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HOMEPLACE THE MAKING OF THE CANADIAN DWELLING OVER THREE CENTURIES Arguing that past scholarship has provided inadequate methodological tools for understanding ordinary housing in Canada, Peter Ennals and Deryck Holdsworth present a new framework for interpreting the dwelling. Canada's settlement history, with its emphasis on staples exports, produced few early landed elite or houses in the grand style. There was, however, a preponderance of small owner-built 'folk' dwellings that reproduced patterns from the immigrants' ancestral homes in western Europe. As regional economics matured, a prospering population used the house as a material means to display its social achievement. Whereas the elites came to reveal their status and taste through careful connoisseurship of the standard international 'high style,' a new emerging middle class accomplished this through a new mode of house building that the authors describe as 'vernacular.' The vernacular dwelling selectively mimicked elements of the elite houses while departing from the older folk forms in response to new social aspirations. The vernacular revolution was accelerated by a popular press that produced inexpensive how-to guides and a manufacturing sector that made affordable standardized lumber and trim. Ultimately the triumph of vernacular housing was the 'prefab' house marketed by firms such as the T. Eaton Company. House-making patterns from the early seventeenth to the early twentieth century are explored. Though the emphasis is on the ordinary single-family dwelling, the authors provide an important glimpse of counter-currents such as housing for gang labour, company housing, and the multi-occupant forms associated with urbanization. The analysis is placed in the context of a careful rendering of the historical geographical context of an emerging Canadian space, economy, and society. PETER ENNALS is Vice-President, Academic and Research at Mount Allison University. DERYCK w. HOLDSWORTH is professor of Geography at the Pennsylvania State University. He is co-editor of The Historical Atlas of Canada, Vol. III.
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HOMEPLACE THE MAKING OF THE CANADIAN DWELLING OVER THREE CENTURIES
Peter Ennals andDeryck W. Holds-worth
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London
www.utppublishing.com University of Toronto Press Incorporated 1998 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-4340-2 (cloth) ISBN 0-8020-8160-6 (paper)
Printed on acid-free paper
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Ennals, Peter Homeplace : the making of the Canadian dwelling over three centuries Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8020-4340-2 (bound) ISBN 0-8020-8160-6 (pbk.) 1. Dwellings - Canada - History. 2. Architecture, Domestic - Canada History. 3. Architecture and society- Canada. I. Holdsworth, Deryck, 1947- . II. Title. NA7241.E56 1998
728'097l
C98-930264-4
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Contents
List of Figures and Maps vii Preface xi Acknowledgments xv 1. Frameworks for the Study of Canadian Shelter 3 PART 1: Canadian Housing during the Era of Mercantile Capitalism 21 2. The Polite House 23 Housing the Ruling Oligarchy of New France 24 The Arrival of a British Elite 27 Mercantile Prosperity and Housing in Atlantic Canada 31 Town and Country Housing for Ontario's Gentry 38 3. The Folk House 50 Case Study 1: French Settlement and House Building 55 Case Study 2: The Transfer of English Folk Housing to North America 70 Case Study 3: Transfers of Celtic Folk Building to North America 76 Case Study 4: The German Contribution to Folk Housing in North America 82 Case Study 5: Folk Housing in Ontario 83 4. The Vernacular House 91 The Absorption of Classical and Formal Style 93 The Popularizing of Gothic Style in Vernacular Form 109
vi
Contents
5. Housing for Labour 121 Mercantile Agents in Early Resource Exploitation 123 Shanty, Camboose, and Dingle: Housing on the Forest Frontier 132 Industrial Villages 138 PART 2: Canadian Housing during the Era of Industrial Capitalism 147 6. The Self-Conscious House 149 The Styles of Eclecticism 161 Revivalist Styles 166 7. The Enduring Folk Stream 171 Enriching the Mix of Folk Cultures 172 Ukrainian Settlement and Housing 180 Traditions Masked but Not Lost: The Acadian House 186 8. Pattern Books and an Industrial Vernacular 192 Regional Variants of Victorian Style 193 California Bungalows and the Pretence of Artistry 201 Building Kits 206 9. Housing the Industrial Worker 213 Cannery Town 215 Coal and Steel Town 216 Mobile Lumber Camps 222 Housing for Railroad Workers 227 Housing for Factory Workers 228 10. Conclusion 232 Notes 237 Bibliography 267 Index 291
Figures and Maps
1.1 Approaches to the study of housing forms 6 1.2 Reconceptualizing the folk-polite continuum 8 1.3 The vernacular transition 12 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 2.9
Berthier Manor, Berthier-en-Bas, Quebec 25 Naval Commissioner's House, Halifax, 1909 30 Bridge House, Bonavista, Newfoundland 33 Cranewood, Sackville, New Brunswick 36 Belle Vue, Amherstburg, Upper Canada 40 Chief Justice William Campbell's house, Toronto 42 Beehive, Bobcaygeon, Upper Canada 45 New Lodge, Cobourg, Upper Canada 47 Cawthra House, Toronto 48
3.1 Hall-and-parlour houses: a. near Lavenham, East Anglia; b. Williamsburg, Virginia; and c. St Mary's [tobacco] Plantation, Maryland 54 3.2 French building techniques, en colombage pierrote 59 3.3 Common French building techniques using wood: a. piquet; b. d poteau en coulisse', c. en colombage; d. piece sur piece d queue d'aronde 60
3.4 Reconstruction of a piquet building with sod roof at Louisbourg 62 3.5 Reconstruction of the de Cannes house, Louisbourg 63 3.6 Acadian folk dwelling of the late eighteenth century, Cap Bimet, New Brunswick 65 3.7 Quebec folk house, Marcoux House, built ca. 1655, Beauport, Quebec 67
viii Figures 3.8 3.9 3.10 3.11 3.12 3.13
Variations in roofing form among Quebec houses 69 Cape Cod house form 74 Crooks House, Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia 76 The Irish folk house 77 Irish-origin farm house, St John's, Newfoundland 81 Pennsylvania-German house near Jordan Settlement, Upper Canada 84 3.14 Pioneer log shanty, Upper Canada 87 3.15 Log house with 'classical' trim, Downeyville, Upper Canada 89 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 4.9
4.12 4.13
Chapman House, Fort Lawrence, Nova Scotia 96 A brick farmhouse at Kirkham, Yorkshire 97 Maritime storey-and-a-half vernacular 99 Distinctive dormer stylings, Maritimes vernacular 100 The transition in Newfoundland vernacular form 102 Rideau corridor vernacular, Upper Canada 104 Prospect Cottage, near Grafton, Upper Canada 106 Folk dwelling re-dressed with brick and fretwork, Canada West 108 Ontario farmhouse revealing its origin as a log building, Dufferin County 113 Ontario Gothic farmhouse, complex L-shaped plan 114 Anglo-Norman House: Montesson Island Manor, Becancour, Canada East 117 Carpenter's Gothic 118 Lunenburg Gothic, Nova Scotia 119
5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8 5.9
Hudson's Bay Factor's house, Fort Langley, British Columbia 124 Cook rooms, Ferryland, Newfoundland 126 Albion Mines, Stellarton, Nova Scotia 129 New Caledonia miner's house, Nanaimo, British Columbia 131 Camboose shanty 134 Dingle shanty, Miramichi, New Brunswick 136 Quebec logging camp layout 138 Les Forges St-Maurice, Lower Canada 140 House at St Martins, New Brunswick 142
6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4
Oaklands, Toronto 153 Molson mansion, Kingston, Ontario 156 Queen Anne house, Amherst, Nova Scotia 159 Craigdarroch, Victoria, British Columbia 163
4.10 4.11
Figures 6.5 Hammond House, Sackville, New Brunswick 165 6.6 Tudor Revival mansion, Vancouver 168 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6 7.7 7.8
Mennonite house, Western Reserve, Manitoba 176 Mennonite house, Western Reserve, Manitoba 177 Mennonite house-barn, Western Reserve, Manitoba 178 Sod dug-out used by Ukrainian pioneers 182 The plan of the Ukrainian dwelling 183 Ukranian folk housing: Bukovynian variant 184 Ukranian folk housing: Galician variant 185 Acadian floor plans, twentieth-century Maritimes 189
8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 8.6 8.7 8.8
Newfoundland outport mansard 194 Montreal working-class housing 195 Bay-N-Gables, Toronto 197 Radford's pattern-book house, ca. 1908 200 California bungalow, Kitsilano, Vancouver 202 B.C. Mills prefabricated house 208 B.C. Mills prefabricated house 209 Eaton's mail-order house 210
9.1 Cape Breton coal mining company housing 217 9.2 Coal miners' housing, Cumberland, British Columbia 219 9.3 Chinatown tenements and shanties, Cumberland, British Columbia 220 9.4 Railroad workers'housing, Point St Charles, Montreal 228 9.5 Textile Company housing at Marysville, New Brunswick 229 Maps Pre-Confederation Canada 20 Post-Confederation Canada 146
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Preface
This book, a decade in the making, emerges from the almost serendipitous conjunction of two like instincts in what was to be a brief professional contact. During the year 1977-8, Hoklsworth joined Ennals in the Department of Geography at Mount Allison University. Both shared an interest in the 'built landscape.' Ennals, whose background and interests were rooted in rural Ontario, had written a master's thesis on the development of farm barns in nineteenth-century Ontario and was completing a doctorate on nineteenth-century rural settlement in Hamilton Township, Ontario, Holdsworth, who had been trained first at the University of Newcastle and later at the University of British Columbia, had a strong urban orientation; his doctoral dissertation examined the production of housing for working-class and bourgeois groups, many of them British immigrants, in Vancouver through the early decades of the city's development. 2 The prospect of a year together in the same department suggested collaboration, but this notion was set in motion when Graeme Wynn 'commissioned' a paper on vernacular housing in the Canadian Maritime provinces for a theme number of the journal Acadiensis that he proposed to edit. While a specific theme issue did not result, our paper did, and it was subsequently published in that journal." Evidently the paper attracted a good deal of attention, for it has since been reprinted twice in other anthologies.4 Apart from confirming that a deep friendship and a productive working relationship were possible, our collaboration as historical geographers with a strong 'landscape' instinct soon demanded that we extend the thesis of our 'Maritimes' paper to a more national treatment. Initially our interpretation of Maritime regional architecture was framed by explanations based on whether builders replicated elements of ethnic or folk
xii Preface roots such as Irish, Scottish, or Yorkshire housing. However, this soon shifted to a consideration of built forms also informed by an understanding of the phases of prosperity that drew people into new social relationships. We began to explore the combined influence of categories of the resource sector (fishing, farming, lumbering, and mining) and of issues of identity (labour and bourgeoisie, and all the fractions therein) on the creation of housing form. This inquiry produced even greater conundrums when these various lenses were raised to the national gaze, to consider more varied migrant streams and more uneven phases and locales of economic development, and when house-building activities were set in an array of differing environmental contexts. In the intervening period, Holdsworth moved to teach at the University of Toronto, then to work as an editor on the Historical Adas of Canada project before moving to the Pennsylvania State University; extensive travel during this period provided many opportunities to research housing in other places, but the work schedule rarely allowed periods for sustained writing. Ennals became involved in a range of administrative duties at Mount Allison, punctuated by periods in Japan teaching Canadian Studies and also pursuing research on European merchant enclaves there; he similarly deepened his understanding of different places and gained broader perspective,5 but also found his desk too crowded, save for a sabbatical year in 1990-1. Nonetheless, material did accumulate, singularly and jointly, and our ideas about the study of 'ordinary housing' and landscape analysis have evolved in response to the stimulating intellectual currents and developments within our discipline and beyond. Some aspects of this evolution in thinking are represented in this monograph; some are not. It is inevitable that, were we to start afresh at this point, our research emphasis might be more socially focused and more archivally based. Put another way, there is much empirical research that remains to be done to probe the nature of house ownership and the process of construction, and perhaps most tantalizing of all, to understand the complex meanings of the house for different inmates, social classes, and gender groups. This book serves a more fundamental purpose, in our view. We see this study as laying out a different and productive way of evaluating Canada's housing history, in which the artefact is set squarely amid the social and economic forces that energized the settlement experience and geography of this country. There can be no doubt that we are challenging some of the accepted modes of architectural categorization - especially those that have long been used by architectural and art historians and, regretta-
Preface
xiii
bly in our view, by many others who have entered the ground to interpret the local legacy of buildings.6 The use of period labels such as 'Georgian,' 'Regency,' and 'Queen Anne Revival" to describe even the most prosaic of dwellings in Canada has long been a source of frustration for us. Quite simply, we argue that these labels are inappropriate to the greater mass of ordinary housing, and that another approach to 'classification' is needed. We have also been disturbed by a tendency to dismiss much of the extant ordinary housing as irrelevant and inconsequential because it does not fit the 'high art' scheme of design execution. A far more critical reading of these artefacts and the literature pertaining to housing is therefore crucial. We offer an approach which opens up the scope for these forgotten dwelling types and forces the viewer to understand the practical, cultural, and social forces that produce the dwelling in the first place. Much of this probing must necessarily take the viewer inside the house, to see the arrangement and use of space, both now and in the past. In this way we reject 'facadism' - the interpretation that limits itself to the view from the street alone and which might be satisfied with mapping or numerically counting apparent likenesses or dissimilarities according to this shorthand. In many ways, then, our scheme for comparing one dwelling to another forces questions about antecedents, ethnicity, economy, social aspiration, interaction, and transformation. Frequently, more questions may be posed than can be easily answered, but therein lies the fun of placing the dwelling into the intellectual calculus. In executing our survey of Canada's built landscape we have aimed at some degree of chronological and regional scope, though we generally end our treatment with the onset of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, it has not seemed appropriate, or indeed possible, to be fully comprehensive. Some will be disappointed that a particular ethnic strand has not been included in our coverage. While we treat some forms of group or collective housing in some sections, we have not explored apartments, multiplex housing, or condominiums in this study. Others may feel that we have neglected to examine building technique in the detail that has become common in many studies elsewhere. Whatever absences exist reflect our own experiences and instincts, but they also reflect in some cases the state of the empirical literature. Readers disappointed that a strand is absent may fill the gap through their own research and writing. Nothing would please us more.
