Stoney Creek, Ontario 5.98

Stoney Creek is a community in Hamilton, Ontario. It was amalgamated into Hamilton in 2001. Prior to 2001, it was a separate city.The community of Stoney Creek located on the south shore of western Lake Ontario, just east of Hamilton (pre-amalgamation) into which feed the watercourse of Stoney Creek as well as several other minor streams. The historic area, known as the "Old Town", exists below the Niagara Escarpment. In 1984 Stoney Creek became a city.Though residential growth exploded, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s in the lower city and in the west mountain in the 1990s and 2000s, most of the land mass of Stoney Creek remains agricultural. The communities of Elfrida, Fruitland, Tapleytown, Tweedside, Vinemount, and Winona serve as distinct reminders of the agricultural legacy of Stoney Creek and Saltfleet township.It lost its independent status in 2001 as the Provincial Government formally merged Stoney Creek, Ancaster, Glanbrook, Dundas, Flamborough and Hamilton into the new city of Hamilton, turning the new multimillion-dollar Stoney Creek City Hall into a Stoney Creek Public Library.HistoryStoney Creek was first inhabited by Canadian First Nations and later explored by French-Canadian fur traders before the area was first settled by Loyalists fleeing the American Revolution in the late 1700s. The name 'Stoney Creek' is borrowed from the area's central water feature, 'the Stoney Creek' which runs from the Devil's Punchbowl, in the Niagara Escarpment, to Lake Ontario. It is often taken for granted that the 'Stoney Creek' is a description of the creek's rockiness although there is some historical evidence to suggest that the name comes from an early settler in the area whose family name was 'Stoney'.