Every street named for a sailor
Ajax
Most Ontario towns are named after English hometowns or local landowners. Ajax is named after a Royal Navy warship — and its streets are named after that ship's actual crew.
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Most Ontario towns in this guide are named after English hometowns, local landowners or Indigenous place names. Ajax, in Durham Region east of Toronto, is named after a warship — and it commits to the bit harder than almost any other place in the country.
A wartime shell-filling plant
In 1941, the Government of Canada established a munitions plant on the site, operated by Defence Industries Limited, filling artillery shells for the Allied war effort. At its wartime peak, over 9,000 people lived and worked at the operation — effectively an instant town built for a single industrial purpose.
Named for HMS Ajax
As part of a naming contest, a DIL employee named Frank Holroyd suggested "Ajax," honouring HMS Ajax, the Royal Navy cruiser that helped defeat the German battleship Admiral Graf Spee at the 1939 Battle of the River Plate — one of the first major Allied naval victories of the Second World War. The name stuck, and the town was formally incorporated in 1954.
Every street, a crew member
Ajax carried the tribute further than the name alone: many of its streets are named after actual members of HMS Ajax's ship's company, including its main north-south street, Harwood Avenue, named for the battle's commanding officer, Commodore Henry Harwood. It's a genuinely unusual piece of civic commemoration — a whole town's street grid functioning as a war memorial.
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Sources
- HMS Ajax & River Plate Veterans Association — Town of Ajax
- Wikipedia — History of Ajax, Ontario
- Wikipedia — Ajax, Ontario