About this archive

The Grand Bend Strip was a community newspaper for Grand Bend, Ontario and the villages around it. Casey Lessard founded it in May 2007 and published it every other Wednesday through the summer seasons until July 2010 — 55 editions across four volumes, 834 printed pages in all. In 2010 it was an Ontario Community Newspapers Association finalist for the province's best small newspaper.

It covered what a small paper covers: council and crime, the Playhouse season, high school sports and music, the people behind the counter at businesses on Main Street, and a summer's worth of visitors. It also ran columns — Advice from Mom, Keeping the Peace, View from the Strip, Living in Balance, In the Kitchen — written by people who lived there.

What is here

Every one of the 55 print editions can be read cover to cover, page by page, exactly as it was printed. 920 stories that were published online are here as text as well, each linked back to the edition it ran in. Where a story ran only online — breaking news between print dates, event listings — it is marked as such.

Nothing has been rewritten, corrected or updated. Dates, names and prices are as they were. Some photographs referenced by the old site no longer exist anywhere; those references have been removed rather than left broken.

Contact

Casey Lessard —[email protected]. If you appeared in the paper and would like something here reconsidered, write and say so.

Bylines

Angela Michielsen · Cameron Rankin · Casey Lessard · James Eddington · Jeff Reaburn · Jenipher Appleton · Lance Crossley · Lorette Mawson · Mary Alderson · Rita Lessard · Tamara Nicola · Tom Lessard · Yvonne Passmore

Who made it has the masthead as it stood in 2010, with a page of every story each person wrote.Awards lists what the paper won, linked to the work where the work is here.

How the site is built

A static site: no database, no content management system, nothing to keep patched. The stories were migrated once out of WordPress; the page images were rendered once from the original print PDFs. Type is Libre Franklin and Libre Caslon Text, served from this domain. No request on any page goes anywhere but here.