Ghost Road: and Other Forgotten Stories of Windsor

Introduction:

A History We Don’t Know

ACOUPLE OF HIGH SCHOOL students from Stoney Point, Ontario arrived unannounced one morning at the Windsor Star . I was working there as a columnist, writing My Town . Their history teacher had dispatched them to my door because they had claimed that there was nothing historically interesting in this part of southwestern Ontario. It was my job, it seemed, to prove them wrong.

Over the next hour, I regaled them with stories. I also told them to get out their pens and start writing. I rattled off some of the riveting details behind the War of 1812, zany tales of Prohibition, the building of the Windsor-Detroit Tunnel, a story about Henry Ford racing a car on the ice on Lake St. Clair. I told them about the renegade Simon Girty scalping his enemies during the American Revolutionary War, about Abe Lincoln ambling down Sandwich Street in Windsor, about a flag that sits in our local museum and about how it might’ve wrapped the fallen body of the great Tecumseh. I also told them the story of my mother being kidnapped by gypsies in Stoney Point, and how my grandmother had to barter her back by handing over eggs, chickens, grain, milk, and anything else she could find on the farm. Also how she stood watching the gypsy caravan rumble away down the dirt roads of Essex County, on its way to the next town. As I spoke, the students scribbled furiously in their notebooks.

When I was finished, they looked up, a little bewildered and surprised. I knew that look. We often view history as consisting solely of momentous actions and life-changing moments. We think of it in terms of politics and war and record-setting events. But the fact of the matter is that we live history. We make it. We absorb it. I told these students, as I tell everyone, that I can find something intriguing without stepping very far from my neighbourhood, or for that matter, from my house. I promised these students that enthralling history was right under their noses, real life stories that are connected to the beguiling way we behave and live today. That’s history.

To prove my point, I told them they should take a journey around their own home. They ought to slow down, walk through their houses, and pause over the objects they have collected, the lives they have lived. As an example, I took them on a journey through my own place, and pointed out that in a dining room cabinet rests a tiny basket-wrapped bottle of Chianti dating to 1932. Never opened. If you put it up to the light, you can see sediment floating in it. So what’s the story? Before my mother-in-law was married, she was holidaying in Florida with her family, and a gentleman in a restaurant sent that bottle over to her table. She graciously accepted it, but spurned his flirtatious gesture. She never saw him again. But she never forgot that moment, and told the story to her daughters. So what does it suggest? Well, probably nothing in the grand scheme of things, but it’s still a great story and maybe suggests something of the times, or maybe about how people meet one another. It is still history.

A 1932 bottle of Chianti comes with a story—the gesture of a young man flirting with a Canadian woman visiting Florida.

In the same room, there’s a large photograph of my Lutheran-born great-grandmother. She has steely eyes and a severe grimace. It was said she had converted to Catholicism, and told her husband on her deathbed that if she needed prayers she’d return. As the story goes, her Stoney Point farm was haunted by her return in the form of a poltergeist, with pots and pans flying about and cupboard doors and barn doors and windows swinging open and violently slamming shut. That’s what my mother told us. She said the family knelt in the farm kitchen praying the rosary until these ghostly episodes subsided. The picture remains in my dining room. I make a point of winking at this ghostly woman every day. I swear she smiled back at me one afternoon.

I also have two tiny landscapes done by a friend of the legendary Group of Seven who made his living as a pharmacist but often ventured out into the woods on days off to paint on the stiff wooden tops of old cigar boxes. There’s also an oil painting by a barber who whiled away the hours in his shop on slow, dreary winter afternoons painting lakes and gullies he only knew from memory. I have the May 13, 1863 edition of a New Orleans newspaper that reports the loss of 18,000 in the Civil War battle at Fredericksburg. Death also came then to the celebrated Confederate general Stonewall Jackson, who was hit by three bullets, two in the left arm and one in the right hand. But word of his passing never made it into this newspaper: Jackson had actually died three days earlier, but this was the age of Lincoln, not Twitter and Facebook, and news of the war travelled slowly.