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Acknowledgments
Heading our list of acknowledgments for assistance during our exploration of the Canadian housing landscape are Graeme Wynn, who has shared our fascination with the historical geography of the Maritimes; John Mannion and Jerry Pocius, one from geography and the other from folklore at Memorial University, who have been extremely generous in providing us with an orientation to Newfoundland traditions and their origins; Cecil Houston and Seamus Smyth, whose work on Irish migration to Canada helped us in our emphasis on regional variations in social and economic phases of development; Ted Mills, who, having been an architectural historian with the Canadian Parks Service, knows more than most about the spectrum of western Canadian architecture; and, in the United States, Bernie Herman, Robert St George, and Martyn Bowden, who helped shape our understanding of the comparative continental context. We would also like to single out Cole Harris, who, first at the University of Toronto and later at the University of British Columbia, was our teacher in historical geography and who laid down a challenging framework for analysing micro-examples and macro-processes. Others who generously shared information and ideas include Ronald Brunskill, Susan Buggey, Richard Candee, Ken Donovan, Simon Evans, Len Evenden, David Frank, Gunter Gad, Jock Galloway, Bob Galois, the late Louis Gentilcore, Henry Classic, David Hannah, John Eraser Hart, Fernand Harvey, Mary Ellen Herbert, Brad Hunter, Allastair Ken, Anthony King, Victor Konrad, Clarence LeBreton, Jock Lehr, Pierce Lewis, Eugene Cotton Mather, Larry McCann, Tom Mcllwraith, Richard MacKinnon, Debra McNabb, Barry Moody, Donald Meinig, Del Muise, Darrell Norris, Sherry Olson, Brian Osborne, John Reid, Eric Ross, Joan Schwartz, J.T. Smith, Scott Smith, Michael Steinitz, Barrie Trinder, Diane
xvi Acknowledgments Tye, John Warkentin, Joe Wood, and Susan Wurtele. Throughout our research we have appreciated institutional support from Mount Allison University, and in particular its Research Committee for travel grants; Erindale College at the University of Toronto, also for travel grants; the Historical Atlas of Canada project for the opportunity to explore some of the ideas expressed in this volume and also for making available draft manuscripts of various plates; the Department of Geography at Penn State University; staff at the Public Archives of Canada, Ottawa; staff at the Glenbow Museum, Calgary; staff at the Provincial Museum of Nova Scotia, especially Marie Ellwood; staff at the Public Archives of Nova Scotia, especially Brian Cuthbertson and Alan Dunlop, and at the Provincial Archives of New Brunswick, Fred Farrell. We would like to thank Joan Bulger, Suzanne Rancourt, Judy Williams, and Barb Porter from the University of Toronto Press for their invaluable assistance in bringing the manuscript to publication. Finally our families, Cheryl, Sarah, and Andrew; Sue, Peter, and Pauline, for putting up with one of us as we descended on the home of the other for periods of intense writing and debate - squeezed into overly crowded schedules of teaching, research, and administration -when they (perhaps) realized that such an intrusion on 'home' in fact facilitated a deeper understanding of what home is really about.
HOMEPLACE
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CHAPTER ONE
Frameworks for the Study of Canadian Shelter
To understand the nature of the housing forms which were transplanted by Europeans in early Canada, it is essential to place this fragment of our cultural experience into a larger historical and geographical framework. The European encounter with Canada was driven by a desire to harness a varying set of natural resources needed for European sustenance and manufacture, and by a wish to colonize territory and settle population as part of an expansion of European society into the New World. The two impulses were integrated, since the settlement process invariably occurred in connection with, rather than apart from, some facet of that European economic system. In this volume, we offer a perspective on the domestic shelters fabricated by and for a wide range of urban and rural peoples over more than three centuries of transforming the land that is today Canada. In so doing, we seek to shed light not only on the commonalities and differences in house form and appearance, but also on the social and economic forces that lay behind their creation. Some of these have been local and time-bound, while others are transatlantic in scale and recurrent over centuries. Many of these actions mirrored the unfolding of parallel settlement and building practices elsewhere in the world. We offer a synthetic historical geography of housing, wherein we view shelter as one element of a complex mix that includes access to land, resources, markets, and wages by a variety of migrant streams - a mix of processes that make distinctive regions and landscapes. Shelter, be it a simple shanty or an elegant mansion, a suburban bungalow or a miner's bunkhouse, can be approached from a variety of perspectives. By its very definition, shelter implies refuge - something beneath, behind, or within which a person or animal is protected from weather or adversity. Given the nature of the Canadian climate, such ref-
4 Homeplace uge was a persistent imperative and a preoccupation not only in pioneer circumstances but also for subsequent generations. Long, hard, cold, and snowy winters, or the fog, damp, and gales endured near the oceans, or the humid, bug-infested summer heat in 'the bush' of the Great Lakes interior all dictated environmental responses that usually meant an adjustment from practices familiar in Europe. Warmth - generated through a hearth and its secure surrounds - was elemental to shelter. The creation of the dwelling brought pragmatic uses of materials at hand; local resources, locally modifiable materials, or those that could be economically imported, influenced the size, shape, and setting of shelter. At the same time, the house when treated as 'home' functions as more than just a refuge. It is a place for rest, for sustenance, for reproduction, and for socializing. Some of the imperatives of the dwelling relate thence to more profound aspects of human relations. The articulation of social spaces - areas to eat, to sleep, to entertain - within the sheltering walls followed patterns that bore deep roots. They were conservative traditions and yet, as we will see, traditions that would change slowly in response to broader social transformations in child rearing, gender roles, privacy, and the like. A third component of the dwelling involves decorative elements that transcend survival and existence; they mark the distance that the occupant has come from more primeval concerns, and the capacity to celebrate comfort and leisure time through aesthetic means. To the extent that these elements mimic the forms of one's betters, this facet of the house can act as an indicator of social relations and consciousness; in addition, decoration often conforms to sanctioned social or religious beliefs. Finally, an important element of shelter involves the act of consumption, since increasingly people were compelled to rent from others rather than build for themselves. And from the last third of the nineteenth century onward, as more and more consumer products were aggressively marketed, the furniture and fittings possessed by a household, and indeed the internal physical dimensions of the house, were influenced by the manipulation of mass taste through advertising. Even those who could afford to own property were buying a ready-made product. No longer would they be fundamentally and intimately involved in the act of shaping the structure. Shelter has been viewed variously as an object or a concept from a variety of intellectual vantage points. The potentials and limitations of these
Frameworks for the Study of Canadian Shelter 5 stances help set the scene for the perspective that we will adopt in this work. Figures 1.1 and 1.2 are our attempt to delineate the ways housing can be treated analytically. In them we attempt to indicate the principal scholarly traditions evident in the literature as well as the essentials of the scheme we employ in this study. Figure 1.1, section a, represents the Academic Tradition of looking at housing, a tradition that has until recently been dominated by architectural historians. House forms are analysed and explained through a taxonomy of form, or what we call high-style labels (such as Georgian, Romanesque Revival, Queen Anne), and by reference to specific architects. In circular fashion, buildings worthy of note are structures that are designed by architects and that fall within clear stylistic categories. Other structures are mere buildings, hardly worth attention because they have little about them that can be accounted for using formal style and design criteria. Pevsner's famous adage - that Lincoln Cathedral is architecture, a bicycle shed is a building - is an extreme caricature of this distinction. The Reality (section b of the diagram) is that a very small fraction of the total housing stock is, or ever was, designed by architects in a high-style manner. But the excluded mass of houses were shaped, in that they have some consistent rules of structural systems, if not appearance. How might we conceptualize this dominant group of structures? One vocabulary that has often been used refers to this non-architect grouping as 'vernacular.' Ivan Illich notes that the original technical Roman use of the term 'vernacular' designates the obverse of a commodity: 'those things that are homemade, homespun, home-grown, not destined for the marketplace, but that are for home use only.'1 In time, it also came to refer to one's native tongue, a distinction in language between the formal Latin of the medieval church and the informal, local speech of everyday life. The divide between vernacular and something else often has 'vernacular' as the 'other' variant to some formalized, deliberate system, be it in reference to material objects or speech. In the case of buildings, the distinction between 'architecture' and 'building' is modified in our scheme into distinctions termed 'polite' and 'vernacular' (figure Lie). We recognize that both have some level of conscious shaping of structure, the one formal, trained, and national, the other amateur and guided by local convention. One of the first attempts to conceptualize this distinction came in the work of Ron Brunskill in England in the early 1970s, when he sought to identify the threshold between polite and vernacular that was worked out in different manners for cottages, small houses, large houses, and great houses over more than
architecture
buildings
a. Traditional academic emphasis - giving prominence to high-art architecture
architecture
b
The 'reality1 is that ordinary buildings are far more numerically evident than the high-art forms
polite
c
'other buildings'
vernacular
Revisionist assessment in academic studies, focusing on the vernacular-polite relationship
1.1 Approaches to the study of housing forms
Frameworks for the Study of Canadian Shelter 7 eight centuries.2 Three years later, in a book on the Lake District of northwest England, he defined vernacular as the products of local craftsmen meeting simple functional requirements according to traditional plans and procedures and with the aid of local building material and constructional methods, rather than the 'polite,' the efforts of professional designers, meeting the more elaborate needs of a formal way of life with the aid of internationally accepted rules and procedures, advanced construction techniques, and materials chosen for aesthetic effect rather than local availability.3
From this and other work comes the sense that 'vernacular' means 'traditional' and also that it means 'local.' However, this term can become many things to many people, a label that means one thing in the sixteenth century and quite another in the nineteenth, as tradition varies and as building technologies evolve. For an immigrant society, like the one that built houses throughout Canada for three centuries, the notion of local and traditional is no absolute bedrock. Drawn from many traditions, scattered heterogeneously within Canada, these people form a constant 'other' to the changing design codes of formal and high-style architecture. In our schema we argue for the recognition of the complexity of transformation that was bound up with the development of vernacular housing. For example, we identify within the vernacular important linkages to high-style or polite architecture, but equally to other building traditions. Accordingly, we would like to argue here that it is useful to see a broader spectrum (see figure 1.2) that defines folk architecture as the bedrock of ways of shaping shelter, refined locally with available materials and transmitted orally, or by example, to produce subtly distinct regional variants. Here we note the use of 'folk' as a category in important studies by Classic in America, Evans in Ireland, and Grant in Scotland.1 As figure 1.2 shows, we see vernacular as occupying the middle ground between folk and polite architecture. As a process of transformation, we see elements of polite architecture being grafted onto folk forms, then this hybrid evolving into a distinct middle ground and inexorably fused into its own variant through necessary use of purchased, rather than homemade, constructional elements. In time, following design guidelines drawn increasingly from pattern books targeted to contractors and builders, the execution of house building is less and less in the control of owner-occupiers. Thus the vernacular becomes no longer the obverse of
folk
vernacular
polite
a. Recognizing the spectrum of housing traditions arising from settlement
polite folk
vernacular gang
aboriginal b. Balancing the scheme by recognizing housing for labour
folk
polite vernacular
new folk
aboriginal c.
