Just a good hour’s drive from my living room in Newmarket lies a patch of earth officially called “Strange” — a name carved in stone on the map of York Region, Ontario. No, this isn’t a joke, nor a fake-news headline, but a real, honest-to-goodness entry on the map.
The story didn’t start out strange at all, when in 1841 a certain William Wells opened a general store. He called the little settlement Williamstown. Where he got that name from, the gods know. Or maybe they don’t. William dreamed of a real town that would carry the name Williamstown with pride. But history had other plans. When in 1853 the Toronto, Simcoe & Lake Huron rail line was built through the neighbouring village of Springhill (today’s King City) instead of through Williamstown, that dream was well and truly over. The railway and its board decided who got growth and who got forgotten. Williamstown was, quite clearly, on the wrong side of the tracks.
Williamstown’s post office closed its doors for good in 1854. But in 1880, a doctor and local politician by the name of Frederick William Strange fought his way through the bureaucracy and managed to get a post office reopened. Whether out of gratitude or plain convenience, the officials decided, without much fuss, to name the settlement after him. And so a failed railway-and-town dream became a place that would forever be known as Strange, Ontario. Now how strange is that?
Who was this Frederick Strange? Well, “many-sided” might be the right word. His résumé shows an English-born physician who sat as Member of Parliament for York North from 1878 to 1882, and later became Deputy Surgeon-General of the militia. His surname was handed to him by pure chance at birth, not by design. Frederick Strange’s legacy became a road sign that still makes online-map users smile to this day.
Here in the 21st century, not much is left of that old ambition. A handful of houses, a Presbyterian church, and two cemeteries quietly, patiently, keep the place’s past alive. Anyone driving through the settlement mostly sees farmland and the flat “Strange Till Plain,” a geological formation left over from the last ice age — named, of course, after the village that had long since run out of future but kept an unforgettable name.
What, geography is boring?
Photo: Harrowsmith Magazine