Tom St. Amand
Mystery solved.
A recent column explored how a small wooded area on Canatara Park’s east side came to be called Tarzanland.
The name, according to local legend, stemmed from a profusion of wild vines that grew there and the children who swung on them.
Well, that is correct, says a Point Edward woman who was present when the jungle-like woods were named 83 years ago.
Jean Paisley, 94, was one of a handful of youngsters from The Point who first called their beloved playground “Tarzanland.”
The year was 1934, and it was known then as “First Bush,” because it was the first bush encountered when heading inland on Michigan Avenue from the river.
“Only one narrow path led into the woods,” Jean recalled during a recent visit to Canatara.
“On the north side of Michigan Avenue was a deep ditch, home to several frogs. The woods began right beside the ditch and we’d follow the small footpath north into the woods.”
Twelve-year-old Jean and a few girlfriends would stay on the path to avoid a marshy area to the west. In the early 1930s, the woods were very thick and the foliage so dense that “we were in our own private world,” Jean recalled.
“We heard no traffic, no other sounds really except for the birds singing. It was our peaceful, private playground.”
Local resident Frances Flintoft paints a similar picture of the woodlot in a 1935 newspaper article, describing it as “a place of joy and inspiration … a piece of virgin loveliness.”
Jean Paisley said she visited the woods mainly to pick wildflowers, returning to her Maud Street home with bouquets of violets, her favourite, for her mother.
She said the boys playing there were more interested in adventure. And First Bush enabled them to emulate Tarzan, a pop culture hero from books and the 1932 movie Tarzan the Ape Man.
One day, Jean recalled, the girls heard yelling coming from the trees.
“We walked deeper into the woods and just to the east of the footpath was a pond. A few Point boys our age had grabbed different vines and were swinging out over the pond, bellowing Tarzan’s cry as they did,” she said.
“I never saw anyone fall into the pond, fortunately, for it contained water snakes.”
Though the girls didn’t swing on vines over the pond they were Tarzan fans as well, having seen the movies starring Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller. Soon, the Point Edward kids began calling their playground Tarzanland.
“Tarzan represented adventure and exploring, and things he did — like living in a jungle and swinging on vines over water — were available to us,” she recalled.
But the woods didn’t remain their private playground for long. Word spread and Jean remembers the day when some kids from Sarnia “swung on our vines over our pond. We were shocked at these intruders and thought, ‘How dare they?’”
Over time the pond dried up but children from all neighbourhoods continued to swing like Tarzan until most of the vines were removed in the 1960s.
When Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote his first Tarzan story in 1912 he hoped his fictional hero would be a success.
He would likely be pleased that a group of children used his creation to name a 22-acre woodlot in Sarnia-Point Edward, a name that has stuck to this day.
Tom St. Amand is a retired high school teacher in Sarnia