gang
The dynamic system - expanding polite, expanding vernacular, waning older folk traditions being supplemented by new arrivals
1.2 Reconceptualizing the folk-polite continuum
Frameworks for the Study of Canadian Shelter 9 a commodity, but rather something in the ordinary and everyday, still distinct from polite formal systems yet clearly distinct from folk idioms. By dint of its regional distinctiveness, it retains that other use of the word 'vernacular,' and in Canada, as elsewhere on the continent, certain forms became synonymous with regional identity in certain periods. Vernacular houses cumulating over the generations convey a particular signature to places, and it is in this sense that we were able to use the notion of vernacular when we first explored Maritime regional house-types.11 In Canada - a land of immigrant settlement - it is important and appropriate to distinguish a segment of shelter attributable to the aboriginal population, separate from the European folk. However, we believe, aboriginal housing had an insignificant impact on European folk notions, save for some occasional links in the early fur trade for temporary shelter. Furthermore, the study of aboriginal housing tends to proceed on anthropological assumptions, emphasizing matters of kinship and ceremonial space as well as transience and portability, issues beyond the scope of this study, which has a more central interest in economic and social forces that shaped the Canadian domestic landscape.(> Of more importance here is the need to contextualize the examples of polite architecture, though numerically small and often marginal compared to European and American equivalents. The importance of this phase of building is the capacity of polite forms to serve as local models for style and taste, and thus become a basis for the gradual vernacular mimicry by families involved in farming, fishing, mining, or local trades. This was especially important in the decades when long-distance connection and interaction were infrequent. Consequently the few polite global traits entered islands of enterprise and created local reference points for a range of bounded and thus regionally distinctive decoration. In Canada, a fifth element worthy of study for our purposes is the shelter erected for the many labourers, nearly all male, working in fishing, logging, mining, or trapping in isolated regions. These barrack-like forms, for they would also include shelter for military groups, are distinct from the single-family shelter of the agrarian economy. These are noted in figure 1.2 as section b and include some elements of a folk world and also elements of vernacular form. Finally, we would stress that none of these five elements are static; rather we need to represent them in dynamic and changing form (see figure 1.2, section c). The high-style or polite segment enlarges through time as more merchants, professionals, and industrialists seek forms and styles that mark their new identity. The folk atrophies, except for periods
10 Homeplace when new waves of immigration from peasant societies resort, like their predecessors, to living from locally available elements until they too partake of the consumer society that reshapes shelter. Between these two patterns, vernacular grows as advertising, standardized materials, and national tastes all affect local housing idioms. Aboriginal forms disappear as Native populations decrease precipitously, and as missionaries and governments rehouse them in an attempt to 'civilize' them. Gang-labour housing forms shrink as prefabricated and standardized forms emerge, and as married labour replaces bachelor gangs. Our reconceptualization of the polite-folk continuum has value only if we can present it in an effective frame for understanding. To that end we need to connect it in both time and space to phases of economic and social change, and to the regional aspects of Canadian settlement history. The phases of encounter with the Canadian realm are organized here in two parts. The first is in a world of agrarianism and mercantile capitalism in which both merchant and settler acted as Europeans in the new land. The link to Europe was bluntly cut or slowly stretched depending on the prosperity of a particular place, region, or sector. The few examples of consciously designed, architect-commissioned, or what in chapter 2 we label 'polite' housing associated with the colonial and mercantile elite typify the early French and English contribution; this was in contrast to what we treat in chapter 3, the mass of ordinary, innately designed 'folk housing' brought largely by non-English settlers, especially by the French and Irish, to the resource and agrarian frontier. To the extent that the polite influenced the folk, a mimicking or 'vernacular' form emerged in different localities and persisted, or was superseded at a pace again dependent on broad economic and social currents emanating from Europe directly, or from America to the south. Indeed we would argue that the main English impact on Canadian housing comes through America, where an earlier folk form of English migrant housing evolved and adjusted in the New World into clearly codified forms. These forms absorbed the material culture of the more Celtic elements of Canadian settlers, thereby fashioning a more homogeneous New World housing solution which ironically captures another later strand of English settlers who migrated to Canada in the nineteenth century. This development is introduced in chapter 4. Another segment of this world involved the necessity to house gangs of labour in remote settings, an especially Canadian form of shelter, given the remoteness of so many resources from settled, agrarian regions. This is explored in chapter 5. The second phase comes with the emergence of a more industrial
Frameworks for the Study of Canadian Shelter 11 economy both in Europe and North America. Population increased, more people were employed in urban settings, and new forms of production triggered new social relationships. Land persisted as a commodity, but for many it served less directly as a status- or wealth-generating device. Instead, a more unsettled, disoriented, and perhaps what might best be termed a 'nervous' society came to consume a wider array of architectural and material symbols as surrogates of position and family well-being. The gulf of experience and opportunity was as wide as ever, but the social fractions and the landscapes were more diverse, complex, and extended, and drew on different sources of inspiration; these are examined in chapter 6. As in the earlier phase, the polite housing of the wealthy stimulated, in turn, vernacular copies, but these now were disseminated by magazines and pattern books as well as by local mimicry. Moreover, different degrees of regional absorption or innovation of both high and ordinary forms of housing provide a fascinating tableau to be explained, all the more so as non-British or non-French migrants brought new folk forms and fresh cultural assumptions to the Canadian milieu after 1890. These issues are discussed in chapters 7 and 8. In chapter 9 we follow the impact of industrial production systems as they reshaped shelter for gang labour into a more urban and proletarian setting. In an increasingly urban country, early twentieth-century Canadian housing forms reflect the persistent model of the staples economy that had long guided its economic and political orientation/ The Canadian set of connections between producer and market regions has, throughout most of the twentieth century, sustained a patchwork of folk and marginal landscapes. Many ethnic and social groups have been absorbed into the nation's urban nodes. Some of these have been able to retain, or impose, their cultural origins on the landscape, and their efforts are as revealing as those encountered in the wilderness in earlier generations. The Canadian model of the welfare state, expressed in transfer payments, social programs, and the like, has propped up areas where the archaic housing stock is gaunt testimony to the fact that they are connected neither to the trading strands of the past nor to the current continental economic realities. And, finally, the new post-industrial society, which exploits information as well as resources, has fostered work groups whose more footloose locations have meant encounters with land, with relic material culture, and with their own sense of the past. Out of this encounter many have rehabilitated and redefined some earlier forms of shelter and created new ones in order to find a personal response in a more leisure-oriented society.
12 Homeplace
1.3 The vernacular transition
Over three centuries of making shelter there has been a simultaneous waning of the folk idiom and the corresponding rise of vernacular forms. We have attempted to delineate the wavelike dimension in this process schematically (see figure 1.3). What the diagram cannot effectively do is stress the uneven surface of this change. For us it is the complexities of this change across time and space that make the historical geography of Canada so intriguing. However, this study cannot and does not attempt to be encyclopedic; too much detailed field-work and documentation remain to be done. Rather we strive to sample across time and space to convey to the reader the nature and background of some of these different forms, organized in two broad periods: one where mercantile economies predominated, the other more corporate and industrial. Here, too, there is no clear transition, either nationally or regionally. The temporal bounds of this study are never precisely delineated. We offer no statistical survey of when buildings were constructed, nor do we use any precise calendar year to bring our coverage to a close. For the most part, however, we are concerned with the residential landscapes that emerged before the Great Depression of the 1930s. The census of 1921 is often invoked to signify the year that Canada became an urban nation, numerically more people living in urban places than rural (even if the
Frameworks for the Study of Canadian Shelter
13
definition of urban is a suprisingly low one thousand people). Even so, there was still a decade of immigration during the 1920s that brought many distinctive folk streams to the prairies or that added low-density suburban and exurban landscapes on the fringes of the country's leading cities. These linked more to the building processes that immediately preceded them than they did to the post-war mortgage instruments and mass housing schemes of the 1940s and later.8 For our purposes, it is the vast rural and resource landscape, the repository of so much Canadian identity, where we find our case studies. Housing structures act as distinctive foreground to regional identities, whether we are driving through the Annapolis Valley in Nova Scotia, or on the old royal road alongside the St Lawrence River in Quebec, or on Route 2 along Lake Ontario's shoreline, or between Watson and Watrous in Saskatchewan, or on countless other minor roads from Bonavista Bay to Vancouver Island. Observing them, we know we are 'there' rather than 'nowhere' because of the ensemble of house, farm, and field, or because of streetscapes in older neighbourhoods in Canadian towns and cities. We are viewing a historical geography frozen (or only slowly changing) in the present. In the Canadian world up to the 1920s, the rural, resource, and urban examples are in a more understandable equilibrium - a smaller set of examples, drawn from a similar set of construction techniques, technologies, and tastes. Where we feel maps help to orient the reader, we have added locational maps. However, since the mapping of complex social and economic contexts would involve a multicoloured cartography beyond the publication resources of this volume and also demand equal coverage for all regional maps when such equivalent data are not available, readers might be well served by a careful reading of the three volumes of the Historical Atlas of Canada to review how the interplay of humans and the environment produced Canada's patterns of settlement and economy.9 The details of many aspects of the social and economic transitions that we refer to are graphically portrayed there. So too are the connections to a broader world, especially back to Europe, but also increasingly to American locations. Our study necessarily draws on studies of shelter and economy in these wider orbits. Our attempt to conceptualize a balanced approach to the study of housing form in Canada stands apart from many other recent surveys. Extrapolating from figure 1.1, we turn briefly to comment on the strengths and deficiencies we see in the approaches which have been used by those interested in understanding the house. As we have noted, until recently most investigations which have viewed the house as 'object'
14 Horneplace were provided by art historians. Not surprisingly, it was the elegant mansion that received attention, since these structures and their well-known occupants left written records of one form or another and the style of their houses could be categorized using broad 'architectural' labels. Other house types, especially those that failed to meet the accepted standard of performance and execution dictated by the high-art labels, were largely ignored. Only in instances where crude copies had picturesque or curiosity value, or served to underline the lack of 'taste' by the masses, did these dwellings draw the art historian's gaze. For the most part, the approach was based on the exterior facade, with little attempt to look inside the house. The language of architectural history could neither help in any understanding of the greater extent of ordinary habitation nor seek to integrate such forms into its universe of understanding. We note that Kalman includes many of the 'ordinary' structures we treat in depth here, and architectural history has evolved and broadened, yet it rightfully retains its academic interest in architects and styles." In its stead, other disciplinary perspectives, arising variously from folklore, anthropology, geography, and social history, have grappled with ways in which ordinary houses could be understood. For example, folklorists have tended to build up levels of insight from intimate knowledge of individual houses and their occupants - domestic biographies in a way - and, to overcome the specificity of people and place, they seek the underlying structural meanings in the form. Floor plans are examined, to note room arrangement in relation to the hearth; activities are observed, to see objects in juxtaposition and understand the rhythmic everyday uses of spaces.12 Some folklorists believe that the house as object can reveal deep and persistent patterns of being, a psychological diagnosis as it were, and in this quest they are joined by philosophers and anthropologists in viewing 'essences' of the house.ls Cultural geographers similarly address the house as object, and have sought to delineate, by the technique of mapping, broad regional patterns of distinctive traits - for example, the distribution of houses with a specific log-notching system or a characteristic gable configuration. Core regions and lines of diffusion, both for human groups and for cultural objects, have been the result.11 Criticism levelled at this approach usually notes that such blinkered mapping often pays little attention to the wider world around the object. Occasionally, however, the two traditions of folklore and cultural geography overlap, and penetrating insights into regional culture can occur. Too often, the work of both the folklorist and the cultural geographer has been narrowly focused, and pre-
