Fact Check: Did Trump restore Lake Ontario’s 'Lac America' name shown on a 17th-century map?
WASHINGTON, DC: President Donald Trump’s decision to rename Lake Ontario 'Lake America' has sparked debate over the history of the lake’s name.
A map circulating online appears to show that French settlers used the name “Lac America" for the lake in the 17th century, raising questions about whether Trump restored an old name. Let's fact-check the claim.
Claim: Trump restored old name for Lake America
After Trump ordered Lake Ontario to be renamed “Lake America” amid the breakdown of trade negotiations with Canada, social media users shared what appeared to be a 17th-century map drawn by French settlers that used the same name for the lake.
“Wont you take a look at that.. apparently Trump is just correcting what was once called lake America a very long time ago,” text in a September 1, 2026, Facebook post said. The post described the image as “an OLD canadia map thats in french.” The map labels the lake “Lac America ou de Saint-Louis.”
Similar posts spread across Instagram, X, Threads and LinkedIn. The claim also appeared in French.
The posts emerged after US-Canada trade talks broke down, prompting Trump to push for a new name for Lake Ontario, one of the Great Lakes shared by the two countries.
Trump and the White House have since shared several altered maps promoting the name “Lake America.” On September 7, the president also posted a manipulated map that labeled the entire North American continent as the “United States of America.”
Fact Check: The claim is false
The posts claiming to show a historical map of “Lac America” are false. A reverse image search found a similar map in the University of Toronto’s online library.
However, the university’s version, dated 1688 and credited to French missionary Pierre Raffeix, labels the lake “Lac Ontario ou de Saint-Louis.”
The same map also appears on the University of North Carolina’s Research Laboratories of Archaeology website.
After Trump’s August 27, 2026, executive order renamed the lake “Lake America,” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said the name Lake Ontario came from an Indigenous word. He noted that the name existed long before the United States and Canada were founded.
The Arizona-based Museum of Indigenous Peoples used Raffeix’s “Lac Ontario” map in an August 28 blog post. The post said the name is often linked to the Huron-Wyandot word “Ontarí,” which means “great lake” or “beautiful lake.”
Other historical sources also link the name to the Iroquoian words “kanadario” or “skanadario.”
French settlers also used “Saint Louis Lake” as another name for the body of water, according to the Wisconsin State Cartographer’s Office and Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy.
