At an age of nearly 200 years, one of Essex County’s most amazingly old, and forgotten about settlements is Olinda, Ontario.  In the 1830s, the village of Olinda (roughly between Essex and Leamington), had a schoolhouse, a general store and post office, two churches, several cemeteries, a blacksmith shop and a budding local industry:  iron mining and smelting – completely unheard of in Southwestern Ontario!  I spent the day exploring the only major ghost-town in Essex County with friends, including Darren of Photo404.com.

Olinda rose to prominence because of it’s American-entrepreneurial approach to creating a local industry at a time when such an idea was in its infancy in Upper Canada:  this was Olinda’s ore smelting furnace.  Workers in Olinda didn’t mine the ore, per se, instead they used a type of iron ore called “bog ore”, hunks of metal found in nearby swamps.  The metal was located, then pulled by oxen for 2 kilometers back to the furnace in Olinda.  The final product, pig iron, was then shipped throughout Ontario (by local settler William L. Bâby in fact), to Toronto and beyond.  More pictures of the remains, and more history about Olinda after the jump.

Much of Olinda’s history lies in the names marked on headstones in the village’s three cemeteries.

William Elliott described the local industry in a 1932 newspaper called the Western District Adviser:

“Iron of the first quality is obtained in abundance one mile from the furnace.  Oh this they have drawn to the furnace a stock sufficient to last five months.  Coal of which five hundred bushes are used per day, is made at the furnace.  All other necessary materials as sand, limestone and clay, are found on the spot and from sixty to seventy men are daily employed, to whom liberal wages are paid”.

Looking down Olinda Sideroad toward the centre of town.

One of Olinda’s original houses.

The brickwork on this house is showing its age.

One of Olinda’s churches, which was apparently the original schoolhouse.

The “Olinda Cemetery”, one of three.

The Baptist Cemetery was barely visible from the road, it was about 100m off the road, behind a peach orchard.

There are barely any signs of the iron furnace’s existence anymore, but from what I’ve gathered, it was in the area of this peach orchard.  Two old harrows (ploughs) sit on this hillside near the Baptist Cemetery.  Back in the day, the Ruscom River flowed in as far as Olinda, right nearby in this photo.

Back on the main road, a line of trees sits close to the pavement on either side of the thoroughfare, a sign of old times.

The Baptist Church was eventually torn down, and the fieldstones that made up its walls are found as foundation of newer farmhouses in the area.  I’m not sure if this structure, on the corner of one of the cemeteries used that exact stone.

In the 1880′s, the Unitarian Universalist Church of Olinda was built, and still holds regular services to this day.

Eventually, Olinda became a ghost town a number of years after its furnace shut down, which may be attributed to either that Olinda was not on a rail line, or that new iron smelting technologies in other parts of Ontario replaced the Olinda furnace.  Olinda is now officially considered Ruthven Ontario, is no longer officially its own town, and is part of Ruthven’s apple and peach farm country. From a high population in the 1800s, now adays there are perhaps a dozen people living within a kilometre or so.

Here’s a link to Olinda on a Google Map.  If you visit, do be sure to respect that many of the village’s old roads are now private driveways, and much of the property is private, and farmland.  It’s said that chunks of iron slag can still be found in the fields around the village, probably lightly buried with history.

Olinda is like nowhere else in Essex County, and it will probably pop out at you as if it really is somewhere far away, or even perhaps, somewhere back in time where communities grew and innovation thrived!