Frameworks for the Study of Canadian Shelter 15 occupied with objects and structures in isolation, at the expense of sensitivity to economic and social transformations. ly Increasingly, by the nineteenth century, fewer and fewer people made their own houses. They were consumers of a product made by others, and as a consequence, the anthropomorphic qualities that might be read into the artifact in preindustrial contexts can be less clearly discerned in more market-oriented economies. Practitioners in social history and historical sociology have focused on the wider economic and social transformations, especially as large-scale and intricate analysis of census records has exposed much more about demographic patterns, family formation, and class structures of early modern societies. Only occasionally, however, have scholars in these fields sought to tie their new understanding of society into a profile of particular places and their landscapes. We know a lot about people, ethnicity, and mobility in Ontario's Peel County, and the rising city of Hamilton, for example, but little about the spaces or physical milieus within which social changes occurred. 10 Analysis of broad structures in society has been enriched by the absorption of the critical perspectives of Marxist scholarship, and broad statements on the social production of the built environment have been posited. This is largely a consequence of work by social historians writing on the industrializing world as it was worked out in the Victorian city and in a world of imperial ambition. 17 The residential circumstances of social, ethnic, or work-connected groups only made sense when seen in a more complex ecological context in which the importance of land, property, and income was considered. Artifacts such as the terraced house or the suburban bungalow could be effectively connected to social and occupational patterns revealed in census and other documents, rather than seen as purely architectural objects. A second critical perspective weighs gender as a central category for the analysis of social space. Emerging from a concern with family history18 but also driven by frustrations at the androcentric assumptions behind many treatments of people and place,19 or the unthinkingly masculine gaze directed at landscape,20 feminist perspectives insist that attention to patriarchy reveals many power gradients embedded in everyday practice. Accordingly the house can be seen as a setting where many spaces both shaped and reinforced gender roles, whether consciously designed as such or emerging from historically contingent practices of everyday life.21 Though many of the feminist stances are conceptual rather than empirical, this perspective enriches our understanding and
16 Homeplace triggers considerable reflection.22 In the context of this study, the role of women in creating and using Canadian shelter remains 'a major interpretative challenge.'23 Typically, these new social histories view people and places from the 'bottom up' and react to interpretations of history that are preoccupied with the elite. In this new climate of inquiry, a more informed holistic view of ordinary housing in rural settings has emerged, some of it propelled by architects, some by folklorists, and some by geographers.24 A broad focus on 'material culture,' on common places and objects, has balanced the connoisseurship that formerly favoured attention to housing from the aesthetic perspective alone. The study of material culture, as witnessed by the enormous range of topics covered in the five edited Perspectives volumes of the Vernacular Architecture Forum since 1982, has as yet made only a slight impact on Canadian scholarship, and it is for this reason that we feel our study will be a significant addition to the literature on the nature of house building in Canada.23 Work on building types or processes of building would thus seem to demand the insights of many disciplinary perspectives and of a critical synthesis, yet the interpreter must not lose sight of the imperatives of place and region, or of time and transformations. This encourages us to bring to the work the perspective of historical geography, and especially the Canadian strand of that perspective framed by Harold Innis and Andrew Clark.26 While this perspective is not especially new, or radical, or prescriptive, it has not been widely employed to examine housing. We believe this mode of scholarship with its propensity to probe widely, using not only 'field methods' but also the library and archives for evidence that then can give new perspectives on complex, evolving phenomena, will serve well for this task. For us, the object and the document are of equal importance. The house as object can be codified as art, as commonplace, as commodity, and as existential core. Documents reveal issues of property, land, and family; social and occupational issues help link form with functions. In turn, recorded evidence on employment, trade, markets, and migration help cast the broad historical and geographical frameworks within which houses and their occupants might be better understood. For us, the spectrum of house building in Canada has necessarily to be seen in the broadest perspective of European society overseas. While many elements of Canadian housing are part of a New World milieu of climate, materials, and technological possibility, underlying social values
Frameworks for the Study of Canadian Shelter 17 and attitudes towards property and material well-being tied most of North America to Europe. Some of the Canadian set of buildings clearly owe their impetus to American practice, and much of Canadian society, over the last two centuries at least, has had to measure and indeed define itself against that southern neighbour - especially in material terms. Yet America too, ultimately, owes many elemental notions of family and community life, and patterns of economic interaction, to its European cultural hearth. 2 ' Throughout this volume, the context of Europe and the United States will be presented to better understand the Canadian experience. Regardless of locality, the material qualities of one's life were affected by the amount of land or other resources at one's disposal, and the extent of control that was possible on that land or with those resources. In turn this equation dictated the likely volume of domestic space to be enjoyed and the security of tenure that might be accorded within the system of property rights. The dwelling thus becomes a tangible yardstick to measure the opportunities and constraints of the New World experience against the old. From it we can see initially a life lived locally and prescribed within limits of materiel, technology, and expectations. Canadian housing before the nineteenth century documents a post-feudal but not yet egalitarian world, where there were a few rich persons, but where the majority were living at or just above the subsistence margin of existence. The process of social transformation from the collective to the individual, from community to privatism, from multi-talented to specialized, from peasant to proletariat, from landed aristocracy to bourgeois capitalist all find some material expression in housing form and appearance. In the process of understanding these patterns, we must also consider the impetus for migration. For many of our European ancestors, it involved seasonal work in the resource hinterland - for fish in the Baltic, Mediterranean, and eventually the North Atlantic; for timber also in the Baltic states and across the Atlantic Ocean. For others, it was a search for new land ahead of enclosure, urbanization, famine, or religious persecution. Increasingly in the nineteenth century, employment, even work on the land, would be in a more urban and industrial setting. The two sides of the ocean were linked by resource trading systems and by hopes and aspirations framed by Old World experience. The historical and cultural geography of Europe and the New World transformations need inspection side by side to locate the specific manifestations of groups in specific Canadian settings.
18
Homeplace
In the chapters that follow, we present new possibilities for interpretation of land and domestic spaces, by drawing on a wide array of sources and perspectives. Throughout we attempt to locate the phenomenon in a wide geographical framework of origins and antecedents in Europe, and later in the United States, among economic and social processes, and within specific Canadian locales over more than three centuries.
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PART ONE
Canadian Housing during the Era of Mercantile Capitalism
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CHAPTER TWO
The Polite House
Dwellings that might be described as being of 'high style,' or what we have chosen to call 'polite' houses, exude a material worldliness and complexity of design which suggest the owner's need to make a visible statement of economic achievement and social rank. For such self-conscious people the dwelling becomes a means of displaying wealth, of demonstrating taste and knowledge of current international fashion. Yet true 'high-style' dwellings are remarkably thin on the ground in early Canada, and those that do exist are modest in scale and decorative exuberance compared to British and American examples. Only at the end of the nineteenth century did Canadians begin to produce any significant number of houses comparable in scale and style to the 'country seat' and the elegant town house of England, or the great houses of the wealthy in the United States. It would therefore be easy to dismiss this form of housing as inconsequential were it not for its role in providing the imaginative ideals that were often mimicked in the vernacular house. In this chapter we identify the groups of people most likely to attempt high-style building in early Canada and we examine the houses they erected and the inspiration for them. We are less concerned to illuminate the intricacies of form in this type of housing, for this subject is generally well treated by other writers.1 Rather we will stress the social and economic development of early Canada that necessarily provides the context in which this category of housing - what Brunskill aptly calls the 'polite house' - came into being. In this way we will establish an aesthetic and social framework in which to examine the connections between developments in high-style and other more ordinary types of dwellings. The first impetus for the high style in Canada undoubtedly was from the intendants, governors, and senior colonial officials, as well as other
24 The Era of Mercantile Capitalism members of the colonial oligarchy; senior churchmen, military officers, and the mercantile elite. Yet in all of the early colonial societies before 1850, in New France and later in British North America, the numbers of individuals falling into this class were small, and, with a few exceptions, they tended to be transient. Most were concentrated in a handful of urban centres, such as Quebec, Montreal, St John's, Halifax, Saint John, Toronto, and Kingston. But what can be said of the houses built by and for these people? Housing the Ruling Oligarchy of New France
In Quebec City, the homes of government officials nestled alongside the monumental religious institutions (the Jesuit College, the Ursuline Convent, the Cathedral) in a settlement dominated by an array of military structures. The Governor's Chateau St-Louis and the Intendant's Palace complex were administrative settings as well as private dwellings. Their visual impact came in their scale and location, rather than the specifics of their architectural decoration. Indeed these buildings evoked an older, medieval set of images onto which would be grafted a hint of a newer and decidedly 'official' fashion - the Baroque. Quebec's early monumental architecture was firmly rooted in the seventeenth century, if not earlier, and by the eighteenth century it was already at odds with the new spirit being pressed forward among the elite of the homeland and elsewhere, who favoured an ordered, balanced, and geometrically perfect 'classicism' in architecture. These prominent buildings did not even have a contrived balance, save for a central doorway and a rhythm of windows along each storey. In Montreal, the same juxtaposition of military, church, and government was moderated by the city's increasing primacy as the commercial centre for the colony's fur-trading economy. The residence of the governor in Montreal was, according to Alan Gowans, a counterpart of the great Baroque palaces of the seventeenth-century French nobility.2 The Chateau Vaudreuil utilized Baroque design elements to confirm the occupant's position: a formal facade was approached by an inclined path, and a curved stairway led to the main door. Inside the entrance, corridors led off a spacious reception room to dining rooms and other areas for entertaining, including a formal garden behind. But this achievement of style had few other residential counterparts in the city. In the walled town of Louisbourg on Isle Royale (now Cape Breton Island), the Governor's Palace was a large, long structure that also
The Polite House 25
2.1 Berthier Manor, Berthier-en-Bas, Quebec. This house, built about 1690 for the seigneur of Berthier, is undoubtedly typical of many early manors in that it was anything but grand and pretentious as a dwelling. It was probably only a slightly bigger and better house than those of many who worked the land on the seigneury.
