The Heritage Highway, also known as Historic Highway, travels from Windsor to Gaspé, Quebec along much of what was formerly Highway 2 and Quebec Route 2, now Route 138 (Chemin du Roy) and Route 132. The 1972 designation originally included various spur routes and connections to destinations such as Niagara Falls, Stratford, Sarnia, Ottawa-Hull and Sault Ste. Marie.
One spur continued along the Detroit River on Highway 18, now Essex County Road 20. It followed the northern shore of Lake Erie east to Leamington. It then continued along Highway 3 to Wainfleet, before terminating at Fort Erie. Another spur along Highway 11 met Highway 17, the Voyageur Route east and west to Montreal and Sault Ste. Marie. Much of the original signage is now gone, but a few signs remain on the routes, with one sign in Harrow on County Road 20. Until 1997, there were a few signs along former Highway 3 alignment near the Cottam and Essex areas.
As the route is now mostly county road, signage has been maintained in some areas, removed in some and left to simply fade to illegibility in others. In some areas where the signed route is concurrent with other posted tourist routes, markers for newly-designated routes have displaced the "Heritage Highway" wheel. One such example is Trenton where on Highways 2 and 33 the Heritage Highway and Loyalist Parkway run concurrently with other signed tourist routes including the Apple Route (to Brighton), a segment of the Wine Route (to Picton) and the Hastings County Arts Route (to Belleville).
Recent signs on Lennox and Addington County Road 2 bear a white-on-brown wheel and the words "Heritage Highway - Route des Pionniers", the latter being a version of the French language translation of "Heritage Highways, Sur la Route des Pionniers" used in the original 1972 joint promotional effort with Québec.
The image shows an older Heritage Highway logo. Any signs currently remaining on the Heritage Highway are reversed in colours, with a white wheel and white lettering on a brown background.
Read more about this topic: List Of Ontario Tourist Routes
Famous quotes containing the words heritage and/or highway:
“Flowers ... that are so pathetic in their beauty, frail as the clouds, and in their colouring as gorgeous as the heavens, had through thousands of years been the heritage of children—honoured as the jewellery of God only by them—when suddenly the voice of Christianity, counter-signing the voice of infancy, raised them to a grandeur transcending the Hebrew throne, although founded by God himself, and pronounced Solomon in all his glory not to be arrayed like one of these.”
—Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859)
“The highway presents an interesting study of American roadside advertising. There are signs that turn like windmills; startling signs that resemble crashed airplanes; signs with glass lettering which blaze forth at night when automobile headlight beams strike them; flashing neon signs; signs painted with professional touch; signs crudely lettered and misspelled.... They extol the virtues of ice creams, shoe creams, cold creams;...”
—For the State of Florida, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)