Four seasons of archaeological field work have now been completed at the La Vase River mouth in Champlain Park in North Bay and at surrounding sites. The La Vase River is part of the Voyageurs Highway between Montreal and Fort William on Lake Superior (now Thunder Bay). This trade route owes its origin to the first nation people that occupied and used the French/Lake Nipissing/Mattawa River system. The site had been occupied off and on for thousands of years and remnants from the people who used the portage and who occupied the area can be found at Champlain Park and on adjacent lands. Evidence of older occupation and use of the waterway systems in the vicinity of Lake Nipissing cannot be found at the mouth of the La Vase because the area was submerged beneath Lake Nipissing prior to this date. Evidence from the four field seasons suggests that the mouth of the La Vase River was used intermittently from the point of its emergence from Lake Nipissing. The earliest use of the site was to access the portage which crossed the height of land separating the Ottawa River and Great Lakes watersheds and to exploit the resources of the La Vase River area. In historic times its significance is derived from both the voyagers highway that heavily used the portage for close to two hundred years as well as the use of Bothwell. s Island at the mouth of the La Vase as a Trading Post. Research has established that the La Ronde Post, the first known constructed building in North Bay, located at the mouth of the La Vase River in the early half of the 1810 - 1820 decade and existed at this site until 1821.

The site was first registered by Dr. Jim Wright, an archaeologist, then with the National Museum of Man(Civilization), in the early 60's, when on an reconnaissance trip, located some aboriginal pottery shards and European clay pipe stems in Champlain Park. The site lay undisturbed until 1995 when the City of North Bay began to carry out research on the site as part of the Heritage North Initiative, a regional tourism development strategy to profile the areas heritage resource base. A archaeologic survey of the south bank of the La Vase River mouth was conducted in the early 1970's by the province, however no significant features were discovered. Even though no other formalized research was conducted at Champlain Park in North Bay in the interim period, several local history books were published that speculated at the exact location of the first La Ronde Post Site and the La Vase Portage. Historical accounts had placed the post at or near the mouth of the La Vase River however descriptions did not match existing topography. The so called . Fort La Ronde. as it was dubbed became a community legend and funding was even raised by advocates to reconstruct it. Some of the barriers to reestablishing the post was a lack of detail as to exactly where it was located and exactly what it looked like. At one point logs where actually delivered to the mouth of the La Vase River to rebuild it, however, for unknown reasons it was never reconstructed.

Confirmation of site details have now been determined through four archaeological field seasons. In 1995 Archaeological Services Inc.(Martin Cooper, David Robertson, and others) began the arduous task of identifying and studying site features along the La Vase portage and specifically at mouth of the River. Following up on some reconnaissance work by Dr. John Pollock, A.S.I. successfully located remnants of the post on Bothwell. s Island at the Rivers. mouth. In 1996 and 1998, two Laurentian University field schools lead by Dr. Pat Julig, and work undertaken by Settlement Surveys Ltd. (Dr. John Pollock), in field seasons 1997-98 further identified specific site details including the exact foundation outline and construction materials.

Work now completed in Champlain Park has also developed details for a secondary site of equal interpretive significance which has had varying explanations as work has progressed. A successively use camp site used through the late prehistoric and early historic periods, probably associated with the portage; a prehistoric seasonal occupation site, probably associated with resource exploitation in the vicinity of the La Vase River mouth; and evidence of a structure probably associated with early white occupation of the area have been found to date. There are other sites nearby that are also of interpretive value probably from the depression era. Work has also been undertaken to discover antidotal information about recent park history.

Final 1997 Report

The Final Report 1997 Archaeological Excavations La Vase Heritage Project (220p) is available on this web site and is also available in paper and digital formats from the City of North Bay. It's also available for download here in a Zip file. The file size is quite large (approximately 7 M), due to the extensive amount of photographic images embedded in the document. All documents within the Zip file are in WordPerfect 8 format. Click on the address below to begin downloading this file:

Download:  ftp://www.city.north-bay.on.ca/lavase/lavase97.zip

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