housed the town's church, barracks for soldiers, and the quarters of senior officers. As an ensemble, the complex alluded to the scale of building at Versailles, the Palais du Luxembourg, and other grand Parisian buildings, yet the stark reality of its situation as a military outpost on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean constantly emphasized the gulf of prosperity and comfort between those posted there and their counterparts at home. Beneath the canopy of senior military and church officials, the houses of other colonial officials and seigneurs in New France point out the limited possibilities for accumulation and display of wealth. The manor house of the seigneury of Berthier-en-Bas (figure 2.1) underlines the ordinariness of much of this housing. Many seigneurs did not live much above the level of their habitants. Recent scholarship on the architectural history of New France has done much to provide a picture of what may have been a common pattern of building. Peter Moogk utilizes the rich resource of the notarial contracts between builder and client to show that most commissions were more concerned with the mundane specification of building materials and with questions of economy than with stylistic elements/
26 The Era of Mercantile Capitalism Clients were apparently more anxious about keeping warm than they were about reaching the heights of fashion in their buildings. Indeed there are hints that from the beginning of colonization in New France, a tension existed between the authorities' desire to re-create a centrally controlled and highly ordered settlement pattern and the settlers' preference for a more individualistic and dispersed land survey system with the freedom from authority that it facilitated.4 In the final analysis the settlers prevailed, and we might presume that in this breaking away from convention and authority they also weakened their allegiance to the metropolitan conventions of architectural taste. Scholars of material culture must constantly remind themselves that making judgments about the past on the basis of what survives in the present is risky. Clearly much of the architectural fabric of New France has disappeared, and there are severe limits to reconstructing the form of past buildings in the colony - the superior documentary record notwithstanding. Nevertheless, the impression we get is that most of the houses built by all classes replicated plans and design elements that stood closer to long-standing folk and provincial practices than to what we understand to be high-style forces. Few of the seigneurs and other leading men of New France were able to attempt the building of great chateaux along the shore of the St Lawrence, as their counterparts, the nobility of France, were doing along the Loire and elsewhere. It is now generally accepted by students of early Quebec architecture that the buildings of the French regime had no one-to-one antecedents in France.3 Rather they were a hybrid form, utilizing a variety of elements from several regions in France to create a new composite that also reflected the different climatic imperatives of life along the St Lawrence and the relative abundance of wood as a building material. High-style influences seem to have had relatively greater currency in the rendering of churches and other institutional buildings, and this perhaps is understandable, given the hierarchical decision-making process that saw the form of these buildings being determined in France and costs being born by agencies outside the colony. Indeed such ceremonial buildings could be designed by architects in France, or by those recently arrived on government commission from the French centres of fashion.6 Architects were not so readily available or accessible to the petite bourgeoisie. Nevertheless a class of merchant builders - men who apparently fulfilled large numbers of commissions for buildings including domestic housing - did establish themselves in Quebec and Montreal as early as the end of the seventeenth century. Among them were some who had a
The Polite House
27
knowledge of classical design and an ability to draft measured plans on paper - facilities which earned them the title 'architect.' Most of these men acquired their sense of classical design by means of books such as L'Architecture Francoise, La Regie de Cinq Corps d'Architecture by Giacoma Vignola, and Louis Savot's L'Architecture Francoise des Bastimens Particuliers (Paris, 1685). A more important reason for the weakness of this architectural mode in New France lies in the broader question of who prospered economically. However much the French colonial authorities sought to implant a feudal seigneurial system on the land of New France, the fact remains that a strong agrarian economy did not spring forth before the Conquest in 1760. In this whole orbit, wealth was generated more easily by participation in the fur and fish trade; those who prospered in the colonies were more likely to be merchants in the towns, many of whom saw the colony only as a place to make money which might then be spent on a fashionable retirement back in France. In the colony of Quebec those who aspired to achieve their ease and fortune as seigneurs living off the cens et rente of their habitants found instead a disappointing and often beleaguered existence which frequently failed to generate an income above that of their tenants. Until the Conquest, the shortage of labour and, more important, of potential renters of land left the seigneurs to bid down the rents in the hope of populating their seigneuries. Even those seigneurs and other members of the elite who lived well off their merchant enterprise in the towns such as Montreal, Quebec, and Louisbourg were only able to produce houses which, although large and well built, were more notable for the need to integrate stores and offices than they were for their aesthetic and social pretensions. At best, these houses were copies of buildings in the more prosaic French provincial towns. Ironically, then, it was the habitants whose economic well-being made forward strides, not the seigneur, and few seigneurial manor houses were erected until after the Conquest. By that time, altogether new stylistic inspirations were being introduced by the conquering British, and it seems likely that the first substantial episode of polite building was launched within the colony only at this point. The Arrival of a British Elite Symbolic of this new order was Powell Place, the house General Henry Watson Powell built on the St Louis Road outside the walls of the old town of Quebec City about 1780. A substantial grand block, flanked sym-
28 The Era of Mercantile Capitalism metrically by side pavilions that were linked by covered corridors, this dwelling set an impressive standard for the colony. Later renamed Spencer Wood, it became, for a while in the 1850s, the governor-general's Quebec home, at which time it underwent substantial alteration.8 Others of the administrative class lived in less ambitious yet still self-conscious houses which were built on the streets immediately outside the Citadel. One example was the Commanding Engineer's House, built by Colonel Durnford on Grande Alice between 1798 and 1805. The British were now able to be more expansive and literally sub-urban in Quebec City's postConquest urban morphology.9 Beyond the city was Caldwell Manor, an imposing dwelling built in 1801 by an Irish officer, Henry Caldwell, at the mouth of the Etchemin River. He had acquired the seigneury of Lauzon from the estate of General James Murray and had sawmills built there to export timber to England. To house himself he built an exceptional dwelling composed of a large central block featuring a triangular pediment and a monumental portico; lateral one-storey wings spread the facade and reinforced through sheer visual expanse his position as a new, prosperous landowner.10 No doubt the tastes and proclivities of these immigrant British gentry provided inspiration to their French Canadian counterparts in the period that followed. Indicative of what this 'indigenous' elite were building is Rolland Manor, built during the late 1820s by Jean-Roch Rolland, the seigneur of Ste-Marie-de-Mannoir. Though not as large a dwelling as Caldwell Manor, the house is a careful execution of the composition, proportion, and symmetry of the Palladian-inspired house and as such demonstrates the owner's attentiveness to an architectural idiom acceptable to his class - albeit as interpreted by the Anglo and American members of this stratum. Interestingly, however, Rolland was not charting new lines of fashion; rather he highlighted the conservatism that comes from ready acceptance of what had become a convention introduced nearly a half-century earlier in Quebec City by the likes of Powell and Caldwell. In Montreal also, the new English landowners and commercial elite built villas beyond the old fortifications. In the era of the fur-trading empire, Montreal's commercial position as the gateway to the vast hinterland of the Great Lakes and increasingly to the timber-rich Ottawa Valley meant that here, more than in Quebec, the houses of the wealthy were lavish and likely to be drawn from proper and polite architectural rules. An examination of other colonies of British North America also reveals a seeming reluctance to implement exuberant and demonstrative domes-
The Polite House 29 tic housing by the early elite. In the case of the several governors' residences, this was partly due to the perceptions of successive British secretaries of the colonies, who were reluctant to commit large sums of money for the construction of imposing edifices. For their part the occupants of the structures, be they in St John's, Halifax, Charlottetown, or Fredericton, felt the need to be compensated for their predicament. Thomas Cochrane, governor of Newfoundland, was able to persuade Lord Bathurst that the proposed size of his home was necessary: 'in a climate where so large a portion of time must be passed indoors the indulgence of rooms a little larger than might be requisite in a temperate climate may be admissible in a building intended to be permanent and durable.' 12 The colony's Government House, when built in the late 1820s, had a central block, side wings, and an imposing hall interior, all at a cost in excess of what was originally allowed.13 The Governor's House in Halifax, built between 1800 and 1807, fitted Governor Sir John Wentworth's perception of the importance of his position, and in the end construction consumed three times the allotted budget. The ground floor was intended for public use with drawing room, dining room, offices, and a large ballroom arranged off a spacious entrance hall. On St John's Island (later named Prince Edward Island), money was limited in the sparsely settled colony, and the governors either built or bought for themselves, or occupied space in the barracks at Fort George.14 Finally in the 1830s sufficient money was raised by an assessment on land, and a wooden structure was built on the land that had been set aside for the purpose in 1789. It too had a great hall or salon, with winding staircases and other decorative details befitting a place intended for entertainment. Finally, New Brunswick's version matched the others by 1828, when a three-storey house was built in Fredericton to replace the modest wooden building that had served for almost four decades before burning down. In all four cases, the structures were between nine and twelve bays wide and followed the fashion of Palladian domestic architecture, with a central pavilion flanked by side wings. In no one case, however, does the leading house of these four colonies provide evidence of effective replication of 'capital' architecture from Britain. Rather, the parallel would seem to be with the better 'gentleman's housing' in provincial, county, Britain. Other leading members of the colonial authority were housed in moderately impressive structures. The Naval Commissioner's House in Halifax, built in 1785 (figure 2.2), presented a smaller version of the Governor's House, except that it was constructed from wood. 1:) Nonetheless its two-
30 The Era of Mercantile Capitalism
2.2 Naval Commissioner's House, Halifax, ca. 1785. This large structure, executed in wood, resembled upper-echelon housing in New England. It must have been an imposing sight in the Halifax of its day and would have reinforced the importance of the British naval presence at that location. It was demolished in 1909.
and-a-half-storey mass, decorated with the correctly executed rules of Palladian style (a projecting central frontispiece, pediment and portico) and framed by wooden quoins, provided appropriate quarters for one of the port's most critical figures. By 1812 the imperial government went one step further and authorized the spending of a substantial sum for a house for the commander-in-chief of the North American naval base. Admiralty House repeated the Palladian elements, this time in stone. Inside, a central hall was flanked by two deep rooms on either side. For the general officer commanding, the senior soldier in the Royal Artillery in the Citadel contingent, a residence was built in 1804 that was far less substantial. It was wooden, and while the exterior had polite lines, expense prohibited all but two rooms from having 'paper hangings' on the walls. The leading soldier and social figure in Halifax at the end of the eighteenth century had been Prince Edward, the fourth son of George III,
The Polite House 31 and later Duke of Kent, the commander-in-chief of the British Forces in North America. He began building an elaborate mansion, known as Prince's Lodge, in 1794. Located on the shores of Bedford Basin (the innermost harbour of the Citadel-protected port), the Lodge was finished in 1800.16 The fact that it was left to disintegrate after the prince left for home is telling evidence not only of the region's inability to sustain the expense needed to maintain such 'royal' property but also of the over-grand scale of sociability for which it would have been intended. If the great garrison city of Halifax produced few great houses, the smaller centres of the region offered even more limited prospects. Accordingly, more modest edifices were provided for the leading military representatives in Sydney, Saint John, and Charlotte town. Mercantile Prosperity and Housing in Atlantic Canada
In the colonies of Atlantic Canada the agrarian impetus was noticeably at odds with other opportunities. The unyielding marginality of land for farming ensured that few people achieved significant prosperity from working the soil. Even in Prince Edward Island, where farming conditions offered some potential for economic success, problems of land ownership prevented the development of capital and thwarted the emergence of a resident landed class. Ironically, Prince Edward Island's first century of British occupation re-created a system of landlord and tenant relations akin to that which sustained the landed gentry in Britain.17 Yet because most of the landlords were absentees residing in Scotland or England, a local landed class with the attendant large country houses and fashionconscious lifestyle did not emerge on the Island. Throughout the region, profits came more easily from trade than from working the land. It was a mercantile economy, and one that by its nature ensured that some of the principal actors maintained strong ties through business and personal travel with the metropolitan centres of British and European culture, and increasingly in the nineteenth century with the dynamic culture unfolding in the American nation to the south. For our interests in domestic architecture, it is intriguing to monitor the extent to which these overseas and metropolitan foci influenced the expression of wealth or status within the Canadian realm. The earliest mercantile efforts in the region focused on the fishery, especially that conducted off Newfoundland and in the Gulf of St Lawrence. By its nature this extractive activity was seasonal and mobile and could in its initial approaches be largely organized from the British
32 The Era of Mercantile Capitalism or French side of the North Atlantic. Merchants and their profits need never accumulate on the shores of Newfoundland or Nova Scotia, or other prime harvesting landfalls. Agents might begin to live among the fisher folk as a resident New World population became more viable, but this process was hardly likely to generate polite houses. Indeed the houses built in Newfoundland by merchants, while often large in size owing to the need to integrate offices and stores and space to accommodate live-in clerks, were pale imitators of style. Bridge House at Bonavista was built about 1814 by a Scottish carpenter for William Alexander, a merchant from Scotland (figure 2.3). Built of wood rather than stone as would have been the case in Scotland, the house was unpretentious, a mansion only by local Newfoundland standards. Elsewhere there were attempts to construct more substantial houses. The Garland House built at Trinity in 1818 was constructed of brick, probably imported along with the bricklayers, and one cannot help but think that this was perhaps the one extravagance that the Garlands allowed themselves in the construction of this dwelling. By its solidity and more generous scale this house, like other merchant houses in Trinity, in St John's, and in Ferryland, was set apart from the crude folk dwellings that surrounded them. Grander, more pretentious houses for these merchants were reserved for the home country, for the point of such dwellings was surely to establish one's place among one's peers. What point was there in displaying one's refinement and knowledge of fashion among the unlettered fishermen upon whose backs the fortune was extracted? No, the goal of most merchants was to provide a house in which one could exist in comfort in Newfoundland perhaps only seasonally; the great house was reserved for the homeland. So it is that one can still see in and around the home-base port towns of Poole and Dartmouth in southwest England, and along the banks of the river Suir, above and below the city of Waterford in Ireland, the houses and country seats of merchants who made their fortunes in the fish trade. Mercantile developments on the mainland in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and the Gaspe were often more diverse in that a wider range of commercial options were generally available. For a period, privateering was a lucrative endeavour; later the timber trade, the building of ships, and the movement of various cargoes including sugar and immigrants around the North Atlantic all sustained the merchant's interest and filled his purse. Yet, here again, the number and 'quality' of demonstrably polite houses is small.
2.3 Bridge House, Bonavista, Newfoundland, ca. 1814. This house typifies the scale and quality of houses built to serve the resident merchant class in leading Newfoundland centres. Built by a Scottish carpenter, for a Scottish merchant, William Alexander, the house indicates that the local economic elite did not exhibit their wealth locally through their houses.
