Battle of Ridgeway

The Battle of Ridgeway (sometimes referred to as the Battle of Lime Ridge or Limestone Ridge) was fought in the vicinity of the town of Fort Erie across the Niagara River from Buffalo, NY near the village of Ridgeway, Canada West, currently Ontario, Canada on June 2, 1866, between Canadian troops and an irregular army of Irish-American invaders, the Fenians. It was the largest engagement of the Fenian Raids, the first modern industrial-era battle to be fought by Canadians and the first to be fought only by Canadian troops and led exclusively by Canadian officers. Sometimes the "Battle of Ridgeway" includes the Battle of Fort Erie (1866) fought several hours later as the victorious Fenians returned to Fort Erie, Ontario. Except for a Royal Artillery bombardier detached to the Welland Canal Field Artillery Battery, Sergeant James McCracken and one British private, Dennis Sullivan, captured and paroled by the Fenians the day before, both at Fort Erie, no British military personnel were present at the battle at Limestone Ridge. The battlefield was designated a National Historic Site of Canada in 1921 and is the last battle fought in the Province of Ontario against a foreign invasion.

In 2011 Ridgeway came to figure fictionally in Guy Vanderhaeghe's new novel A Good Man (McClelland & Stewart, 2011) and became the subject of the first book-length study focusing on the battle to be published in over one hundred years: Ridgeway: The American Fenian Invasion and the 1866 Battle That Made Canada., (Penguin, 2011) by investigative historian Peter Vronsky.