A journalist for the Sarnia Observer (past) and The Sarnia Journal (present)
by George Mathewson for The Sarnia Journal The Sarnia Farmers' Market supplied residents with food from local market garden for 91 years, until the downtown site was destroyed by a tornado. The current Ontario Street market opened four months later. Photo courtesy of Dorothy Alexander If you’ve been to the [...]
by George Mathewson for The Sarnia Journal (2015) The unveiling of a plaque in Bayshore Park a few weeks ago marked 400 years of Francophone presence in Ontario. It also brought to mind one of Sarnia-Lambton’s most enduring and perplexing mysteries. In the year 1828, a fur trader named Edourd [...]
by George Mathewson for The Sarnia Journal (2014) It’s common knowledge that Sarnia’s airport is named for astronaut Chris Hadfield, the city’s more famous native son. But few know it was actually his father, Roger Hadfield, who first landed a plane at the airport. Or that the First Family of [...]
by George Mathewson for The Sarnia Journal (2014) City councillors seemed to surprise even themselves last week by granting the condemned Cull Drain Bridge a second chance at life. In a unanimous vote, city council agreed to spend $230,000 to demolish the bridge but save its steel trusses, which will [...]
by George Mathewson for The Sarnia Journal (2014) It’s an old rusty bridge that goes nowhere. Yet on June 4, the gymnasium of Bright’s Grove Public School filled up with a standing-room only crowd of nearly 200 vocal residents eager to talk about the Cull Drain Bridge. The scenic bridge [...]
by George Mathewson for The Sarnia Journal (2014) It’s been climbed on, posed beside and rendezvoused at by half the people in Sarnia at one time or another. But the origins of the cannon in Canatara Park, and how it got there, have long been a mystery. Now, two men [...]
by Jean Turnbull Elford writing in Upper Canada’s Last Frontier (1982) The opening of a line between Port Huron and Chicago in 1879 brought a great increase in traffic to both the Great Western and the Grand Trunk. Three years later, the two lines amalgamated under the Grand Trunk name [...]
by George Mathewson for the Sarnia Observer (2003) Of all the strange things that abound in the pages of The Observer, the Fenian scare must rank near the top. By the mid-1860s, Sarnia was a bustling little community. Citizens were puffed up over the discovery of oil, the arrival of [...]
by George Mathewson for The Sarnia Journal (2014) No family has had a greater impact on Sarnia street names that the Vidals. Richard Emeric Vidal was a captain in the Royal Navy who was rewarded for his service with 200 acres in what would become the city’s choicest residential neighbourhoods. [...]
by George Mathewson for the Sarnia Observer (2003) Imagine Sarnia without Canatara Park. No sandy beach. No leafy paths. No bandshell or animal farm. Well, the crown jewel in Sarnia’s park system would likely be a gaping crater or buried under a sprawling subdivision today if it hadn’t been for [...]
