A Visit to Crawford Lake

I recently visited Crawford Lake, located NW of Toronto, near the City of Milton. Crawford Lake is a conservation area that is managed by Conservation Halton, which is a regional land use administrative authority.

Although Crawford Lake Park is named after a farming family that settled by the lake, the park is known for the reconstructed Indigenous longhouses located on the site. The original inhabitants of this site were Nations of the Iroqoian linguistic group, who occupied a village on the site from around the 13th to the 17th centuries.

Three of the longhouses have been reconstructed and are used as presentation spaces and to display artifacts found during archaeological investigations at the site.

The images presented focus on the wooden structure of the longhouse. They are also being posted in conjunction with this week’s theme of Black & White Sunday: Structure on Paula’s Lost in Translation blog.

The basic structure consists of tree trunks that are buried in the earth, and connected at the top with flexible poles. The cladding consists of bark from trees. I am unsure of the materials used to construct the roof membrane.