Everything stops for tea

to Helen Hutchison for her vision, determination and plain hard work

heritage flower garden

south (front) entrance facing the river

 Thanks all round.
Friend Brenda and I repaired to Napanee today, for tea and a tour of the exquisite museum house, Allan MacPherson house (1826).

Once a ruin, the house was rescued by the Lennox and Addington Historical Society, which administers it today.








Delicate neo-classical doorcase and windows, superb joinery in the cornice, pilasters and door surround. This is one of my favourite houses - clapboard can lay claim to sophistication like no other building material IMHO.

north facade

The house has identical fronts, often seen in  houses of the era. The south side facing the river, gardens and park was actually 'the front' facade. Several PEC homes of the era have the same feature.

Brenda and our lovely guide

MacPherson House parlour

Thanks to our delightful guide, who interpreted the house, its furnishings and the life of the 1830's when this house was the only significant house north of the river.

Napanee River from the ballroom window

stair runner woven on MacPherson House loom by a  gifted volunteer

 And thanks to the volunteers, both those 'below stairs' and those costumed servers in the summer kitchen, who offered choices of very good tea, scones, jams and cream.

Below stairs - winter kitchen

For more information, because Brenda and I really think you should go for tea, visit http://macphersonhouse.ca/history

Rogues and Scoundrels

Always wondered: why all the fuss about Newburgh?
Yesterday, on our way to Charleston Lake PP, we had a ramble around the village.
And found out why.

Last night, I checked out Abebooks, keen to pick up a copy of Stokes' and Cruikshank's 'Rogue's Hollow', to absorb their scholarship and echo their enthusiasm for the village and its architecture - and find out who the rogues were (always attracted to folks with a story).

Oops - a little outside my budget. Today I hied myself off to the Belleville Public Library website to request it.

Newburgh Academy

http://www.jgkeller.ca/NewburghAcademy.html has a great photo of the 1959 grade one and two classes outside this impressive limestone building. It was opened in 1853 as the Newburgh Academy, gutted by fire in 1872, refurbished later and used as a high/elementary school, then an elementary only, and closed in 1965.

Today it houses apartment dwellers - lucky them.

Study in texture

  So, while I wait for my library book....

Working class hero

Hooper's Mill

Early brick dignified by ashlar quoins - parapet walls

Still waiting...reliving my day lily day in Newburgh.
Looking forward to an autumn colour visit.
And perhaps a snow-blanketed winter day. 

When life hands you lemons...

 I'm thinking about how many Loyalists and other pioneers drew lots for properties they'd never seen. Thinking of the role that geological chance played in whether they and their descendants became successful farmers or just rural survivors. So much depended - everything depended - on the drawing of lots. By chance, some folks ended up with deep alluvial till, while others got...rock farms.

Even the hard farms on the Cambrian shield had been forested, encouraging settlers (and those promoting settlement)  to believe in the soil's capacity to provide.

I spotted this beautiful house near Hay Bay. It's built from granite fieldstones, used in their round natural state - I remember our dad calling those stones "hard-heads". The builder looked at the stones strewn about his hoped for prosperous fields, and made lemonade.

The photo does not do it justice to the little Ontario farmhouse, but look at the massive chimneys, the patchwork walls. The house has style - the shady verandahs boast turned posts and bargeboard.

Notice the window sash cut to cooperate with the incline of the kitchen tail built to the side of the main house.

I 

And here, near South Bay, is a unique community of beautiful stone walls. I don't know if it's because there was a gifted drystone wall builder who shared his love and skill with stone, or if folks just looked at the stone lying about on the surface of their newly cleared fields, eroded over millenia from the loose limestone escarpment above, and said....anyone for lemonade?

It's what's inside that counts

I am finally reading John Rempel's Building with Wood, cover to cover, front to back. It's a promised return after so many visits just to check a fact or find a term.

I have just finished a large-ish writing job - a chapter on early PEC building - for a local author/publisher. I spent a lot of time photographing houses of the early decades of the 1800's, and they taught me a thing or two, standing mute and in some cases abandoned and in disrepair. They broke my heart.

But I have been most disciplined, recording "just the facts ma'am" and setting emotional responses aside. Now it's time to sit back and enjoy these old bits of old buildings, try to connect with their earnest builders, and think about the many years they stood and sheltered families, and listen to the stories they can tell.

Enjoy these silvery weathered old bits of our built heritage (our disintegrating heritage in these cases) with me?

