Windsor

Windsor. A city (2016 pop 276,165; metropolitan pop 344,747) on the Detroit River in southwestern Ontario, Canada. Ukrainian workers were attracted to Windsor in the 1920s by the automobile industry. In 1925 the Ukrainian Catholic parish of Saints Volodymyr and Olha was organized, and in 1939 it completed its church. The Orthodox community set up a parish in 1927 and built Saint Volodymyr’s Church in 1937. The Ukrainian People's Home (est 1926) and the Prosvita society (est 1932) organized plays, concerts, and Ukrainian schools. Politically active émigrés from Galicia set up a branch of the Ukrainian National Federation and its affiliate veterans’ and women’s organizations in the mid-1930s. Postwar émigrés established a branch of the Canadian League for Ukraine’s Liberation (1953). The Ukrainian Credit Union in Windsor has grown steadily since 1946. Ukrainian businessmen and professionals organized their own association in 1952. In 1981 the city’s Ukrainian population stood at 8,100. But only 1,430 inhabitants claimed Ukrainian as their sole mother tongue in 1991.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 5 (1993).]