I could go on. I have a framed front page of the old Windsor Daily Star reporting on the crowning of King George VI of England following his brother’s abdication. That story is currently featured in the movie The King’s Speech, and focuses upon the ascension to the throne of this man who was forced to hire a speech therapist to aid him in delivering public addresses. The Star even refers to heightened anxiety over the new king’s speech impediment, and notes this first official address to the nation was executed without a hint of that disability.

Marty Gervais’ German-born great-grandmother, Elise Mineau, said on her deathbed that she would return with a sign if she needed prayers; within weeks of her death, the house in which she lived was haunted by a poltergeist.

I could also tell you about the man who used to live in this house—my father-in-law—who once made his living as a circus performer in high-wire aerial acts and performed all over the U.S. and Europe.

If you go out to the garage, beneath the concrete floor lies buried an old Ford Model T. It’s there because during the Second World War when the garage was built there was a shortage of fill, and to set a foundation for the building it was necessary to find something substantial that would help fill the hole in the ground. This old jalopy served that purpose. It’s there—you can’t see it, but it’s history. It says something, too, of the time.

So, take a look around your own home. The items I speak of may have little monetary value, but they all tell a story. History is within your reach. It’s within the walls of your home, in photo albums and memorabilia, and when you add those to the inventory of tales in all the other homes of your neighbourhood, it’s a social record of life lived there.

You need only open your eyes.

This book is a stock-taking of those forgotten stories and tales not so well-known. The ghost road of the title refers to a one-mile strip of highway that rests abandoned in the middle of a farmer’s field near Manning Road. It’s a little bewildering to find it there, smack dab in the middle of nowhere—but, like many of the things, places and people in this collection, this now-overgrown patch of asphalt was once a vibrant part of our culture. In fact, it was a drag strip that for years brought weekend crowds numbering in the thousands to its races.

In naming this Ghost Road, I am suggesting something more metaphorical: our history, the ghosts of our pasts, the stories that lie just below the surface. We catch sight of Detroit across the river and feel the nudge of its history when it once was part of ours. We travel the back roads into Essex County, to old forts, courthouses, arenas, train stations, neighbourhoods, and the shorelines of two lakes and a river. In all of these places, there are stories. Some are remembered and retold. Some are forgotten.

These accounts live and breathe with uniqueness. And we are very much a part of it all. We don’t recognize ourselves, and why would we? After all, the city and area that we live in has carried on for years as a community with what Gord Henderson, a Windsor Star columnist, once described as having a best-before date on its older buildings. We are a city filled with cars, a city whose very vitality has often been tied to them. We have a great distaste for parking garages. We favour wide-open sprawling parking lots, and if that means tearing down a hundred-year-old building, we embrace the opportunity. Thankfully, this way of thinking is changing. We are trying to save buildings. We are trying to tell our history, though in a way, it’s already too late. When I was writing The Rumunners, I telephoned the wife of an old photographer in Windsor who had documented everything from the Prohibition in the 1920s, the building of the Ambassador Bridge, police raids, strikes and murders. His widow sadly told me she had destroyed all of his photographs, that she’d sent all his meticulously labeled negatives to the Windsor dump. She told me that she had telephoned the library with an offer to donate them but was flatly turned down by a clerk who probably assumed her photographs were family snapshots of birthdays and anniversaries.

The Peerless Potters, circus troupe. Marty Gervais’ father-in-law appears third from right.

Advertisement for the Peerless Potters, also known as Fearless Potters

The same goes for the stories. When some curmudgeonly old fellow wants to bend your ear about what happened during the Second World War, confide in you a tale about his grandmother, or show you something that might’ve been saved from the First World War, pay attention. If it weren’t for Alan Douglas, former curator of the Windsor Community Museum, we might not be able to see the old Red Ensign flag that wrapped the body of the fallen Tecumseh. If it weren’t for Spike Bell telling me about the old view camera of Windsor’s legendary photographer Pat Sturn, I might not ever have discovered that her camera had been in the hands of Carol Hebert, wife of the deceased Ray Hebert, a Windsor portrait photographer. Carol heard about my desire to have this camera go to the Windsor Community Museum and called me to say if we picked it up, she’d donate it. And she did.