Adoption is not for everybody...

Adopt a highway, adopt a manatee, adopt a soldier, adopt a pet, adopt a....bit of neglected c.1819 frame house, Bath's most significant building?
Nah, wouldn't be practical.
Too much work.

That's why I've had this house on my worry list whenever I've passed through Bath these last 15 years.
I blogged about the house back in November 2010.
To quote our old dad, at the time "I wouldn't have given much for its chances".
Looked like a classic case of benign neglect.
And we all know how that ends.

Last Friday as I bopped down Church Street from Bath Academy, head full of anticipation for the War of 1812 events ahead, eyes on the reenactors' encampment on the Fairfield-Gutzeit lawn, I was overjoyed to see signs of life at the corner.

Had a peek inside - and a tour the following day.
This is one lucky house...adopted by a smart, energetic, skilled, ambitious, informed, visionary man who is bringing it back from the brink.
His name is Ron Tasker, he's an engineer, he knows what he is doing and he had been searching throughout the area for a house like this.

He has sat down at the knee of this old soldier, and heard all the tales.
He is sharing the stories, and writing a few of his own along the way.

I am almost speechless with relief...with recognition of a kindred spirit.

Someone whose conversation is peppered with words like hand-made lathe, guttae, Rempel, rose headed nails, pilasters, the Kingston Gazette, Georgian mantels with subtle neo-classical touches, early wallpaper. Who knows his way around the early history of this building, its business, its owner, and this town, and is graciously sharing what he is learning and doing (like removing 30 or more tons of rubbish from the building) to effect this house rescue. He was looking for a place like this house. Lucky house.

Ron Tasker telling the Peter Ham store story

a touch of neo-classical under the mantel shelf

This was the original 'front' facing the street up from the harbour

hand-split lathe - to enjoy fully read John Rempel

Watch this space.

The news from Ham House is getting better every day.

Hello Old Man...

...tell me your story.
I've come upon you, travelling an unmarked road over shallow limestone and hot dry weeds.
I've found you in this place.
Nothing but silence here, nothing but the whisper of the wind in the long grass, the spice of the red cedars under the hot sun. An unfamiliar bird voice calls...a bird who does not know backyard feeders, one who feels only the rhythms of this bit of the county, forgotten now.

You did not prosper here.
You built this house when many lived in fine brick and stone, their cattle fat and their fences strong.

Moses Hudgin log house 1860, PEC

Yet it was a good enough house; strong enough to last 150 years.
You farmed a bit on this begrudging land.
You fished in the unforgiving lake.
You sailed sometimes for a bit of pay.

You'd laugh to hear we've saved your log house.
But they did.
Because sometimes we still need silence, and the stories that a hard man on a hard farm can tell.

Goodbye Old Friend

I have had little time to write lately; too busy writing. A promised chapter about architecture for a book on Prince Edward County has forced me into an uncharacteristically disciplined month. Now the fact that this discipline has demanded reading and research and numerous road trips to take photos would suggest that I cannot call in too much sympathy. Granted.



But the voyage has not been without its tragic losses.

Today I feel I need to be among friends who understand.

This little house, the Mouck House of South Marysburgh, was built around 1836.
PJ Stokes figured it was the oldest house in the township.
The fact that it was brick, at a time when brick was used mostly in big houses of well-off folks, tells you just how proud the folks were of their little house.

But what I loved about the little house was that it showed me its brick heart...well, it showed anyone who cared to look, its brick heart. The side wall shows the way early builders used reject bricks (remember they were fired in pits nearby, short on quality control) for an inner layer of brick "nogging," good for insulation. You can see the outer bricks holding on at the corner. You can see the nogging between the frame members, the interior plank walls. You can see her little warm soft handmade brick heart.

But like making friends with a very old person, and beginning to learn so much from them, the relationship ended too quickly. Last week I made a return trip to the area, on a quest for a log house I'd read about. I carefully passed a large flatbed truck parked at the roadside. Men were loading a large yellow machine. I'd travelled a bit farther before I realized that I must have passed the old house, so did a U-turn and came back. I found, not my little old friend under the big trees, but a smooth flat area of new soil where hours before, the little Mouck house had stood.

I asked some walkers, so deep was my feeling of denial at the death. "Yup, it was time that happened, it was falling down". Great. A spot for another vinyl sided, many-gabled fake craftsman style house. History here? Nope.