Manitoulin Island, Ontario
Little Current is the largest town on Manitoulin Island, and the first place you reach if you drive to the island from the mainland. It sits at the north end of Manitoulin where the narrow channel between the island and Goat Island squeezes the water of the North Channel into a fast tide-like flow — the "little current" the French voyageurs named. Everything about the town revolves around the crossing.
The Little Current Swing Bridge, built in 1913 for the Algoma Eastern Railway and converted to shared rail-and-road use in 1946, is the only year-round land connection to Manitoulin. Highway 6 crosses it, and during summer navigation season it swings open on the hour to let boat traffic through the channel. If you time it wrong, you wait fifteen minutes; if you time it right, you get a slow-motion view of one of the more unusual working bridges in the country. The old rail tracks were pulled up in the mid-1980s; passenger service on the island ended in 1963.
The town took its name from a French translation of what earlier voyageurs called Petit Courant — a description of the water, not a person or place. The Anishinaabe name for the site is Wewebijiwang. A post office opened in 1864, and the town was incorporated in 1890 with Thomas Capman Sims as its first mayor. In 1998, Little Current was amalgamated with several smaller municipalities into the Town of Northeastern Manitoulin and the Islands, but locally it is still just "Little Current."
The economy has moved from steamboats, fishing, and sawmilling to marine tourism, the North Channel yachting scene, and services for the wider island. Manitoulin's roughly 13,000 residents get their groceries, hardware, medical services, and legal work here. Haweater Weekend, held the first weekend of August, is the town's signature festival. "Haweater" is a local term for a lifelong island resident, from the haw berries that early settlers ate when other food ran short. It matters here what year your family came.
Downtown Little Current is compact and walkable — Water Street runs along the harbour with restaurants, a marina, a bookstore, and the Ojibwe Cultural Foundation nearby. The Cup and Saucer Trail, one of the best hiking trails in southern Ontario, is a fifteen-minute drive south. The town is the natural base for anyone working through Manitoulin, and it fills up from May through October before going quiet November through April.