Country Roads of Ontario

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

“When they built Highway 401,” writes Iris Jones, “they made every
other road in southern Ontario a country road.” Accordingly, the 12
journeys described in this book include what once were major highways,
and its northern Ontario treks cover hundreds of miles of the
Trans-Canada Highway. For each excursion, Jones provides a chatty guide
with snippets of history and many mentions of inns, shops, and
restaurants. Each chapter is prefaced with notes on “getting there”
and “highlights” (which for only five of the twelve chapters give
the distances involved), and is followed by phone numbers of tourist
offices and of many of the commercial establishments she has mentioned.
As sketchy as the book is, it should still be of value to explorers of
Ontario.

The information is selective: The town of Bala is mentioned because
Lucy Maud Montgomery “summered here once,” but Norval, where one can
still see the house she lived in for years, is not here at all. Jones
mentions a Lakeside Bar in Port Dalhousie and later in the same
paragraph a Lakeside Tavern; are they separate places or references to
the same establishment? She lists tourist sites in Kingston without
including John A. Macdonald’s home, a National Historic Site; when one
looks up Macdonald in the awkward index, he appears under “W” for
“Well Known Characters.” And the old Fryfogel Inn has not
disappeared, as the author implies; it stands, still awaiting
restoration, on Highway 7 just east of Shakespeare, Ontario. The
inclusion of some room and meal prices will quickly date the book: a
quick check of one bargain at a western Ontario restaurant reveals that
the cost is 25% higher than that published here. The omission of even
rough sketch maps of each journey must be noted; these would have been
very helpful. The pencil drawings throughout the book by Anne
Tatgenhorst, however, are delightful.