How Did Oakville Get it's Name?

At first glance, the name Oakville sounds almost boringly literal. Nice town. Trees. Lots of oaks. Done.

But the real reason Oakville is called Oakville has far less to do with aesthetics and far more to do with global trade, barrels, and one of the most valuable natural resources in early Canada.

In the early 1800s, the land around what would become Oakville was covered in one of the richest hardwood forests on the north shore of Lake Ontario. These were not decorative trees. They were massive, old-growth white oaks, prized across the British Empire for one specific reason.

Barrels.

White oak was essential for making staves, the curved wooden slats used to build barrels. And barrels were how almost everything moved in the 19th century. Flour, salted meat, alcohol, dry goods, even military supplies.

If you controlled oak staves, you controlled trade.

Before Oakville was a town, before it had streets or houses, the area around Sixteen Mile Creek was already busy with labour.

Trees were felled inland, squared by hand, and floated down the creek. From there, the oak staves were stacked along the shoreline and loaded onto schooners bound for ports across Lake Ontario and beyond.

This was not a minor operation. It was a major export industry.

So when William Chisholm began planning a harbour and a settlement at the mouth of Sixteen Mile Creek in the 1820s, he was not naming a quaint lakeside village. He was establishing a working port town built around oak.

The name Oakville was, in effect, a business card.

The oak forests here were not accidental. They were part of the last great hardwood stretch along Lake Ontario’s north shore, a belt of oak, hickory, walnut, elm, and maple that thrived in the milder lakeside climate.

Contemporary accounts describe trees of enormous height and girth, far larger than anything that grows naturally in the region today.

That forest is gone now, logged, milled, and shipped out. But it is the reason Oakville exists where it does.

Interestingly, the creek itself already had a well-established name long before settlement. Indigenous peoples and early surveyors referred to it simply as The Sixteen, a reference to its distance from Burlington Bay.

But Sixteen described geography. Oakville described value.

Naming the town after oak signaled exactly what kind of place this was meant to be. A port, a supplier, a producer, not just another farming crossroads.

The irony is that the oak trade did not last forever.

Over time, timber exports declined, wheat replaced staves as the dominant commodity, and eventually Oakville shifted away from its industrial roots altogether. But the name remained.

Today, Oakville is known for its waterfront, neighbourhoods, and quality of life, not for barrel exports.

Yet hidden inside the town’s name is a reminder that Oakville was not founded for leisure or scenery. It was founded because oak was money, and this was one of the best places in the province to get it to market.

So next time you see Oakville on a sign, remember this.
The name is not poetic. It is practical. And it tells the story of a town that began not as a suburb, but as a serious economic bet on trees, water, and trade.

This piece draws on Oakville and the Sixteen: The History of an Ontario Port by Hazel C. Mathews, one of the most comprehensive early histories of the town.