Wood traces the various threads that went into creating a successful farming colony while documenting the sacrifice of the forest ecosystem to the demands of progress, progress that prepared the ground for the railway. Ontario was a going concern before the railway came - the railway simply streamlined the increasing trade with an international market that drew on Ontario for a multitude of farm products and a continuing output from the woods. Making Ontario provides a detailed focus on the theme of environmental modification at a time of great changes, liberally illustrated with analytical maps based on archival research.

David Wood was born in Scotland and grew up there and in England. In 1973 he made the move to Canada to work in the environmental field, and in 1976 co-founded a small solar energy company. Eventually he followed his life-long passion for food and opened the David Wood Food Shop in Toronto in 1984. He operated the three shops and catering business until 1990, when he moved with his family to Salt Spring Island on B.C.'s West Coast. He continues to live there, in the midst of family and friends. He is the co-owner of the Salt Spring Island Cheese Company.

David Wood's profile page

"The strength of the book is its capacity to draw together the considerable body of diverse scholarly writing that has been produced over the past two decades and to set his into a framework that permits the reader to see Ontario's first generation ... of settlement for what it was." Peter Ennals, VP Academic and Research, Mount Allison University. "[Making Ontario] is a highly interesting synthesis of Ontario's colonization and of the implementation of the constituent elements that would lead to the province's socioeconomics ... [Wood's] significant synthesis, and approach of historical geography is a valued spatial contextualisation, illustrating the subtleties involved in Ontario's development during the first half of the 19th century." [translation] Jean-Claude Robert, Department of History, Université du Québec à Montréal.