Lake Nipissing is a large lake in southern Ontario, Canada. It lies between Georgian Bay, to the southwest, and the Ottawa River, to the east. Lake Nipissing has an area of about 330 square miles (855 square kilometers). Major streams feeding Lake Nipissing include the Sturgeon, South, and Veuve rivers. The main stream draining the lake is the French River. The name Nipissing comes from an Algonquin word meaning little body of water. It probably refers to the size of Lake Nipissing compared with the larger Georgian Bay and the Great Lakes.
Lake Nipissing has an average depth of only 15 feet (4.5 meters). Over the past 10,000 years, the elevation of Lake Nipissing and the surrounding area has risen by 400 feet (122 meters) as a result of isostatic rebound. Isostatic rebound is the rising of Earth’s crust in reaction to the removal of weight, such as weight from a glacier.
First Nations people lived in the region surrounding Lake Nipissing long before the arrival of Europeans. The first European to see the lake was possibly Étienne Brulé. Brulé was a French adventurer who traveled much of the Great Lakes basin for the French explorer Samuel de Champlain in 1615. In the 1630’s and 1640’s, the lake was part of a route used by Jesuit missionaries to reach Huron settlements south of Georgian Bay. From the 1600’s to the 1800’s, fur traders traveled across Lake Nipissing to reach the northern Great Lakes region.
The first permanent European settlement along Lake Nipissing was a Hudson’s Bay Company trading post established in 1848. It stood at the site of present-day Sturgeon Falls. In the second half of the 1800’s, logging replaced fur trading as the main economic activity around Lake Nipissing. In addition to logging, tourism and recreational activities are important to the area’s economy. Various kinds of fish, especially walleye, attract fishing enthusiasts to lodges along the lakeshore. The largest communities along the lake are North Bay and West Nipissing.
