Explorers

Early explorers of the Hastings County area followed water routes, this being the easiest form of travel before roads were built. Étienne Brûlé, the first European to see Lake Ontario, and other travellers seeking the inland seas of the Great Lakes hugged the shoreline of the lake. The portage at Carrying Place, Ontario 's oldest road, testifies to the water-borne traffic that tramped overland across the isthmus between the Bay of Quinte and Wellers Bay. Other historical explorers who travelled Lake Ontario include René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, Father Louis Hennepin and Samuel de Champlain. Champlain and a band of Huron warriors canoed down the Trent River in 1615, on their way to do battle with the Iroquois on the south side of Lake Ontario.

Others crossed northern Hastings by following chains of lakes and streams between Georgian Bay and the Ottawa River. The meandering Moira River was not a particularly effective exploration route, except for lands immediately north of the Bay of Quinte. However, Champlain may have ventured up the Moira as he and his Huron companions fled the Iroquois in 1615.

Much of the early exploration of northern Hastings County was conducted by military and civilian surveyors. Like the Arctic explorers who were trying to find a Northern Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific, these men were attempting to find a practical water route from the Ottawa River to Lake Simcoe or Georgian Bay.

Among them were Lt. J.P. Catty, who made his way from Balsam Lake to the Ottawa via the Madawaska in 1818; Lt. Walpole, Royal Engineers, from Lake Simcoe to the Ottawa in 1827, who was sent to map a canoe route from Lake Simcoe through Lake Baptiste, the York and the Madawaska rivers, and David Thompson, from Penetanguishene to the Ottawa via the Muskoka and Madawaska rivers in 1835. These surveying forays were conducted in the years subsequent to the War of 1812-14, when the government was trying to develop a water transportation route well removed from the Canada-U.S. border.