Studying history as a student at the University of Toronto just wasn’t working out for Ron Brown. So he turned his back on history and chose geography instead as his major.

Ironically, Brown today is considered one of Ontario’s leading historians.

He has published 24 books on the history of this province, but it’s not the kind of history you’re going to hear when sitting in a university lecture hall. The history Brown brings to life in his books involves Ontario’s weird and wondrous features. And the history lectures he delivers to his live audiences rarely occur in classrooms.

They’re mostly delivered while trying to maintain his balance on rolling-and-rocking railway cars and tour buses rumbling through the province.

“Nobody knows Ontario better than Ron Brown”.

His big bus rolls to a stop on a lonely country road so passengers can look at an empty ditch lined with rock walls. It’s the “ghost canal” Brown explains to his audience, mostly senior citizens, like himself.

In 1908 Sir William Mulock, a lawyer and entrepreneur in Newmarket, as well as the region’s sitting Liberal MP in Ottawa, got his Liberal Government to finance the digging of a barge canal. His plan was to connect Newmarket to the Trent-Severn Waterway and Lake Simcoe, despite warnings by transportation experts that there was simply not enough water in the area to make it work.

The canal was dug for 16 kilometers, but it had no water in the summer. The “ghost canal” helped defeat Wilfred Laurier’s Liberal Government in a 1911 election and bring Sir Robert Borden to power.

A little further north the tour bus stops at another fascinating Ontario landmark. Designated as a National Historic Site of Canada in 1990, The Sharon Temple is an open-air museum site, located in the village of Sharon in East Gwillimbury. Composed of eight distinctive heritage buildings and dwellings, the site houses 6,000 artifacts. The building is made available for public use such as tours, concerts, weddings, and special occasions by its current owner, the Sharon Temple Museum Society. (source Wikkipedia)

In Simcoe Country, on a lonely dirt road five kilometers north of Lake Simcoe, Ron points to a small wooden building. It’s the oldest African Methodist Episcopal Church in North America. It was built as a log church in 1846 by Black soldiers who fought for Canada in the War of 1812. The soldiers built the church at their new community and later added board and batten to try and keep out the cold, winter winds.

The Black settlement disbanded by 1900, and the church was abandoned in 1920. Volunteers kept it from deteriorating until it was declared a National Historic Site in 2002 and now the federal government maintains it.

While eating sandwiches and drinking tea on the poop deck of a luxury ocean liner, Ron Brown’s audience will hear how in1907 on its way from Scotland to Georgian Bay this 105-metre-long ship had to be cut in half to make its way through the Weiland Canal

Then Brown tells them how the S.S. Keewatin helped to open-up Ontario’s northland and the Canadian prairies, connecting Southern Ontario to the lakehead and points west, by sailing for 60 years as a CP Railways ship from Port McNicoll to Fort William, now Thunder Bay.

He tells them the Keewatin is five years older than the Titanic and is the oldest Edwardian-era cruise liner still afloat. It is floating today in a drydock at the Maritime Museum of The Great Lakes in Kingston.

Trains and boats and planes and the role they played in creating Ontario’s history is explained in Brown’s best-selling books. 

The owners of Mary Morton Bus Tours hired Brown to plan 36 different Ontario tours and ride along with the paying passengers to point out the sites and abandoned sites where that history happened and who made it happen.

His geography degree goes hand-in-hand with his love of history.

Brown was 17 when his first travel article was published in a newspaper. There have been many thousands since.

His parents took him on vacation to Gaspé and Perce Rock. He wrote about a family restaurant in Campbeltown, New Brunswick that ran in a Scarborough weekly, but he never got paid.

After university he volunteered with CUSO in Trinidad and Guyana and those two exotic locales gave him material to write about. His stories ran in Canadian Teacher Magazine, Canadian Geographic and other magazines – and he got paid.

After earning a master’s degree at University of Waterloo Brown became a civil servant working for the Ontario Government in 1978 as a regional planner in Northern Ontario.

That job introduced him to a wide variety of interesting communities, including various ghost towns. He kept notes.

He had been interested in ghost towns since going with a Toronto school group as a teenager to a Parry Sound indigenous reservation where Depot Harbour had been a busy grain port until abandoned after W.W. ll.

Stagecoach Press in the Yukon published a book about Yukon’s ghost towns and the publisher in the book said they planned to publish a book listing the ghost towns in all provinces. Brown sent a note to the publisher to say he knows many of them in Ontario and he soon had his first book contract – Ontario Ghost Towns.

Brown has an eye for the unusual and roaming Northern Ontario for the Ontario Government introduced him to many of Ontario’s unusual features.

He loves trains and he is broken-hearted when he comes upon an abandoned train station or an abandoned rail line – so he wrote about them.

It turns out a lot of Canadians also love trains and miss them chugging through their towns and neighbourhoods. Brown’s book – The Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore – became a Canadian best-seller with more than 40,000 sales. It listed all the abandoned train stations and rail lines across Canada.

One of the prettiest train stations in Ontario closed its doors for good in Goderich in 1998. Brown writes about entrepreneur Herb Marshall who bought the station from Goderich for $1, then spent $2.5 million to pick it up and move it 250 meters closer to the Lake Huron shore. Today it is one of the most popular restaurants in Southwestern Ontario.

The Toronto Star has listed several of Brown’s books on its list of best-selling travel books and he has been interviewed by most of Ontario’s major newspapers, plus TV and radio stations. And he is a popular after-dinner speaker.

It was his TV and radio interviews that got him the reputation “nobody knows Ontario better than Ron Brown”.

It’s usually 3.5 years between getting an idea for a book and getting it on the street. Currently he is researching a book about Ontario’s best small town main streets – like Fergus and Bayfield and Kenora and Cobalt.

Cobalt is known as Ontario’s most historic community. And guess who was on the TVO panel that gave it that title.

Yep, Ron Brown.