Why We’re Moving to St. Thomas, ON
If you haven’t heard, in March of 2022, the Hennebrys are packing up and leaving Hamilton.
There’s a lot of mixed emotions that come with this big decision. Leanne and I moved to Hamilton 1 month after we got married (primarily because our honeymoon lasted 3 weeks lol) and have lived here ever since. It’s literally the only place we’ve called home together. The ramification of leaving it behind hasn’t been fully realized (and can’t be until it’s in the rearview).
If you’re interested in why we chose St. Thomas, the answers are pretty simple and straightforward. I’ll dive into them below with a bit more context in case you’re the curious type.
About St. Thomas
If you’re unaware, St. Thomas, ON is a small “city” just south of London, ON with a population of about 40,000. It’s famous for a few reasons, but 2 of the most interesting one to a modern audience are:
It’s the place where Jumbo, a famed elephant part of P.T. Barnum’s circus, died in the late 1800s. True story: he was struck by a train in the trainyards after a show at the circus (St. Thomas was a great place for a circus because a ton of railways converged in the city). Jumbo is the inspiration for Disney’s Dumbo, among other stories.
It’s the childhood hometown of Rachel McAdams. No need to say more.
Besides those things, it’s a great spot because it’s got character (more than some of the many suburban cities that border the Greater Toronto Area) and it’s got space. Having a population of 40,000, it’s got enough of the big-city luxuries within its limits (like a Wal-mart and a movie theatre) while still only being a 20 minute drive from the even bigger city of London. It’s perfectly situated for a family like us that’s looking for more space without moving way out into the boonies.
It’s also only 20 minutes north of Port Stanley, ON which has a beautiful beach and very charming small town character.
Our Connection to St. Thomas
We first learned about St. Thomas when Leanne’s sister Andrea got a job at the Christian School in town and moved there from Waterloo. We visited her a number of times over the years and gradually fell in love with it.
When my parents were looking to relocate from where I was raised and open up a pizza place, we suggested St. Thomas as one of their considerations. Much to our surprise and joy, they also fell in love and made it where they wanted to live.
You can probably start to put together some of the reasons we’re moving there, but now we have enough context to officially dive in.
Here are all the reasons we’re moving to St. Thomas, Ontario:
1. To be closer to family
This one’s obvious and already been alluded to throughout the first part of this blog. Leanne’s sister and her husband live in St. Thomas, and my parents moved there in 2020 to start somewhere new.
COVID hitting was an eye-opening experience for us, as it was for a lot of people. We realized more than ever that having people you can depend on within (reasonable) driving distance is a real blessing. We bit the bullet of long drives to Walkerton when we needed to, but distance means visits are less frequent, and we realized having extended family nearby was a huge value to us as a nuclear family. (Thankfully, Leanne’s parents have only been 30 mins away from us in Hamilton, but that’s still far enough that it almost always requires planning a visit.)
The plan to move to St. Thomas has been in the works for the better part of a year and a half. We had hoped that, when we’d spilled our plan to Leanne’s parents, they would decide to follow suit and move to St. Thomas someday as well (as then 2/3 of their kids lived in the same town 2 hours away). They wasted almost no time selling their house and getting the ball rolling on building something new in Talbotville (just outside of St. Thomas).
What this means is that all of our kids’ grandparents, aunts, and uncles (for the most part; not entirely) will be within a 9 minute drive. That is monumental for Leanne and I as parents and for our greater family.
On top of being closer to all the family we just listed, our absolute best-friends (whom are almost as close as family) live in Lambeth which is a small town just outside of London. We’ll only be 19 minutes away from them, which is a huge improvement over the 90 minutes we currently are.
We love being able to visit our family more often, drop the kids off after school for a few hours, pass them off when both of us are sick (a rare occurrence but a nightmare when it happens); you name it. There are very few downsides to being so close to family when raising young kids.
2. We wanted a better city to raise our kids in
Listen, I love Hamilton a lot. Like, a lot a lot. I love/hate it. But I love it more than I hate it.
