By Phil Egan. Special to The Sarnia Journal
(2015) At age six in 1953, I used to board a bus from my home on Maud Street in Point Edward to journey across town to Our Lady of Mercy School at Christina and Durand Streets. One day after school, daydreaming, I missed my stop. When I finally made it back to the Point on the return run, my mother was frantic.
“Where on earth have you been?” she demanded. “I don’t know,” I told her. “But I was in a different country.”
This was my introduction to the since vanished village of Blue Water. The language that I had heard there was French. Blue Water may have seemed foreign to a six-year-old schoolboy, but it was very much a part of Sarnia’s history.
It’s gone now, that sprawling collection of 575 homes and 26 businesses that began across from the gates of Polymer Corporation and became a thriving village.
Blue Water was a child of the war effort; it was born to house the workers needed to staff the new synthetic rubber plant hurriedly constructed in 1942, after the Japanese army had overrun the rubber plantations of Southeast Asia. The call for workers had gone out across Canada. Blue Water began as barracks and bunkhouses to shelter the workers.
The work was steady, and the men began to construct housing and to bring in their families. By 1956, the village had a population of over 2,300. Many were French-Canadian, and they bonded together as a community, building a church and school, a hotel, a grocery store, clothing and shoe stores, barber and beauty shops and more. The name Blue Water was adopted in 1944 with the establishment of a post office.
The village looked to Sarnia for roads and sewers, but funds were denied. Roads were gravel; there was water and street lighting, but no sewers. A Toronto developer purchased 250 acres in Blue Water in 1952 with plans to build single and multiple-dwelling homes and apartments, but everything was put on hold pending Sarnia’s decision with respect to constructing sewers. The cost estimate was $750,000.
One of the questions facing city council was the issue of the Chemical Valley’s future needs to expand. Would Blue Water be a hindrance to future industrial growth, and the jobs that would come with it? And how would the villagers feel about being enveloped by refineries and chemical plants, and all of the inherent dangers that living next to such potentially dangerous neighbours might entail?
The difficult decision was ultimately made to relocate the community and its 592 families. The cost of doing so was estimated at $5.5 million. The federal government stepped in with funding.
Some homes were uprooted and moved to new lots in communities all across Southwestern Ontario. It was a slow process, lasting into the mid- 60s. Polymer purchased 130 acres in 1964. The final expropriations came in 1966.
Today, many of Blue Water’s French Canadian refugees have carved out a new community in Sarnia’s north end, the last traces of the vanished Village of Blue Water.