Byron, London Ontario

Before it was Byron, this neighbourhood was known as Hall's Mills — a post office hamlet in the former Westminster Township. In the 1830s, Burleigh Hunt built a dam, gristmill, and a carding and fulling mill along the Thames River. The mills drew settlers and commerce, establishing the first community here at the river's edge. Hall's Mill Road still runs north from Commissioners Road toward the Thames, tracing the original route millers and farmers travelled.

Around 1845, Charles Coombs purchased McEwen's grist mill — known as the Spring Mill — roughly where Storybook Gardens stands today. The mill was powered by springs flowing from the hillside into the Thames River, a natural hydraulic advantage that made this bend in the river a hub of early industry. Springbank Drive preserves that name: the springs along the bank. The mill is gone, but the park that replaced it has become London's most beloved outdoor destination.

Colonel Thomas Talbot was one of Upper Canada's most eccentric and powerful landowners — a former aide-de-camp to Lieutenant-Governor Simcoe who eventually controlled over 65,000 acres through the Talbot Settlement. Unpredictable and fiercely independent, Talbot nevertheless placed hundreds of settler families on productive land across southwestern Ontario. The road bearing his name runs north from Byron's Baseline Road, honouring the man whose land grant defined much of this region's early settlement history.

When Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe journeyed from Niagara to Detroit in 1793, he followed a Native trail that passed through what is now South and West London. The trail was widened, improved, and eventually formalized as Commissioners Road — named for the Crown Commissioners responsible for maintaining early colonial infrastructure. The road that anchors Byron's commercial strip today is the same corridor Simcoe travelled over 230 years ago.