Witching Hour - Strange History: The steel town that never came

Witching Hour - Strange History Some of Windsor's woods were laid out as city streets. In 1913 Ojibway was incorporated as a U.S. Steel company town. Roads went in, the homes never came and the Depression ended it. Windsor annexed it in 1966.

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Witching Hour is our nightly local history and folklore feature. Ghost stories and legends are retold as stories people tell, not reported as fact. Sources are listed below the story.

Tonight's Witching Hour is not a ghost story. It is a strange piece of Windsor history: a town that was planned, incorporated and then never filled in.

The plan

The town of Ojibway was incorporated in 1913 in what is now southwest Windsor. It was meant to be a company town for the Canadian Steel Corporation, a subsidiary of U.S. Steel, which planned a steel plant there.

Streets for nobody

Work on the ground started before any homes. Museum Windsor's records say roads were built before the town itself was started, and a natural heritage review of LaSalle Woods describes old road allowances and sidewalks laid out there for homes to serve the planned plant.

The homes never came. Both sources say the project stalled, and the Depression of the 1930s finally ended it. The City of Windsor puts it simply: the project never fully developed, for financial reasons.

What is left

Ojibway stayed a town until it became part of Windsor in 1966. Woods have since grown back over much of the planned town site. Today the area includes Ojibway Park and the Ojibway Prairie Provincial Nature Reserve.

In 2023, a Jane's Walk history tour told the story of the steel town that never was at Black Oak Heritage Park, one of the parks now on that land.

If you walk those trails this fall, you are walking through a town that was drawn on paper and never built.