ON TAP FOR 140 YEARS
Jordan Tough, co-owner of the Dominion House Tavern in Windsor, pours a beer at the landmark west-end establishment on Thursday. The Dominion House Tavern will celebrate its 140tH anniversary on the May long weekend.
The Dominion House, Windsor’s oldest tavern, is so beloved some regular customers once rebuilt the bar rather than see their watering hole close for a few days. “Sometime in the early 1970s, we were sitting here drinking one night ... and all of a sudden the bar just collapsed right in. Collapsed and fell down,” co-owner Chris Mickle said Thursday of the story he heard from a customer and later verified.
“Six guys sitting at the bar all were construction workers. They went out and got parts and built the bar that night and it opened up at noon the next day, just so they had a place to drink.”
The Sandwich Street landmark known to most as the DH is celebrating its 140th year with an open house May 18 and 19.
“One hundred and forty is quite the milestone,” Mickle said of the tavern he bought seven years ago and owns with three others. “I started going to the Dominion House Tavern when I was going to the University of Windsor when I was a student and fell in love with the place.”
The Dominion House dates back to 1878 and started with Frank Dents as the proprietor in a hotel on the south side of Sandwich Street. In February 1883, the hotel and tavern burned to the ground and the Dominion House reopened across the street in its current building in March 1883. There are many different accounts online but Mickle is going by an old menu someone brought in that contains historical tidbits gleaned from the Amherstburg Echo. The menu also says Dents assaulted a labourer in a “drunken row” in Sandwich in 1879 and the man was not expected to survive. The Dominion House, with a second-storey balcony and rooms for rent upstairs, was a coach stop between Amherstburg and Detroit. Farmers took their produce by ferry to the old Eastern Market in Detroit and it was said that the horses automatically turned to get a drink at the tavern’s trough — what is now the patio — while their owners likely just as automatically veered inside. Although the tavern was said to have secret tunnels during Prohibition, Mickle couldn’t find any. Over the years, the tavern attracted jurors from the nearby county courthouse (Mackenzie Hall), workers building the Ambassador Bridge in the late 1920s, and of course university professors and students. Professors even held classes there.
Mickle has a framed letter from the late Herb Gray (the longtime local MP and former deputy prime minister) who said he was at the landmark so much during his university days his friends joked he would get his degree from the Dominion House.
“Part of the best thing about owning the Dominion House is actually owning a piece of Windsor’s history,” Mickle said. Co-owner Jordan Tough is the bartender and resident drummer who holds an open jam night Tuesdays. He got to know the DH during his university days and said it has a homey feel that can’t be re-created. “You feel like there’s history here,” Tough said.
On Thursday afternoon, 70-yearold Robert Fairhurst enjoyed an Old Vienna, which is the bar’s big seller. “Friendly,” Fairhurst said of the historic bar’s appeal. “It’s more like an English pub.”
Mike Landry, 65, who worked at the DH for 18 years starting in 1980, remembers nights when people lined up three deep at the bar. The DH has great burgers and attracts a wide range of people: lawyers, bikers, police officers, students and the regulars who have been coming for decades. “It’s just a great place and it’s been a great place for many years,” Landry said. “It had its downs like everybody else, but it always comes back.” The university crowd makes up about 30 per cent of business at the tavern that has been attracting a breakfast crowd on weekends for about a year, has live music most nights and also draws people with its patio and two beach volleyball courts in the summer.
The Dominion House is celebrating 140 years with a holiday weekend open house May 18 and 19 with $2.25 Bam Bam Burgers and a concert May 19 with Five Against One — A Tribute to Pearl Jam. Bam Bam Burgers are double burgers with bacon and cheese and were a popular item decades ago.