Many of the accounts you will find here began with conversations I had with individuals. Some stories originally appeared in the Star but have been updated, and rewritten here. And so a big thank-you to that newspaper for its sentient stance on historical material. I miss the newsroom buzz, hearing reporters share stories. I loved being close to the telling. Today I read the news and strain to read below the surface—there are always more stories swarming underneath.

My hope is that with these stories, I have taken my own advice. I have listened. One Sunday morning, a local history enthusiast told me about Lincoln coming to Windsor. He shared a few details and loads of incredulity, and I was interested enough to go in search of the truth. The story is here. I was curious about Simon Girty and this led me to a Kingsville motel where I found a tattered 19th-century deed to the property he owned. It hung on the wall of a long-lost ancestor of his. When someone asked if I recalled a Windsor Symphony concert when spectators were showered with shrapnel from cannons being fired during Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, I pored over the microfilm at the Star’s archives. These stories are all here. So is that one of the now-famous bridge in River Canard, named after two War of 1812 sentries. In my enthusiasm to include it, I stumbled across another story, and told the world about it, much to the chagrin of some local officials, who had worked so hard to have the name changed. Afterwards I got an earful from them, but a former history teacher, Paul Hertel of Amherstburg, hired to do the research on this bridge for the town, also discovered the inconclusiveness of it all, and shared that with me. You have to listen—that’s the message.

This is the Windsor we don’t know. This is the Windsor we rarely—if ever—speak about. Open your eyes. Open your heart. Give voice to those legends.

18TH AND 19TH CENTURIES

A View of Detroit and the Straits, taken from the Huron Church on June 22nd 1804 by Edward Walsh

(courtesy University of Michigan Clements Library)

Songs and Cahiers of the Early French

THERE’S A SONG ABOUT A WOMAN on her wedding night who’s upset by the size of her husband—by which she means something more than his height—and how she loses him in bed. She burns the bed and vows she’ll never marry a man of that size again.

There’s a tune about a woman who runs off with three soldiers, and won’t return to her family. One man sweeps the floor of this woman’s house, the second makes her bed, and the third combs her hair.

There’s another song about a soldier called away on his wedding night, who returns seven years later to find his wife has taken a new husband.

There are drinking songs, wedding songs, songs of woe, and songs of the Virgin Mary. All in French, springing from old French families whose roots go back to the 18th century, here at the tip of southwestern Ontario, from scattered French communities that existed—and still exist—from Pointe-aux-Roches to Windsor, Ontario.

Marcel Bénéteau spent every spare moment driving all over the countryside of Essex and Kent Counties in search of traditional French songs. He sat in farm kitchens and listened as elderly Franco-Ontarians reached back to their childhood to recall the songs that were sung to them.

(photograph by Cristina Naccarato)

But most of these lyrics were handed down to families specifically in the Petite Côte (LaSalle and River Canard) area. Many were scribbled in cahiers or notebooks and nearly got thrown out with the broken furniture or rusted farm equipment. Others were picked up when someone bothered to pay attention to these families—some of whom can no longer speak French.

Marcel Bénéteau, a Windsor-area singer, broadcaster and folklorist, has made it his life’s work to collect these lyrics and tunes. He has recorded them in a two-volume set of albums called Vieilles chansons du Détroit (Old French Songs of Detroit).

He struck a goldmine when he met Stella Meloche in LaSalle, who was born in 1902 on Turkey Island. She gave him the lyrics and melodies to some 150 songs passed on by her parents and grandparents. Much of what Bénéteau has found is unique to this area: You won’t find it anywhere else in the country.

Bénéteau knows this because he has made numerous forays into the archives at Laval University and throughout Québec searching out the songs’ origins. Some have roots in France, but can be found nowhere in Québec.

This fascination with music and stories, the particulars and nuances of the language as it dates back 300 years, is something Bénéteau regards as rich and rewarding. The late Peter Halford, a former University of Windsor French professor, teamed up with Bénéteau to explore this history. He said in an interview with the Windsor Star: Our area is so rich, and people are discovering only now what we have down here. The two collaborated on a book about the history of the French language in this area.

For his own part, Halford stumbled upon an outstanding find when he was told of a little-known Jesuit dispatched to live among colonists in New France in 1743. This Belgian francophone, Father Pierre Phillipe