Leo Page House – Then and Now

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• Does anyone know about an abandoned steel mill out in Ojibway? My dad used to live out in that area and said that as a kid he and my uncle would go wandering around its ruins. This would have been in the early 1950s. He thought that it was built for use in World War II but was never used/completed. He could never remember quite where it was except out in the bush and after many hours of hunting, I never found anything either. Anyone?

• I've heard stories too... of a blast furnace... not sure what to think about it.

• I really enjoyed your entry. Its amazing how many farms in Sandwich West & South Windsor were carved up into subdivisions and sold to land speculators. They even went through the expense of putting sidewalks through some of them.

  I have spent the better part of my Real Estate Career trying to put these pieces of land back together again.

  Just imagine what Windsor would have been if that Steel Mill was built...

  Peter

• The Gary of Canada! Sounds about right.

• My grandfather was "Pepe" George Janisse and my father was Vicent Janisse, George's son. Thank you so much for these pictures and this trip down memory lane. As seven brothers and sisters, we lived in the house directly to the north of the Page home once it was purchased by my grandfather and father. We moved as a family from the original funeral home location in Windsor at the corner of Jeanette and London St. before it was renamed University Ave. The home directly to the south on Ouellette Ave. was owned by my cousins the Pageaus. I have many wonderful memories of the Page building as I was growing up. I eventually worked at the funeral home while I was in school and eventually, both my brothers, Paul and David, and one of my sisters, Michele, went on to become funeral directors. Living right beside the funeral home, I was able to get to know all of the cousins - the Pageaus, Uncle Armand and his sons Al and Frank Janisse as well as the wonderful people who worked as part of the funeral home staff and my extended family over the years. The challenge as always is to find an appropirate balance between preserving our history and being progressive and in tune with the economic demands of the times. These were challenges I watched three generations of Janisse men grapple with. Some of the comments in this blog reminded me of those challenges. Again, thank you for a look at my history. Paulette Kupnicki

• Paulette, do you remember which corner your first funeral home was located at the corner of Janette & London St (University Ave)?

  Though the old house looks nothing like the original, the reno was doen very well and the building is in very good condition. I would like to thank The Janisse Funeral home for their services in the past and for their dedication to downtown.

• The original Janisse funeral home was on the southeast corner of Janette and London St.(University Ave.)

• Drove by the other day, and they are preparing to cover the newer, ugly facade with even newer, and uglier STUCCO! help us all. I wonder how tacky they will go with this...

• Re an earlier query by MJD, the old steel mill in Ojibway was the Canadian Steel Corp. My grandfather and uncle came from the parent company-US Steel-in Youngstown, Ohio, as building engineers in 1916 and worked on the project until the mid-1920s, a few years before it closed. The mill consisted of two blast furnaces, seven giant "stove" towers, cyclonic dust collectors and a 200-foot chimney. Also on the 1800-acre site was a coal dock and a large slip (now Morton Terminals) which could accommodate lake freighters loaded with iron ore. Along the slip was a large concrete craneway for an unloader crane. It included a long service tunnel which I remember exploring as a west-end kid. I clearly remember the huge rusted blast furnaces but never explored them. Now lost, I used to have Grandpa's notebook with sketches of the Ojibway mill and the planned residential community (where the raceway and Ambassador Golf Club now sit). Streets, curbs and sewers were installed but no housing was ever built there (we used to discover parts of it when hiking in Yawkey Bush). The end of WWI, the postwar recession and finally the Depression killed the project. Construction ceased and the place was abandoned. Forever cold, the great blast furnaces never poured a single ladle of steel and were torn down for scrap in February, 1958.
  Sorry for the length but I love this particular topic and have researched it as part of my family history.

• thanks for the story Scott!

  If you look on google maps, just inside the curve of the ETR tracks on Morterm property, you can still see the scars those towers left in the earth.