It’s not always the most welcoming environment when you think about raising a family. We live off a pretty major street in the city, and our kids would have to cross it twice daily when they eventually would walk to the local school. Not only is that street just loud and busy and dangerous, it’s a popular hangout spot for drug addicts and sex workers.
I don’t want to shield my kids from these realities. Moving away from “poor people” won’t make them any less poor. But, as a husband and father, I have an obligation to provide for my family the best life I can give them, and I really started to question whether Hamilton was the best environment for that.
I don’t talk openly about the number of times I’ve called 911 over the years about something going down on our street lol. But it’s an average of more than once a year. Most people I know have never called 911. And trust me - I’m not just trigger happy. I’ve had legit reason to call every time.
We also live close to Hamilton’s steel industry, with our house currently on the north end of town. Studies have shown that people who live in this neighbourhood have an (albeit marginally) higher rate of cancer, and shorter life expectancy. The amount of soot and gross black ash that has settled into my backyard multiple times every summer is not a real wonderful sign. I know that the air we breathe here is sometimes pretty polluted, and that we’re closer than we ought to be to some of the factories that make up Hamilton’s economy.
These things started to wear on me the longer we’ve been here. Hamilton no longer feels like the best option for my family, and it would be wrong to keep hanging out just because I personally enjoy the perks that come with living in the city.
3. We outgrew our house (or at least our backyard)
Our kids love being outside. As much as I love playing guitar. And because our backyard is a shoebox and (as explained in the last section) not really the greatest or cleanest place to play, we really started to feel confined in this house.
Almost everything else about our house we love (I’ll digress because the list is long and I’m planning another blog with more detail). But the backyard was always the #1 biggest compromise, and after 3 years of being here, we’ve realized it’s no longer something we’re happy going without. The local parks to us are great, but it’s not the same thing.
Our new house, on the other hand, has a gigantic backyard. This is easily one of the things we’re most excited about for the kids. They will have the space to flourish and play and just be kids, and that fulfills me as a parent in ways I can’t explain.
4. We wanted a slower pace of life
I am not a fan of the suburbs at all. Stick me in the centre of all the action in a condo downtown, or put me out in deep isolation in the rural Yukon, but keep me far, far away from the suburbs.
That being said, Hamilton started to just feel a little too city for us as time has gone on. Properties that only have 3’ between homes. No privacy. No driveway. No shed. Space always being at a premium in one way or another. Neighbours that are always sort of on top of you and too close for comfort (although, to be clear, most of our neighbours in our current Hamilton home are phenomenal and I am sad to be losing them). Never far away from transport trucks driving down your street. Crime and construction and just noise noise noise.
It all became a little too much.
Moving to St. Thomas allows us to still be close enough to the amenities of a city (again, London’s only a 20 minute drive away) while still having a backyard that is big enough for my kids and a home that feels spacious enough to live in comfortably for decades to come. The neighbourhood we’re moving to is particularly quiet (it’s all dead-ends) in an older part of town. It’s close enough to the core of St. Thomas while still being far enough to get away from all the hubbub we’re tired of where we live now.
St. Thomas just felt right. Your money goes so much father in a place outside of the GTA / Niagara region. Our new place would’ve easily been $1,000,000+ if you’d try to find all of its perks anywhere near where we live today (probably closer to $1.2 million or more). Call me crazy, but the average person shouldn’t have to pay $1 million for a home that modestly suits their family’s needs.
5. We have few friends in Hamilton
Ha. Here’s something that feels weird to talk about openly but… I suppose that’s the purpose of this entire website.
As long as Leanne and I have lived in Hamilton, we’ve struggled to make friends. The first few years were easily the worst. No family lived nearby and our church, despite being full of other phenomenal young people, just was too small to let us fit in for the first little while. This isn’t any particular person’s fault: we’re all human. It’s not a problem we have with churches. But any time we’d meet someone we liked, they would either: be non-reciprocal (because they already had established friend groups), forget about us, or actually move away from the city in no time.
We weren’t looking to have millions of connections, but we struggled to have any, and that was rough.
Now that we’re finally leaving Hamilton, I’d say in the last year and a half, we’ve actually made some friends here we’re sad to leave behind (and, in the strangest turn of events, I probably have more friends here than Leanne does).
