COLUMN: Viewpoint – Learning from Pelee Island

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 30/09/2022 (955 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Have you heard of Pelee Island? It is in Lake Erie and is the southernmost inhabited place in Canada. We recently spent four days cycling there.

About two hundred people live on the island year-round but from April to October it is crowded with tourists who make their way to Pelee Island on the two ferries that run several times each day. We had to reserve a spot on the ferry for our car months in advance.

Book lovers turn out in droves on the Mother’s Day weekend for an annual literary event hosted by award winning author Margaret Atwood who has a home on Pelee Island. Each year she invites a different noted Canadian writer to come and be part of a daylong celebration that culminates with a formal dinner.

In summer folks come to swim, cycle, kayak, and hike. They rent cottages or bring tents and trailers to camp on the island.

Bird watchers flock to Pelee in the fall. The island is along the migratory path of hundreds of different bird species. It is a prime spot for adding to one’s lifetime bird watching list since you can see birds on Pelee Island you wouldn’t see anywhere else in Canada.

Another fall attraction is the pheasant hunt which first began in 1932 and continues to this day on two different autumn weekends. Hunters from around the world descend on Pelee to shoot the 16,000 pheasants which are raised in captivity on the island and then released for the hunt.

My husband Dave’s family has strong connections with the island. When his grandparents first immigrated to Canada from Ukraine they lived there for nearly a decade working as sharecroppers. My husband’s grandmother served as a midwife for the many Mennonite women on the island. In the 1940s Dave’s grandparents moved off of Pelee island and bought farmland near Leamington, Ontario.

Then in 1979 Dave’s older brother left his job as an urban planner in Toronto and together with a friend bought land and began farming on Pelee Island. Not long after a wealthy entrepreneur from Austria arrived determined to revive the wine industry that had flourished on the island at the turn of the century. He convinced my brother-in-law to plant his fields with grapes.

Although both my brother-in-law and the wealthy Austrian have long since left the island the wine industry there has become quite the success story and you can now buy Pelee Island wines in liquor outlets across Canada. An afternoon visit to the winery was a part of our itinerary while we were there.

There is a small museum on the island, and we hired its former curator to be our guide for two days of cycling. He took us to see ancient grinding stones used by the Indigenous people who inhabited the island thousands of years ago. He showed us a map illustrating the many spots near the island where you will find dozens of shipwrecks in the lake waters. They met their tragic fate before a lighthouse was built there in the 1830s. That ancient structure is still standing, and we hiked down an abandoned beach to see it. We went to the local cemetery where our guide regaled us with stories about the interesting and colorful lives of the people who have made their home on the island in the last two centuries.

Our time on Pelee island was wonderful and it confirmed once again how many beautiful and interesting places there are in Canada to explore and learn about. If you have never been to Pelee Island I can highly recommend it.