Hey, flock! I can’t believe I’m saying this: we’re turning TEN YEARS OLD today!

Back on February 23 of 2015, I decided to start at Twitter. It was a slice of life as a cartoon sheep in Niagara Falls, NY.

Was it quality content? Absolutely not. Unless you really liked discussing slipping on ice and not spilling Starbucks, or any of the jokes you’d expect from 2015 Twitter, my early days of interwebbing were not the highest quality content.

Then, I started realizing that I could start sharing some of my weird interests. I could discuss bad 80s songs, or review local restaurants. I could discuss the history of my hometown, and really take a look at Niagara Falls.

This led to the blog.

I can remember being excited in 2020 for the five year anniversary of Sheepie Niagara. I hadn’t expected this little side project to last that long, or get the local following that it did. Now, here at the decade mark, I’m still in shock.

While I might’ve changed quite a bit since the beginning, there’s one thing that’s been constant for almost the entire history of the blog: the Olive Garden Review.

In October of 2017, I decided to review Olive Garden‘s selection of sauces during their Never Ending Pasta Bowl Promotion. One of these reviews was for their Creamy Mushroom sauce. It was a short blurb of a review on the new sauce, which I thought was fairly good.

Out of nowhere, it blew up. The review was at the top of Google Searches for “Olive Garden Creamy Mushroom Sauce” for years, and is still consistently brings people to the blog. The Creamy Mushroom sauce is still my favorite at Olive Garden, so if this is my legacy, I’d be okay with that.

Luckily, I’m pretty sure I locally have a legacy for a bigger reason.

During the summer of 2020, at the height of the pandemic, I had picked up researching random finds around Niagara Falls. That’s when I stumbled across a random grave in Deveaux Woods State Park that changed my life.

This was the beginning of my research into Eliza Keig, who emigrated from the Isle of Man and ended up working at the Deveaux School. If you haven’t read the post, Go read it here.

I never realized how much of an impact this post was going to have. I was told by a dear friend that Niagara Falls State Park actually suggested the post to them when they decided to look into the grave. I wouldn’t have ever imagined that a random dive into a fairly unknown site in Niagara would lead to this blog being cited as having the most thorough record on Eliza.

It’s moments like these that make me love blogging. I’m able to uncover the lost history and hidden gems on the American side of Niagara Falls, and hopefully help people realize just how awesome of a place this is.

So, thanks for ten years of being my flock. I couldn’t do this without all of you.

-Sheepie ❤