34 The Era of Mercantile Capitalism Business connections for many Nova Scotian merchants were south, or perhaps even back to England, and one wonders whether many did not view their time in the region as temporary, hoping to retire to a more congenial location once their fortunes were accumulated. In this rough coastal frontier area, the best one might seek to build in the way of housing was something commodious and comfortable. Many must have noted that there were few others of their class in these scattered villages to appreciate a 'grand pile.' In the absence of any local 'society,' an unpretentious house would do. Since most of those who sought to prosper in this way were New Englanders, it is likely that prototypes for housing were derived from that source, and the five-bay colonial Georgian house constructed simply in wood was reproduced throughout the region from about 1770 until the 1830s. From the drawings of John Woolford, a British military officer who travelled extensively in Nova Scotia in the 1820s and left a large compendium of sketches, we can gain some sense of the character of the settlement landscape. Woolford's drawings suggest that a number of the larger dwellings were apparently of the salt-box type, though hardly any of these buildings have survived. However, it must be clearly borne in mind that the region was very much a marginal settlement before 1783 and in many ways the Maritimes was little different from Newfoundland before that date. Handfuls of people lived out a mean and Spartan existence in isolated coastal settlements. In spite of efforts to fix a land-based population loyal to the British Crown on the Nova Scotian peninsula, many of the New Englanders who drew land there soon drifted back to better opportunities in the towns of Massachusetts or on the wild lands of its western frontier. The Cape Cod, the salt box, and the common colonial Georgian houses are hardly what one would regard as high-style forms. In our schema they are either folk or vernacular types (discussed in the following two chapters), and we are forced again to assert that the high style found little currency in the region before the nineteenth century. By the 1820s, when British settlement had been firmly in place for some seven decades and fuelled by a succession of immigrant waves, the colonies in the Maritimes ceased being an isolated cul-de-sac and the poor cousin in a burgeoning American family. It was a time when merchant activity and capital gravitated towards the larger centres of Halifax and Saint John. Mansions that imitated the fashionable Regency style of England and that were 'effective symbols of colonial snobbery' developed away from the wharves. For example, John Black built a classic Georgian stone house just north of Halifax's Government House in 1819, using
The Polite House 35 granite brought on his ships from Aberdeenshire. 19 On the edge of Halifax, the ex-privateer cum banker Enos Collins enlarged an existing house into the impressive mansion known as Gorsebrook.20 Balanced oval rooms and other interior elegances confirmed his position in the colonial elite alongside the governor. Samuel Cunard built a similarly impressive mansion. Estates such as these along the Northwest Arm brought some degree of gentility to the capital. While these larger urban places certainly did exert a powerful influence on the region's economic life, it is also true that a class of merchants remained firmly rooted in the smaller coastal outports. Thus it was that many a local merchant might prosper enough to build a self-conscious dwelling. Here it must be borne in mind that the term 'local merchant' in the context of small-town Maritime Canada in the nineteenth century meant much more than 'storekeeper' or 'wholesaler,' though he likely fulfilled both of these roles. Rather it implied someone who was likely to conduct a large and complex exchange of timber or fish, or agricultural products drawn from more remote hinterlands. These resources were transported in the merchant's own ships, sailed by local masters and crews, for sale in Britain, Europe, or the United States. Some might engage in speculative trading voyages to South America, the South Pacific, or Asia. Typical of these individuals was William Crane, a leading merchant of Sackville, New Brunswick, in the three decades before 1850.21 Crane and his partner C.F. Allison exchanged local agricultural staples for a variety of goods imported from Britain, Halifax, Quebec, and the American states. In order to take advantage of the lucrative transatlantic timber trade, a branch business was located at Miramichi some two hundred kilometres away. Agricultural surpluses from Sackville thus went to supply the timber shanties of the Miramichi river valley. The firm's business was nevertheless loosely structured, conducted on credit through agents in distant ports. Wooden ships owned by Crane and Allison and built and sailed by Sackville men sought markets for New Brunswick timber in British ports and endeavoured to make paying return voyages, often via New England. Crane also served as the principal source of mortgage money in the area, and he amassed substantial property holdings on defaulted real estate. All of this yielded him a sizeable fortune estimated at £120,000 when he died in 1853. In 1832, in keeping with his position as leading local merchant and important office holder, Crane built a substantial house known now as Cranewood (figure 2.4). The house is of dressed sandstone and is one of
36 The Era of Mercantile Capitalism
2.4 Cranewood, Sackville, New Brunswick, ca. 1832. This house was built for William Crane, one of the leading export merchants of Sackville. Built of stone quarried locally, the house seems to be a conscious reproduction of the type of solid bourgeois dwelling that might be found in many a provincial town in England or Scotland in the preceding decades. In its way it revealed much of the self-image and aspirations of men like Crane.
the few stone houses constructed in the province during the early nineteeth century. It is a fine example of the so-called official Georgian style - a decidedly British rendering of Georgian form and anachronistic in that it was really a style that had ceased to be in vogue in Britain a generation earlier. Thus while Crane succeeded in constructing what we would regard as an ample and authentically high-style house, he revealed his parochialism or conservatism, or both, by opting for an old style. We will never know whether he was au courant with the so-called Regency style, or the picturesque styles such as Gothic Revival, which were coming into fashion among the bourgeoisie in England, or why he chose not to adopt the neoclassical style still in vogue among American and British North American trend-setters. We can state that he was not alone in being hesitant. Other small-town merchants in the colony also
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lagged in responding to changing fashions in the act of confirming their local primacy. Two other examples of substantial stone of similar age and inspiration are the Keillor House at Dorchester (1819) and the Tweedie House (probably built by a member of the Rankin family) at Kouchibouguac on the Northumberland Strait shore. Both houses serve as examples of the backward-looking habits of prosperous village farmers and timber factors respectively. The house of the merchant Dr Andrew Webster in Liverpool, Nova Scotia, a small town some 150 kilometres along the coast southwest of Halifax, was constructed in the early 1820s and mimics the uncommon hip roof and the carefully rendered Palladian pediment of Gorsebrook in Halifax - not surprising, perhaps, given that Webster was married to one of Enos Collins' sisters.22 Another example occurred at Albion Mines (near present-day Stellarton, Nova Scotia), where Joseph Smith, the agent for the General Mining Association, built a Georgian-style two-and-a-half-storey mansion called Mount Rundell in honour of his British employers. 2H The elites' capacity to replicate versions of British fashions in housing offers a telling insight into the process of stylistic transmission within the class and from these centres to the hinterland. There were others in the region who did incorporate the new Greek Revival into their houses. One of the most strikingly pretentious houses built during the first half of the nineteenth century in the region is Mount Uniacke, the country seat of Richard John Uniacke, attorneygeneral of Nova Scotia for thirty-five years.'21 The house, finished in 1815, is located half-way between Halifax and Windsor. It is essentially a Georgian dwelling onto which a neoclassical portico has been grafted. It is perhaps significant that this portico is far from an 'academic' reproduction of a classical detail. In fact it is a rather crudely fashioned appendage lacking the proportions and stylistic elements so carefully reproduced by others of Uniake's class who sought to affect the classical revival temple styles. This was a large three-storey house for a family with twelve children. The ground floor was divided by a large entrance hall, with a drawing room and bedroom on the left and a dining room and library on the right. Seven bedrooms upstairs and a large kitchen and cook's quarters in the basement filled a house for someone of wealth and in the public stream. Another house to absorb the Greek Revival was Martock, near Windsor, built for a Halifax merchant and named after his home village in Somerset, England, but expanded into its massive form by his prosperous soldier son during the 1840s.2:) For the most part, however, the region reflected the conservatism of the Georgian, perhaps tied locally to the
38 The Era of Mercantile Capitalism military tone of Halifax and a desire to align with the colonial, and ultimately the British, landed aristocracy. Town and Country Housing for Ontario's Gentry If Quebec and the Atlantic colonies provide two important models of an economy and society in which a small group of individuals were able to replicate conservative elements of European high-style architecture, the context for similar houses in early Ontario remains to be seen. Upper Canada was comparatively late in receiving immigrant settlers: its first large-scale European infusion was the American Loyalists in 1783. Their numbers were much smaller than those in the Maritimes, and their social and financial heritage much more modest. However, the subsequent migration of essentially American frontiersmen continued for almost three decades thereafter as the colony attracted its share of the westeringland seekers who were spilling out of the old colonies and into the new lands bordering the lower Great Lakes. Ontario's first century of settlement was overwhelmingly built on the strength of a buoyant agrarian development. The majority of immigrants, whatever their background, were fired by the prospect of acquiring land from which they might expect to prosper. Within a year or two, even those with five to ten acres of cleared land might participate in a commercial wheat economy that, except for a few poor years, returned encouraging profits from very small amounts of capital or labour investment. In a climate of rising expectations and burgeoning growth, fuelled in part by the steady, and at times massive, influxes of new British immigrants after 1820, the ordinary farmer might prosper by reinvesting in his enterprise and by increasing the scale of farming. Many derived handsome profits by land speculation even at a small scale, and it is clear that in Upper Canada, as in the new states to the south, the agrarian society with its supposedly 'free land frontier' did not produce immediately a uniformly egalitarian social order. Rather, society restructured itself into 'haves' and 'have-nots' as access to land became circumscribed. Nevertheless, in spite of these forces, it is important to be clear about the proportions of this new order. Almost no one became wealthy by the standards of the British landed class, nor did the system of agriculture produce a lifestyle akin to that achieved by many in the American plantation south. Rather it was a society of smallholders in which those with four- or five-hundred-acre 'estates' were the exception in most rural communities before 1870.
The Polite House 39 It is true, however, that by 1850 the society emerging in Ontario felt the need to display in material ways their economic and social progress, and the house became one means of doing so. But it is a significant testament to the limits of their prosperity and to the evenness of its occurrence that almost no one was able to indulge in truly grand high-style housing. Instead, their achievements were more apt to be expressed in the emerging vernacular form (see chapter 4), which mimicked so vividly the style of the self-conscious polite architecture but never really achieved its fullness and ostentation. Ontario therefore reflects in a profound way the levelling or simplification of society that marked many 'settler societies' overseas. Instead of the very rich and very poor of European society, we find a broad mass of people less economically stratified.20 That said, what can be found of the high style in early Ontario? Who tried to produce it and what success did they have? Three groups are ready targets for scrutiny. The first were the Loyalists, with their foothold on a thin strip of Canadian soil across the Detroit, Niagara, and St Lawrence rivers. The second were the so-called Family Compact - the members of the ruling oligarchy who for the first half-century of Ontario's existence as a colony sought to ensure that the state would become a triumphant re-creation of Britain overseas, replete with state church, a privileged class, and Tory values. Finally, a third group were the immigrant gentry and military officers on half pay, both of whom fancied themselves a part of a socially elevated vanguard of British tastes and fashion. Typical of a well-to-do frontier Loyalist was Jacques Baby, who resided at Sandwich near modern-day Windsor in 1790. Baby had lived in Detroit prior to the Revolutionary War, but as a Loyalist he had found it prudent to relocate across the river. A member of the new colony's legislative council and a fur trader in the North West Company, Baby's position and wealth enabled him to build a house of impressive scale and detail for a location that was in many respects perched on the edge of the rough frontier of the continental interior. Yet there is evidence that Baby had completed the 'Grand Tour' of Europe in 1783 - a clear measure of his capacity to indulge in the frivolities of the upper class.27 Doubtless this experience provided him with a first-hand exposure to the details of British Georgian residential architecture, for it was this ideal that he had executed at Sandwich in 1790. Not far away, another example, more of a country seat, was Belle Vue, built by Robert Reynolds (figure 2.5). With its attached servants' quarters and service wing, and in its park surroundings facing the river it recalls Virginia.
40 The Era of Mercantile Capitalism
2.5 Belle Vue, Amherstburg, Upper Canada, ca. 1816-19. This brick dwelling overlooking the Detroit River provided a rural setting for Robert Reynolds, the assistant commissioner general for Upper Canada. Its lateral wings followed a fashion associated with mansions in both England and southern states such as Virginia.
