Ojibway – 1919

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• There was minor settlement. In the top of that triangle... nothing worth mentioning though. It never became the actual town it was supposed to. That's quite the layout!
  This was the area of original French settlement too. Dating back to 1749.

• Interesting choice of street names. None reflect the original French settlement though.

• No, quite sad really!
  This was a very 'British' era though.

• Interesting to note, that first real meander in Turkey creek is still a meander on this map.
  That means they straightened it out sometime after this map.
  If you look on Google Earth, you can still see the meander outline in the terrain, but the river itself has been straightened out.

• A streetcar suburb is what comes to mind for me...i can see a couple extra wide streets to accommodate rails.

• Shawn: The French settlement was called "La Petite Cote" in 1749. It eventually straddled Turkey Creek. The land was so poor the settlers called it "Cote de Misère", which might explain why it never became much. At the same time, fifteen farms were granted on the eastern side of Huron Line, all French residents from the Detroit side and these were the founding families of what became Windsor. The south shore remained largely French until the Loyalists settled there after the War of Independence.

• Absolutely fascinating! Many of the street names on this map survive in their present location today, although very few from the actual Ojibway subdivision. The notable exception is LaSalle Street, which exists more or less where shown on the map along the perimeter of what is today Vince Marcotte Park. The street labelled Elliot on this map seems more or less where Sprucewood exists today. Many of the little streets behind Zehr's on Malden exist today: Stock, Ellis, Washington, Westpark. Laurier definitely got moved further south. Would be interesting to see if/where/how the Liberty and Beals on this map would have connected to their present day south Windsor counterparts. Todd and Bondy were early reeves of Sandwich West Township. When Windsor annexed half of Sandwich West in 1966, how did they decide to put the boundary between Bondy and Fourteenth Streets, and then a jagged line from there to the river? One other interesting factoid. There are stub ends of many south Windsor streets along Cousineau Road in LaSalle that were forever detached from their south Windsor counterparts after the construction of Highway 3, St. Clair College and the annexation. The most curious: Villa Maria. It was intened to be a winding boulevard through south Windsor. Instead, it became Villa Maria North and South east of St. Clair College. It's disconnected stub is the continuation of Normandy Street east of Huron Line, which was opened up in the past couple of years. Sources said it would be named Normandy, but it is signed as Villa Maria and we hope it remains so as one of few subtle reminders that LaSalle and south Windsor were at one time joined as Sandwich West Township.

• What a great map - thanks for posting this! When I lived in Sandwich West I often used to walk to Brunet Park & always wondered why there were old sidewalks in the woods there but no remains of houses or structures. The mystery was finally solved when I recently came across the story of the US Steel Corp. & what was intended to be the 'company town' of Ojibway. Apparently some initial construction was done (sidewalks, storm sewers) but was stopped by the Depression. There are also remnants of the sidewalk construction in Oakwood Park in South Windsor as well.

• Wow, this is exciting. I wrote a paper on this back in university and was scanning the international metropolis page hoping to learn something about these abandoned streets with sidewalks and lightposts I'd read about doing my research.

  My understanding was that this street layout was proposed by US Steel and was exactly the same as the street layout of their city Gary, Indiana. Prospectors bought up and subdivided surrounding lands and even some infrastructure started getting built (these abandoned roads I've wanted to explore for many years now) but then US Steel pulled out of their plans and all of these bought up and undeveloped plots of land remained forest like the rest of SW Ontario originally was.

  It's been my anecdotal understanding that the reason the woods behind Holy Names High School have still never been developed is because the owners of the subdivided (but completely undeveloped) plots in there are so long gone that no-one could patch enough of them together to purchase, clear the land and build. This meant lots of bush parties for us in high school.

  If anyone can offer any info on whether these unrealized neighbourhoods with streets, sidewalks and streetlights but no homes in the area are I'd love to learn about it.

• This is the first sign of Matchett(e) Road having an E. Alfred Matchett, who the road was named after died December of 1913.