Where’s Wardsville?

Wardsville is a village settlement on the Thames River in the Municipality of Southwest Middlesex in southwestern Ontario.  We are located half way between Toronto and Detroit city at the centre of four counties: Elgin, Middlesex, Lambton and Kent.Wardsville is surrounded by beautiful river country, the largest Carolinian Remnant in Canada, (lovingly called Skunk’s Misery) a 50-year-old 27-hole golf course, fertile farmland, and the Big Bend Conservation area. Located on Longwoods Road, the original trail from Toronto to Windsor, it has always been a place where people could find food, lodging, and hospitality. Mr. Ward, the original innkeeper, played a part in the Battle of the Longwoods in 1813, - a couple miles east.

Community Identity is our personal and shared sense of neighbourhood and place: the feeling, emotion, and psychological colour that we attach to the spot where we live on the planet. For example, neighbourhoods in Mosa Township and Aldborough are still defined by the catchment areas of the one room school houses, even though the schools were closed in the early 1960s.

Heritage, language, culture, economy, ecology, landscape combined with all of our senses give us a common identity and sense of place.

Building community is the job of citizens, students, businesses, organizations, sports groups, churches, historical societies, and farmers’ coffee klatches. The people build communities and neighbourhoods, not bureaucracies. Elected officials and public servants at all levels try to enable community building (with various degrees of success) but they don’t actually do it. People create communty.

Looking at demographics and trends, one can see that this area has a lot to offer. Arts, culture, and human services are today’s economic generators. 

Changes to accommodate community needs are going to require some major imagination, collaboration, and investment.  Let’s organize at the local level to strengthen communities in the Thames watershed.

Community Identity is our personal and shared sense of neighbourhood and place: the feeling, emotion, and psychological colour that we attach to the spot where we live on the planet. For example, neighbourhoods in Mosa Township and Aldborough are still defined by the catchment areas of the one room school houses, even though the schools were closed in the early 1960s.

Heritage, language, culture, economy, ecology, landscape combined with all of our senses give us a common identity and sense of place.

Building community is the job of citizens, students, businesses, organizations, sports groups, churches, historical societies, and farmers’ coffee klatches. The people build communities and neighbourhoods, not bureaucracies. Elected officials and public servants at all levels try to enable community building (with various degrees of success) but they don’t actually do it. People create communty.

Looking at demographics and trends, one can see that this area has a lot to offer. Arts, culture, and human services are today’s economic generators. 

Changes to accommodate community needs are going to require some major imagination, collaboration, and investment.  Let’s organize at the local level to strengthen communities in the Thames watershed.