The Importance of Being...

...Ernest.
Ernest Margetson.
Or Ernie, as I have often heard him called.
The winter issue of Watershed magazine contains a super article by Mandy Martin about the indomitable heritage hero.

Ernie is certainly a man about old towns.
I only met him once, years ago, when he joined an ACO walking tour of Consecon, and won us over with his enthusiasm and knowledge about that village's Greek Revival past.

The photo at top is just about where Ernie chipped in...at the eaves return at the corner of Division and Porter. And proceeded to take us onto someone's lawn to admire some outstanding Greek Revival triglyphs and metopes, and doorcase with full entablature. They were fighting a losing battle with vinyl siding, but impressive, nonetheless.

At the end of Mandy Martin's article, I caught a reference to Hillier United Church. Turns out this is the church I mused about in a post back in May. This lovely church sitting in a vineyard at Closson Chase Winery, providing equipment storage and accommodation for seasonal workers - including a bedroom in the steeple, Martin reports - was the former Hillier UC, moved and repurposed. Beats demolition. Although Ernie Margetson is not implicated directly, his active role on local heritage advisory committees, and his dedication to adaptive resuse of heritage buildings in the area, would suggest that he likely was behind the inspired relocation.

the Regency rescue nearing completion

The Watershed article explains where the Margetson family lives, near the tiny hamlet of Melville at Consecon Lake. Whenever I visit Shannon Kyle's Regency 'rescue' on that lake  I pop over to Melville to enjoy the resonance - I feel the presence of  a bustling mill village from another century.

Incidentally, this Regency cottage once stood in Ancaster. It's now The Gryphon guesthouse, another preservation/repurposing story gone right. Read 'The Regency Cottage Rebuild Story' here - scroll down the page about a third of the way.

The importance of being earnest.
Thank goodness for the heritage conservationists of the world.