Archive 022 / Grasshopper Lane

Before it was paved... it was Grasshopper Lane.

For years, the stretch of Johnson Street between Steel Street and Grove Street was still an unpaved, overgrown walkway through the fields — known to generations of East End kids as Grasshopper Lane.

Suggested for the archive by longtime Barrie native Kelly Gilliland Welch, who requested it as one for “all of us oldies.”

Blkbny121 remembers collecting pop bottles along Grasshopper Lane in the 1960s and returning them to Fudd’s Variety.

By the late 1970s and early ’80s, OldDiamondJim remembers using it as a shortcut walking toward Eastview. In good weather, it was an easy cut-through; after rain, it could get seriously swampy. He also remembers an abandoned farmhouse along the route.

Growing up on Alexander Avenue, todd1977 remembers walking up Grasshopper Lane to reach the Eastview tennis courts, with frog ponds just east of the path.

As the neighbourhood filled in and that stretch of Johnson Street was eventually developed into the road it is today, Grasshopper Lane disappeared from the landscape — but not from local memory.

The Grasshopper Lane Tee brings that piece of East End geography back into the archive — for the people who remember the fields, the mud, the frog ponds, and the shortcut everybody seemed to know.

Fit and sizing

This style has a relatively fitted unisex silhouette. Check the measurements below against a shirt you already own.

How to measure: Lay a similar shirt flat. Measure the body width one inch below the armhole, and measure the body length from the centre-back neckline seam to the bottom hem.