A Walking Tour of Windsor, Ontario

There is no better way to see Canada than on foot. And there is no better way to appreciate what you are looking at than with a walking tour. Whether you are preparing for a road trip or just out to look at your own town in a new way, a downloadable walking tour from walkthetown.com is ready to explore when you are.

Each walking tour describes historical and architectural landmarks and provides pictures to help out when those pesky street addresses are missing. Every tour also includes a quick primer on identifying architectural styles seen on North American streets.

One glance at a map and you realize there had to be a Windsor. Lake Erie and Lake Huron are so close that a settlement was natural to facilitate a continuous water route through the Great Lakes. That settlement arrived in 1748 in the form of a French Jesuit mission. The city it spawned is the oldest continually inhabited city west of Montreal.

It wasn’t Windsor yet, however. At least by name. When the first formal strides towards citydom took place after the British took control and the village was called Sandwich when it started in 1794. With expansion and the assignment of the Essex County seat it would eventually assume the name of the Berkshire, England town and the original village of Sandwich would get its own town status in 1858.

But the biggest influence on the growth of Windsor was not French. It was not British. It was American, specifically the Detroit auto industry. After becoming the “Automotive Capital of the British Empire” the population of Windsor spurted from 10,000 in 1900 to 100,000 in 1925. The Ford Motor plant was established in 1904 and grew so large, at one point employing 14,000 people, that it became its own town known as Ford City.

It was not the first time an American industrialist spawned a municipality on the Canadian side of the Detroit River. Hiram Walker, a Massachusetts man, settled in Detroit and began buying land in Ontario in 1856. He moved to Canada in 1859 to build the Windsor Distillery and Flouring Mill, the surrounding town called Walkerville and a rail line to service his business. Walker moved back to the United States in 1864 but his distillery continued to crank out Canadian Club Whisky, the Dominion’s best-selling exported whisky. In 1935 Sandwich, Ford City and Walkerville all folded into the Windsor jurisdiction.

Windsor has always been defined by its geography on the doorstep of America - it was a hot spot during the War of 1812, it was a major destination for escaped Southern slaves and it was a primary supplier of illegal liquor during the 1920s during the era of American Prohibition. Appropriately we will thus start our walking tour of the southernmost city in Canada where unobstructed views of the Detroit skyline are the main attraction...