By Randy Evans & Gary Shrumm for the Sarnia Journal, 2019-10-20 Maybe you’ve noticed it, an old-style cottage still standing at the corner of Lakeshore and Blackwell Side Road, abandoned and fighting a losing battle against the elements and surrounding housing development. It has a story to tell. The tale [...]
By Randy Evans & Ken Maczko for the Sarnia Journal, 2020-01-26 Editor’s note: This concludes a three-part series. On Jan. 17, 1941, a game was played between St. Paul’s and the St. John’s Saints of the Sarnia Church Hockey League. The tilt had a rather unChristian-like grittiness. According to one [...]
By Randy Evans & Gary Shrumm for the Sarnia Journal, 2020-01-23 Editor’s note: This is the second in a three-part series When the Sarnia Curling Club built St. Andrews Rink in 1892 its winter activities were restricted to curling and public skating. But two years later the club offered hockey [...]
By Randy Evans for the Sarnia Journal, 2020-01-16 Editor’s note: This is the first in a three-part series For the Sarnia Hockey Club, it was huge progress. In the winter of 1894, its players were granted permission to move indoors to the two-year-old St. Andrews Rink, across the street from [...]
By Randy Evans for the Sarnia Journal, 2020-02-11 Sarnia’s economy in the 1800s was heavily dependent on the financial health of its rural neighbours. And vice versa. Rural products were crucial to the town’s mills, grain merchants, grocers, bakers, lumberyards and potash dealers. In turn, farmers needed Sarnia’s manufactured goods [...]
By Gary Shrumm & Randy Evans for the Sarnia Journal, 2020-03-12 Historian and columnist Phil Egan told Journal readers earlier how members of the Ku Klux Klan desecrated Sarnia’s St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in 1924. Sadly, that incident was not the full extent of Klan activities locally. Established by Confederate [...]
By Gary Shrumm & Randy Evans for the Sarnia Journal, 2020-04-25 Sarnians have never live through anything quite like the current COVID-19 crisis and the extraordinary changes it has brought. But this isn’t the first time infectious disease has seriously impacted the community. Early Sarnia was a veritable petri dish [...]
By Randy Evans for the Sarnia Journal, 2021-02-02 * When he died in 1960, Bert Lindsay had been living in Sarnia for four years. His obituary correctly pointed out that his son was hockey hall-of-fame great Ted Lindsay. Omitted, however, was the fact Bert was the winning goalie for the Montreal [...]
By Randy Evans for the Sarnia Journal, 2021-03-03 TOP THIS – For Norm “Red” Armstrong, Dec. 15, 1962 was a day of firsts. The former Sarnia Legionnaire donned the blue and white of the Toronto Maple Leafs and skated out into his first NHL game. His first shift came at 14:93 [...]
By Randy Evans for the Sarnia Journal, 2021-11-30 When looking through old editions of the Sarnia Observer a researcher often comes across odd and interesting glimpses of life from our city’s past. Here are a few: AN EARLIER LAURENCE HOUSE In the early 1900s a woman named Nancy Laurence upped [...]