Our absolute best friends moved from Hamilton to Lambeth back in mid-2020, so being closer to them is something we are over the moon about. Our friends who are sticking around in Hamilton we sincerely hope are going to come visit us and remain a regular part of our lives as long as possible. But by and large, Hamilton’s a place we don’t have a ton of friends to call up on a Friday night.
6. Hamilton never quite got there
I debated included this section because there’s a very good reason I’ll just eat my words in a few years when I learn the politics that happen in St. Thomas are not that different than those that happen in Hamilton. But nonetheless, I’ve included this section below.
When we moved to Hamilton in 2014, it felt friggin’ cool. The restaurant scene was booming, Supercrawl was still growing year after year, Artcrawl was something Hamiltonians regularly took part in, the LRT was finally being taken more seriously again, bike lanes were being put in. There was just so much to be excited about.
Well, here we are almost 8 years later and a lot of that stuff has either dwindled, been killed off altogether (LRT), or never quite lived up to what you were expecting.
Hamilton’s always been a city that’s a little rough. We know that. And compared to what it was in the 90s, it is miles ahead of its former self. But for all the promise Hamilton held when we arrived in 2014, it never seems to live up to it.
I don’t know. Maybe I’m just cynical and bored and pessimistic about it all. That would be fair to say. But to see the way this city is so poorly mismanaged by its local politicians (our City Council is absurd), and the way so many Hamiltonians are at war with each other (largely thanks to the amalgamation, combining Stoney Creek, Dundas, Ancaster, Waterdown all into 1 big “city”), I’ve largely felt disappointed by the way Hamilton’s turned out in our time here.
I still hope and pray for great things for this city. While we were here, I hope we did our part to help make it a bit better. But I don’t want to live my life in a city that’s always on the cusp of something great without ever reaching it. All the tradeoffs that come with it no longer feel worthwhile.
7. Possibility of Christian school
Remember how I’ve spoken about the obligation (and joy) I have to provide the best possible life for my kids?
For me personally, the Hamilton school system was the very first thing that started making me think about moving elsewhere. It’s not even that Hamilton has bad schools (doing some homework shows you that it’s pretty decent for a city of its size and population), but something about them really made me feel not quite at-home with the idea of sending our kids there.
Again—a huge part of this has to do with the idea of walking down our street, past sex workers and drug addicts, crossing a major street, and dropping the kids off for the day. None of it is impossible, none of it is unusual to many people. But I just really, really didn’t love the prospect of doing this when I knew I might be able to provide better for our kids.
The longer we’ve talked about moving to St. Thomas, the more we seriously consider (eventually) trying to find the budget to send our kids to the Christian school in St. Thomas. Leanne’s sister and her husband work there, and they love it for kids. It’s not perfect, but no school is.
Having worked in kids’ ministry for a number of years, Leanne has seen firsthand how important raising your kids to know Jesus is from a very young age. Knowing we could possibly pull strings to put our kids into a Christian school is something that brings me immense joy for my children.
I attended a traditional public school all my life but I don’t credit it with having benefited me a whole lot. I have heard the great counter-argument to Christian education from fellow Christians: we are called to be a light to the world, and I get that and agree, but we can’t be a light to the world if we are not first set alight. That’s what I hope a Christian school will help me accomplish for my kids; Lord willing.
No promises this is going to happen, but it’s a goal I think we’re pretty seriously working towards.
8. St. Thomas just felt right
I mean, as you can see, St. Thomas just felt right for us. It was never anything that made us feel nervous or uneasy when discussing. It always felt right.
Every time we’d visit, we’d talk more and more seriously about what we’d enjoy about living there. When those conversations eventually took root in decision-making territory, it wasn’t difficult to arrive at a conclusion.
St. Thomas has felt pretty incredible to us from the very get-go. We’re not foolish enough to think it doesn’t have its own drawbacks or lifestyle-adjustments or quirks of its own. Every city does.
But we know—beyond a shadow of a doubt—that all the things we’re gaining by moving to St. Thomas are far too numerous to convey.
We can’t wait to make St. Thomas our home. Less than a month to go now.
We’ll see you on the other side.