Of the Family Compact we have a surprisingly limited number of surviving houses by which to evaluate their efforts. This is principally because Toronto, the eventual administrative and financial centre of the colony, has subsequently undergone so much change in its built fabric that all but a handful of pre-1840s buildings of any type have disappeared. Two that we can attribute to this group - the Grange and the Campbell House - and others that survive as documentary evidence are worth noting. Toronto, or York as it was then known, had been laid out as the temporary capital of Upper Canada in 1793, further away from the republican border than the first capital at Niagara-on-the-Lake. It was proposed that once there was sufficient settlement in the hinterland, a permanent capital was to be built at London - a design that was never implemented. And while for a period of time in the 1840s the capital was located in Kingston, the commercial and social power of the colony remained firmly in Toronto. Unlike the juxtaposition of the military and social elite in Quebec or Montreal, there was a significant separation between the Garrison at Fort York and the New Town, and the intervening sites were occupied by the Legislature, a school for the colony (Upper
The Polite House 41 Canada College), and residences of some of the colony's leading figures. The lieutenant-governor's house of 1800 and Maryville, the 1794 home for the surveyor-general, are among the more prominent polite houses, although noteworthy more for their formal gardens than for scale and architectural display. In order to lure landowners from the first capital at Niagara-on-the-Lake to the new centre of government, generous parcels of land, some one hundred acres in size, were laid out as 'park lots' just north of the commercial town. On many of these lots, and along the waterfront near the Governor's House, elegant stone or brick mansions, set within ample landscaped grounds, were built after the War of 1812 when American troops briefly occupied York. No doubt many of these dwellings were built with war compensation money, or war profits.28 For the most part these houses repeated the silhouettes that were wellentrenched forms in more developed areas in the United States or in Britain. Classically composed houses, sometimes with the Palladian fashion of a prominent central portion and side wings, topped by an eyecatching triangular pediment and fronted by a columned portico, were the standard. Four chimney stacks seen through the hipped roof signal the typical composition of four main rooms on each floor, heated by fireplaces on the end walls. One of the finest surviving examples is the Grange, built in 1817 as the home of D'Arcy Boulton, solicitor-general of Upper Canada. At that time he sold his earlier small cottage to John Beverley Robinson, the attorneygeneral, who in turn transformed it into an elegant two-storey mansion known as Beverley House. Another was the house, popularly known as the 'Palace,' of Anglican Bishop John Strachan, whose wealth came from his having married one Mrs McGill, the widow of the wealthy Montreal furtrading merchant. Nearby resided William Campbell, who would become the chief justice of the colony (figure 2.6), and to the east lay Moss Park the home of William Allan, director of the Bank of Upper Canada. By the 1830s a visitor to York could remark that 'dotted here and there are neat pretty villas, built on a handsome construction, having those compact pretty paddocks and shrubberies which so much adorn the countryhouse.'29 An exceptional example of those country houses was the home of William Baldwin. Writing to a friend in 1819, he described it as follows: I have a very commodious house in the country - I have called the place Spadina, the Indian word for Hill - or Mont - the house consists of two large Parlours Hall and stair case on the first floor - four bedrooms and a small library on the second floor - and three excellent bedrooms in attic storey or
42
The Era of Mercantile Capitalism
2.6 Chief Justice William Campbell's House, Toronto, ca. 1822. This brick house, built for one of the leading members of Upper Canada's elite, incorporated Palladian architectural ideals in what is a house of modest scale and design. It originally occupied a site on Duke Street but was relocated and restored in the 1970s.
garret - with several closets on every storey - a Kitchen, dairy, root-cellar wine cellar and mans bedroom underground - I have cut an avenue through the woods all the way so that we can see the vessels passing up and down the bay - the house is completely finished with stable and with a tolerable good garden, the whole has cost about £1500 and the Land you know was the gift of poor Mr Willcocks/ 0 While the houses of the Family Compact were more able to set themselves in appropriate estate surrounds, it is important to note that here too, as elsewhere in British North America, the broader context for life and livelihood did not enable their owners to sustain such social symbols for long. Within a decade or two, most of the park lots were beginning to be subdivided, either for smaller estate parcels or, more often, for small
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building lots.31 In England, where such large houses had been in rural settings and supported by revenues accruing from a lucrative agrarian tenancy, rural gentry had spent time and money exploring various landscaping solutions to better display their houses. On the edges of Lake Ontario and with a wilderness beyond, the estates retreated in the face of an expanding commercial economy, and estate owners adjusted their own interests to merchant banking, wholesaling, and provisioning for the flood of incoming immigrants. The half-pay officers and would-be gentry, many of whom were what would later be called 'remittance men,' became a noticeable element of many settlements in Upper Canada during the decades after 1818. They provide an excellent insight into the problems of trying to assert fashionable housing preferences in the face of frontier reality. Most of these people were individuals who were unable to maintain the social pretensions they had inherited or had developed in Britain. In the post-Napoleonic era the British economy was already heaving with the stress of absorbing not only the masses of demobilized soldiers and seamen but also a surplus rural population already cut adrift by the forces of the so-called 'second agricultural revolution.' Among those also dislodged by the transformations taking place in the countryside were many petty gentry. These included sons of smaller landlords unable to provide a sufficient landed inheritance, the offspring of clergy and other minor office functionaries who by virtue of their genteel upbringing were poorly prepared to fit into a social and economic order in flux, and of course, the army and naval officers for whom there was no longer a place in His Majesty's Services. A few who found themselves linking with this group of Ontario settlers had made money in the service of the East India Company, or in other overseas adventures, and sought a place to settle down in retirement. Whatever their background, they were of a generation whose patrimony or self-generated financial resources tended to be insufficient to sustain them in Britain, and whose social refinement and education ill prepared them for the world of industrial management or commerce, or even the professions. Most saw in British North America, or other of the overseas colonies, the opportunity to conserve a way of life that was rapidly being denied them at home. With a considerable sense of adventure and a small amount of capital - sufficient in most cases to buy a substantial 'bush' farm in the Canadas, or as we will see later a ranch on the prairies or in British Columbia in the 1890s - these gentlefolk sought to reestablish themselves and their lifestyle. Although a number succeeded, many more struggled to make good
44 The Era of Mercantile Capitalism their dream. Too often these men and women suffered from misplaced values and misordered priorities. At best they arrived possessing only an arm's-length knowledge of farming practices in Britain, where day-to-day decisions and the direction of an army of labourers were carried out typically by a farm steward, or tenant farmers, rather than by the landlord himself. In British North America farmers were required by custom and the shortage of labour to work the land themselves. Here the inexperience of these men showed itself; many were targets for unscrupulous land agents who encouraged them to squander their capital by acquiring roughly cleared or worn-out farms. Others, preoccupied with theoretical farming notions gleaned from books on the new science of agriculture, poured money into the importation of high-priced, specialized livestock breeds for which there was no immediate market return. And in their desperation to re-establish a lifestyle suited to their presumed station in society, many expended large sums on amenities, including pretentious housing. Although many abhorred the 'levelling' tendencies of the frontier communities, which threw them together with what they considered to be baser Irish and American refugees, they were often captivated by the rustic charms of their new surroundings. This was a group that was particularly susceptible to linking the spirit of English Romanticism to housing. Nothing captures this allure more than the log dwelling. Here we might suggest that this imaginative movement conveniently allowed these people to rationalize their limited financial means with their self-conscious class aspirations by means of an otherwise lower-class housing idiom. In fact it is one of the ironies of the Canadian experience that a group subscribing to the Romantic ethos with its profound reverence of Nature and its yearning to experience the sublime should arrive on a wilderness frontier which was being systematically laid waste in the most single-minded way possible, given the technology of the day, by another group of highly pragmatic people. Nevertheless, these incongruities did not prevent individuals like the Rev. Hartley Dunsford from constructing in 1839 the Beehive, a large and complex two-storey log dwelling at Bobcaygeon near Fenelon Falls (figure 2.7). Similarly, John Langton's second log house, built in 1837 in the same area, and Captain Steele's double-winged log house of 1833, document this fascination with the rustic, as did their proclivity to settle in bucolic but agriculturally impossible locations on the fringes of the Canadian Shield. ^ Equally quixotic in their house-building choices were two major land developers - William Dunlop and Thomas Talbot. Talbot came as close as
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2.7 Beehive, Bobcaygeon, Upper Canada, ca. 1839. This remarkably large log structure was built for the Rev. Hartley Dunsford, one of several British immigrants and half-pay officers who sought to re-create a 'gentry' lifestyle in the Kawartha area of Upper Canada in the 1830s. Among their rustic fancies was a penchant for log houses, especially those that exceeded in scale and complexity the much more prosaic log hovels of their socially inferior neighbours.
anyone in Upper Canada to re-creating the scale of landed estate that kept many of the British nobility in style in their great country mansions. At the height of his power he personally controlled sixty-five thousand acres on which were housed thousands of British immigrant settlers. Talbot ruled his fiefdom from his home base, which he called Malahide, in reality a log house near St Thomas/' Dr William Dunlop, who helped found the Canada Company (another land company that controlled thousands of acres in the Huron Tract), also built a log house, Gairbraid, that followed the H-plan that Dunsford, Steele, and others used.''*'1 In the final analysis this group failed to impose their gentry-class imprint on the land of early Ontario. They were too few, too late, and the economic realities of the colonies made them anomalies from the start. Ontario had become a land for independent settlers and the real money was to be made by financing their milling needs for grain and lumber, their manufacturing needs, and the like. That said, this nascent elite with its connections to the fashions of a more metropolitan world in Britain
46 The Era of Mercantile Capitalism did act as a conduit of architectural style. As they insinuated themselves into the landscape of farms and villages during the third and fourth decade of the nineteenth century, their house-building efforts, however modest and idiosyncratic, provided inspiration for the less tutored but prospering farmer, farrier, and storekeeper. It was through this would-be gentry that a series of hitherto unconventional architectural fashions and approaches to design was introduced - a movement that took its impetus from English Romanticism. High-style historians have stressed that architects in Britain responded to a broader artistic and literary movement which emerged in the eighteenth century and which is generally referred to as the Picturesque - a landscape aesthetic in which nature was revered precisely for its roughness, irregularity, and variety of colour and texture.*'' Housing was seen to be an adjunct to the broader landscape conceived in this more holistic or ecological way and every effort was made to fit buildings and their occupant-viewers to advantage into the whole landscape composition. The movement was a wholesale rejection of the order and regularity that dominated in eighteenth-century architecture and which was derived from the earlier theories and guidance of Andrea Palladio. Whereas Palladian theory stressed following a set of rules and conventions of aesthetic proportion and composition of elements, and disciples of Palladio tended to see house and landscape as separate design elements, the new Romanticism stressed a freedom to combine elements eclectically in an attempt to mirror the natural world. Designers therefore sought congruency within nature as opposed to a separation from it. Though late in taking hold as an architectural movement, it found wide appeal after its acceptance by the Prince Regent, whereupon it came for a time to be labelled the Regency style.s countryside. It would be inconsistent, however, to argue that these new arrivals made no effort to transfer known housing practices to the rural lands of Ontario and the other parts of eastern Canada where they alighted. As we have already seen, the folk traditions of Ireland and Scotland were deeply ingrained and powerful dimensions of a still distinct Celtic folk culture residing in the often economically marginal areas of nineteenth-century Britain from which these men and women came. To enter a setting where the already prevailing orthodoxy involved building shelter using wood must have been an unsettling experience for many of these newcomers. Even if the general layout and proportions of the familiar folk housing could be easily reproduced using log or frame, there is some evidence that not everyone embraced these adaptations. Joseph Carrothers, who emigrated from Ulster to settle
86 The Era of Mercantile Capitalism near London, Ontario, in the 1840s, expressed his prejudices in a letter to his brother: I have been very busy this summer building a house and I am living in it now i have a neat Cottage House 30 feet by 20 feet the out walls of 10 feet high of mud and inside walls of Brick It is well thought of in this country (stone are rare in this place) I have a dislike to the timber Houses the are very cold in winter and very hot in summer and the are allways sinking and twisting. 47
What was occurring in early Ontario mirrored a large process of North American settlement in many ways. The cultural crucible of ethnically heterogeneous land-hungry settlers extended across the southern shores of the Great Lakes region as well, and the sequences of experimentation, cultural borrowing, and change differed little in basic outline in the American midwest. As Houston and Smyth note, the house that Carrothers built was very much the likeness of the Irish masonry cottages that marked the world from which he had come. His response was a conservative one, and it contrasted sharply with that of his brother Nathaniel Carrothers, who with pride reported that the basic timber frame cottage with lapped wood siding that he built in 1845 was 'a good deacent frame house deacently fineshed.' 48 Nevertheless, it is apparent from the 1820s on that some areas of Ontario took on a decidedly Irish appearance as a generation of immigrants wrestled with the problem of reproducing housing using either Old World methods or the log and frame techniques adopted from a growing population of Canadian-born neighbours. Whatever the specific technique used, the beauty of the established New World solutions must surely be in their capacity to respond easily to the scale and arrangement of space familiar to these 'folk.' In reality even the most basic log dwelling was not far different from the rubble and earthfast huts that had housed people coming from Ireland and the Islands of Scotland (figure 3.14). The abundance of wood and the comparatively greater difficulty of working with stone hastened the transition. The log house must be seen as part of the process of pioneering, and many settlers sought to provide themselves with other types of dwellings when they had become sufficiently established. Yet because the process of pioneering continued on what was a moving margin of settlement in Ontario at least, log construction remained an active phase of house building throughout the nineteenth century. Consequently, numbers of these log buildings have survived for modern analysis.49 A variety of other
The Folk House 87
3.14 Pioneer log shanty, Upper Canada. This conjectural reconstruction from Upper Canada Village is probably typical of the crude housing expedients produced quickly by pioneers on the frontier of Ontario. Though it was intended to be temporary, many settlers probably found themselves living a year or two in such housing as their energies were absorbed in land clearing.
