There are many National Historic Sites across Canada, but few tell as vivid a story as Sainte-Marie among the Hurons, near Midland, Ontario, on the shore of Georgian Bay. It is one of the most visited heritage attractions in central Ontario, welcoming well over a hundred thousand visitors each year. Part of its appeal is its setting close to the beaches and waterways of the Georgian Bay region, but much of it comes from its past. In the first half of the seventeenth century, French Jesuit missionaries and the Wendat (Huron) people built and shared this settlement, which for a decade served as the headquarters of the French mission in the heart of Wendat country and as a meeting place for trade and teaching.

Construction began in 1639, and within a few years the mission had grown into a small European-style community of chapels, workshops, a hospital, and living quarters, home to around sixty French residents at its height. Life there was never secure. The mission stood in a region increasingly caught up in the wars between the Wendat and the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) confederacies, and by 1649 repeated raids had made the settlement impossible to defend. Rather than let it fall into enemy hands, the missionaries themselves set fire to Sainte-Marie and abandoned it, and the surviving Wendat scattered. Within a single generation, the once-thriving community had vanished, and the site slowly returned to forest.