Beyond the Falls

Growing up in the middle of Ontario’s Niagara Peninsula, I visited Niagara Falls many times. Whenever relatives from overseas appeared on our family’s doorstep, it was not long before we were all riding down Lundy’s Lane in my Dad’s Plymouth Valiant, rolling down Clifton Hill, riding up the Skylon Tower, and sailing on Maid of the Mist tours in bright yellow raincoats.

I was a young adult before I realized that there was a whole other side to the Niagara experience. While attending journalism school at Niagara College in nearby Welland, Ontario, in the late 1970s, I was assigned a history project to research the War of 1812. With camera and notebook in hand, I pedalled my bicycle to Queenston Heights — and I entered another world.

The village of Queenston — just ten kilometres northeast of the city of Niagara Falls — was a quiet, leafy haven of stately old homes, low stone walls, and deep woody ravines. Looming over the village is a steep hill with an enormously tall limestone tower topped with a statue of General Isaac Brock. My twenty-year-old self was stunned by the grandeur of it all.

In its early years it was a social hub for Upper Canada’s upper crust. After changing owners a few times, it became a Catholic nuns residence, then a boys school, and by 2003 it was almost a pile of rubble. Fortunately, concerned citizens raised funds to save it, and now students come here to learn heritage-restoration skills. It’s open for guided tours in summer.

Like so many places in the area, including our B & B, Willowbank is said to house a ghost. In this case, it’s the ghost of Hannah Hamilton, Alexander’s wife, that has been seen looking out the windows.

From Queenston we took daily drives down the Niagara Parkway — which a visiting Sir Winston Churchill once called the “prettiest Sunday afternoon drive in the world.” Completed in 1931, the fifty-five-kilometre parkway follows the thundering course of the mighty Niagara River, beginning at Fort Erie on Lake Erie, winding past Horseshoe Falls, and then on to where the river flows into Lake Ontario at Niagara-on-the-Lake.

The parkway is loaded with historic attractions. Included among them are the two War of 1812 forts — Old Fort Erie and Fort George — at each end. Costumed interpreters tell riveting war stories and hold artillery demonstrations and re-enactments.

For a less-hurried experience, cycle or walk the parkway’s multi-use trails, if you can. You’ll see so much more. Niagara- on-the-Lake offers numerous bikerental options, including electric bikes.

It was while cycling that I stopped to read a historic plaque and discovered Chloe Cooley. This young Black woman’s fierce resistance to being violently bound and ferried across the river to be sold to Americans in 1793 led to the abolishment of the slave trade in Upper Canada.

The Niagara River was a key crossing point for the Underground Railroad that led tens of thousands of enslaved people to freedom throughout the nineteenth century. At the White Water Walk in Niagara Falls, you can stand at the spot where in 1856 Harriet Tubman led a group of fugitive slaves into Canada on the world’s first working railway suspension bridge.

At the end of a day’s touring, we often took in a meal at one of the area’s many historic restaurants and pubs. Among our favourites was Niagara-on-the- Lake’s Olde Angel Inn, established in 1789. It is of course said to be haunted, in this case by a whistling ghost named Captain Colin Swayze, who reportedly opens doors and moves things around.

Haunted or not, there’s no doubt that the attractions along the Niagara Parkway help visitors get into the spirit of the area’s rich history.

IF YOU GO