Stratford is full of stories, but perhaps one of its most scandalous is that of wunderkind Tom Brown, who was elected mayor of the city just after the first world war.
“Tom Brown was a young up-and-comer, at the time in his early 20s, a very handsome young man, distinguished, came from a good family,” said Lauri Leduc, owner, operator, and guide of Stratford Walking Tours, a new service set to open in May. “He was elected for five terms. Very successful, very popular.”
Over his tenure, the highway between Kitchener and Stratford was rebuilt, schools opened, and crime was down.
“Great things, but – there’s always a but – January 1, 1930, he was gone.”
Brown vanished overnight, Leduc explained. His disappearance was treated as a missing persons case and it wasn’t until a business partner reported an emptied safety deposit box, investors were left hanging, and debtors came knocking that police changed their tune and started investigating his disappearance as a theft.
They didn’t have to wait long. Four months later, police in Mexico contacted local police to tell them they found a dead body with a jacket embossed with “Tom Brown, Stratford.”
“To make a long story short, the police really didn’t do much of an investigation,” Leduc explained. “No examination. No cause of death determined. They buried him quickly.”
Although Brown most likely met his fate in Mexico, Leduc said that there have been a number of sightings since, claiming that Brown was living in Europe, in Miami, bouncing from hotel to hotel.
Brown’s story is just one of the many that make up the walking tour that Leduc has designed for Stratford Walking Tours.
Leduc has always had a passion for history, having studied it in university. She grew up in Perth County and recently came back after 27 years to make a home in St. Marys.
Before then, Leduc and her husband lived in England for two years, where she went on a number of walking tours across the country. It was those tours that inspired her to bring that idea to the Festival City.
Leduc knows that there used to be a walking tour in Stratford, that closed prior to the pandemic, and Destination Stratford offers a self-guided audio walking tour as well.
“I thought there’s a market for this in Stratford,” Leduc said. “The audio tours are great … but that’s what I saw – a gap.”
Leduc’s tour starts at Stratford City Hall. Leduc will give some history on the building – and the building that came before and the building that was proposed to come after it.
In the 1960s, then mayor C.H. Meier wanted to demolish city hall to build a new one, since the building needed some costly repairs and seemed to have outlived its usefulness. One design presented would have been a 10-storey building with retail shops on the bottom floor.
The suggestion was met with such spirited debate that Meier received death threats, before the idea was shelved in 1972.
From city hall, Leduc will tell audience members the Tom Brown saga, some history of the downtown buildings still standing and the buildings long gone, and then head down Ontario Street to the Perth County Courthouse.
Leduc said that she designed the tour to touch on some important stories and landmarks on Ontario Street, but wanted to focus on the history surrounding it. Most tourists will see a lot of the main strip downtown and she wants to show them some spots they might not see as much.
Winding around the courthouse and the Shakespeare Gardens, Leduc will take audience members along the Avon River, eventually stopping at the Stratford War Memorial.
From the memorial, Leduc will lead a stroll up Waterloo Street, past the former Knox Presbyterian Church – now Copperlight – and the Armoury, before ending off back at city hall.
The tours will be adjusted for the audience, Leduc said, though they will all be based on a route that is about two kilometres and about 75 minutes long.
While the tours will have a lot of well-documented information, Leduc is making an effort to share more ‘off the beaten path’ stories as well, like her sister’s friend who was driving near the William Hutt Memorial Bridge.
“She gets into a little fender-bender,” Leduc shared. “She gets out of her car … and it was William Hutt!”
