25 John St. |
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Ontario Tourism Region : Southwestern
Description From Owner:
- Pop. 16,000. In Mersea T., Essex C., on Pigeon Bay of L. Erie and Hwy 77 and C. Rds. 20 & 34, 53 km SE of Windsor.
- The community had its beginnings in the early 1800s after the Talbot Rd. was laid out by Col. Thomas Talbot.
- It was frrst called Wilkinson Corners, and when the post office was to be established in 1854, mill owner William Gaines suggested the name Gainesborough.
- There already was such a place in Ontario, so Gaines proposed Leaming¬ton for his native town in Warwickshire, England. Natural gas and oil were discovered in the area, but by 1904 the wells had petered out.
- Point Pelee National Park is immediately SE of Leamington. The park has the smallest dry land area of any Canadian national park but draws more than half a million visitors each year.
- Point Pelee juts into L. Erie like the spout of a funnel and is a migratory flyway for birds and butterflies, at the tip of which they rest before or after crossing the lake.
- More than 700 species of plants have been identified in the tiny park, and 347 species of birds have been spotted.
- On a clear night in August of 1845, two steamships, the Kent and the London, sighted each other and signaUed but failed to alter course and collided.
- The London attempted to tow the badly damaged Kent to Point Pelee, but the Kent sank with an estimated loss of 10 lives.
- Leamington is one of two ports on the Ontario shore from which summer ferry service connects with Pelee I. and Sandusky, Ohio.
Address of this page: http://www.ruralroutes.com/leamington