literary and documentary sources can also be used to investigate the nature of early Ontario housing. A number of travellers' accounts, diaries, and paintings and illustrations confirm that, log folk dwellings were evidently employed by all groups entering the province/'0 The evidence suggests that, whatever their national background, the majority of immigrants to early Ontario resorted first to a folk dwelling form. The interior details of spatial organization and the size and proportions of rooms might reflect one's prior regional traditions. In this sense a measure of cultural continuity might be preserved. But Ontario, perhaps more than any other part of British North America, became a dynamic cultural marketplace where ideas and practices old and new were tried, adapted and abandoned, traded and borrowed. The remarkable intermixing along rural concessions of people from many parts of the British Isles and Europe, from the older American colonies, and, in some cases,
88 The Era of Mercantile Capitalism from service in other more distant parts of the Empire made this process inevitable. Moreover, a buoyant agrarian economy fostered a spirit of pragmatism and adaptation. Ironically, most British immigrants were dislodged by the massive and profound changes undermining their way of life at home, and they saw the New World and its broad expanses as a chance to preserve or restore the world they were losing through a life on the land. What began as a profoundly conservative step resulted ultimately in a fundamentally radical series of cultural changes as large numbers of these people became, by the middle decades of the nineteenth century, independent prospering commercial farmers and land capitalists who quickly adopted the very applications of mechanization to farming and other basic tasks that had caused many of them to flee overseas in the first place. The erosion of their old cultural ways involved hundreds of small steps and it occurred haltingly and often in a fragmentary way. Thus almost all groups quickly found it expedient to adopt a new building technology the use of log construction. The technology was conveniently conveyed in the form of a dwelling that was familiar for many immigrants precisely because it preserved the essentials of the folk houses they had left behind. It mattered little that this method of building and its outward appearance were largely American. Initially at least, social custom and a familiar family rhythm could be perpetuated within the walls of the dwelling, thereby anchoring the household against many of the other assaults on their lifeways. At the same time it seems likely that the adoption of the log dwelling ultimately did much to strip away ethnic distinctiveness on the landscape. Outwardly, most log houses appeared very much alike. There probably were opportunities to put a characteristic Irish or Scottish or German stamp on the building, but the rusticity of log construction and the difficulty of inserting an aesthetic detail on the facade made it ill suited to many of these expressions. In the end, however, some succeeded in making the log house respond to some of the architectural fashions then being visited upon houses of a different construction. Here and there it is still possible to find evidence that householders were able to fit devices related to the vernacular house in the form of door and window surrounds of neoclassical inspiration (figure 3.15). Perhaps the instinct for finding a new form of expression was already being manifest. It is essential to recognize that folk house building survived the period of pioneering. Prosperity and the spirit of the times saw much of
The Folk House 89
3.15 Log house with 'classical' trim, Downeyville, Upper Canada. This small house, long abandoned, was built by Irish immigrants to the Peterborough area. Its hall-and-parlour plan repeated a familar configuration for Irish settlers. However, the employment of log construction was a departure from their tradition, and the attempt to add a measure of 'style' by mimicking classical trim around the door is a poignant testament to the sense of 'progress' felt by the occupant of this house.
Ontario's settlement landscape pass through a massive rebuilding phase, beginning in the older counties during the 1850s. Brick and stone replaced log, though some areas, such as the area north of Lake Erie, continued a strong wooden building tradition. Yet one can still see many small dwellings dating to this phase which preserve the essentials of the folk house. Often one suspects many must be older log buildings that have been encased in brick or wood siding. Frequently the house has obviously been relegated to a farmer's hired man or to another generation of the farmer's family. But many were also constructed during this period of economic optimism and they remain a remarkable testament to the persistence of this simple housing idiom - especially since much more materialistically expressive vernacular forms of housing were
90 The Era of Mercantile Capitalism exploding across the landscape of Ontario by this time. We turn now to explore this process and the specific nature of the houses that have come to symbolize the hopes and dreams, indeed the achievement, of the new freeholder class of Canadians during the second half of the nineteenth century.
CHAPTER F O U R
The Vernacular House
Beginning in the second half of the eighteenth century and figuratively situated between the few polite and the many folk houses, there was an increasing tide of modest dwellings built for minor military or colonial officials, prosperous farmers, storekeepers, and others who sought to distance themselves through housing even if in only minor ways from the broad bulk of society. Their dwellings were larger, more durable, and more organized as a set of functioning spaces. The structures mimicked and diluted elements of the polite house and began the attack on folk practices. The erosion of folk building processes and house appearance occurred less by a visual adaptation and absorption of self-conscious design than through a revolutionary reorganization of internal domestic space. Symptomatic of the modernization of society in general,1 the multi-functional hall-and-parlour folk dwelling was transformed into, or replaced by, a set of compartmentalized spaces that delineated public and private realms, both within the family and between a family and the wider world. Henry Classic has argued that in times of social change and upheaval - be it in Virginia in the eighteenth century, or Ulster in the nineteenth - people were less open to each other.2 The close and known community was replaced by a world of strangers. The known world had been accessible through an always-open door that led to the hearth, but now strangers were met at the front door, and they only gained access to an entrance hall rather than the home proper. Beyond lay separate rooms for food preparation, food consumption, social intercourse, and sleeping, and these spaces were screened by doors. Such internal composition of space was often reflected in external form, especially in the balanced placement of windows and doors. Light for the now necessary hallway came through a transom light above the
92 The Era of Mercantile Capitalism door, or through side panes of glass. Here immediately was an opportunity for decoration. The transom could be simple, or divided into panes, or dressed up into an elliptical fanlight. Similarly, side lights could vary in size and complexity. In combinations, doors, transoms, and side lights could provide a touch of taste or a hint of wealth even if the surrounding house was quite modest. Hallways led to staircases for upper-floor sleeping quarters. Bedroom windows in the gables or dormers, protruding as eyebrows on the front roof face, also provided opportunities for balancing the proportions of the facade and a medium for decorative trim. These conscious notions of organization led in turn to further elaborations of facade trim - cornices, pilasters, eave returns - that aped the classical details of grander houses, or of public buildings such as churches and court-houses. All of these manifestations of change cumulatively produced what we prefer to call the 'vernacular' form. Typically buildings exhibiting these characteristics were modest houses, in contrast to the grand house, but they reveal compositional and organizational elements that had a recognizable degree of conscious articulation. While the theoretical design rules of classical architecture were unyieldingly universal, we will see that in the hands of a new class, different regions, or indeed countries, different elements were absorbed or distinctive national variants evolved. As local builders grappled in their own way to interpret and adapt these notions, regionally distinctive vernaculars emerged, sometimes as distinctive as the folk forms of earlier generations. It is important to stress at the outset that the drive towards the vernacular was not immediate, linear, or singular. Rather it proceeded haltingly people could be selective in choosing elements of style for the outside (or inside) of their dwellings. Elements that symbolized or displayed an awareness of the emerging vernacular might be pasted on an exterior, while the key elements of the house might remain highly traditional. Some degree of accommodation with modernity could be effected, while other elements were rejected or at least not implemented. Above all, not all members of a community participated in this transformation. The proportions of polite, folk, and vernacular in a place are a surrogate census of opportunity and achievement, innovative instinct and social convention. There was no doubt a period of transition, perhaps taking place over two or three generations before 1850, in which these new housing forms and details gradually became more commonplace and familiar. Then, when as in the 1850s an institutional response to the vernacular phenomenon arose, in the form of popular architectural pattern books, the transition was virtually complete. Thereafter, house building would proceed
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93
from a formal text in which the visuals, and in some sense the implicit social meanings, were predetermined or at least visible (as opposed to having to be visualized) to the builder or occupant. In this final stroke of change, the process of house creation became at last an act of consumerism; no longer did the householder engage in fundamental creation and problem solving based on long-standing cultural patterns. In this chapter we explore the extent to which the transition was either well advanced or proceeding more tentatively in selected regions of Canada. For example, did Quebec, Newfoundland, and the marginal areas of the Maritimes have the same chronology of transition as southern Ontario? How important was settlement stage or date of entry? What part did ethnic cohesiveness play in all of this? Were absences or limited supplies of previously familiar building materials important accelerators in encouraging people to turn to new forms? Or were new stoves and heating forms facilitators of more compartmentalized housing? Were cheaper glass and factory-produced building materials a force in generating larger and taller buildings? The Absorption of Classical and Formal Style With the emergence of the professional architect in the seventeenth century, there was a more conscious architectural sense among the major aristocracy. A revolution was also occurring in the nature and form of the domestic house as a fashion-conscious rural and urban gentry brought the styles of Italy and ancient Rome to the countryside and provincial towns of western Europe. Moreover, these changes were beginning to be picked up by the more prosperous of the new yeoman farming class at the very moment when overseas migration began. If many an emigrant was leaving a mean cottage or hovel on a minimal plot of ground, there were also some who had been tenants on the smallholdings being produced through the process of enclosure, the better of which might have a politely balanced Georgian house as the centre-piece of the farm.' The impetus for constructing a vernacular Georgian in the New World came then from direct knowledge among some of the emigrating land-owning or land-renting farmers. But there were also many in the migrant stream who had been less well off and who attempted to assert a newly acquired status through mimicking their Old World betters. To foster and facilitate the realization of these ambitions, various pattern books were circulated that offered the sense, if not the fine detail, of the architect's desired lines. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, this meant that classical form found its way into some simple, yet elegant, small houses. Colonial
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The Era of Mercantile Capitalism
American master builders had drawn on books from England in the 1760s, when volumes such as Ware's Palladia, Price's British Carpenter, and Langley's City and Country Builder's and Workman's Treasury of Designs gave ideas for design and detail. These translated, modified, or otherwise allowed for an adapted classical Georgian architecture. The earliest indigenous North American style manuals seem to have been by Asher Benjamin in the 1790s, although formal architectural elements found on churches and public buildings could well have provided a more immediate local model. Classical details, however they were translated from Palladio, Adam, or Gibb, appeared especially in the form of broken pediment eave-returns on end gables, cornices and pilasters on the front facade, decorated transom surrounds, and sometimes window trim. The first region in Canada to experience the flowering of this movement was probably the Maridmes. In this region the elements and characteristics of the vernacular house were most noticeable in the two-storey houses built by New Englanders in the 1760s and 1770s around the coast of Nova Scotia at places such as Tusket and Barrington or in the 'planter townships' of the Annapolis Valley. A decade or two later the impetus was sustained by American Loyalists flooding into towns such as Shelburne, Nova Scotia, or into the Saint John Valley of New Brunswick. With modest wealth brought from the seaboard colonies, these people reproduced a familiar vernacular dwelling pattern. In a handful of dramatic cases, the act of transmission of a house type went so far as to involve physically moving existing dwellings with the newcomers, as in the case of those floated from Castine, Maine, to St Andrews, New Brunswick. 0 For many others, however, the opportunity to accomplish this end had to await the acquisition of prosperity in the new colony. Here we can assume that when the time came, these people had ready frames of reference to serve as models for the dwellings they wished to construct. For example, a house such as that built by David Daniel Merritt in 1817 at Saint John, New Brunswick, was very like the merchant houses built in Newport, Rhode Island, or other New England coastal towns to the south, yet significantly it was constructed almost thirty-five years after the Loyalist exodus which had brought Merritt and his family to New Brunswick. (l For American-born newcomers like Merritt, the relatively greater material prosperity that they were able to develop, the beneficent government support for mills and materials, and a knowledge of working in wood gained in the American colonies meant that a more developed form of architecture was more quickly established than was the case among the many other migrants who arrived thereafter directly from Europe.
The Vernacular House 95 If we examine the vernacular houses built in the Maritimes after 1800 it is evident that they increasingly encapsulated many of the essential features that marked the swing to the vernacular dwelling. Few had central chimneys by this date, builders preferring instead to place as many as four chimneys on the end walls. This modification alone permitted the easy execution of the central hall and staircase and gave the builder the freedom to execute a balanced composition in the placement of rooms. In the case of hipped-roof houses, such as that built by Merritt, the resulting silhouette was similar to the Palladian houses of the governors-general of the various Canadian colonies and thus underlined visually something of the emulation and mimicry that was so fundamentally a part of the vernacular movement. Perhaps a more common practice, however, was to employ the gable-roof form, but this too enabled the builder to place four downstairs rooms symmetrically, and these were serviced by two distinct chimney piles - providing heat to the rooms in the half of the dwelling in which each was located. The instinct to implement vernacular dwellings was not limited to those from the American colonies. An interesting confirmation that a parallel transition was occurring in the material culture of other parts of the North Atlantic world can be seen in the experience of Yorkshire Methodists settling in the Chignecto region of New Brunswick. In the 1770s, dissenting Methodists from Yorkshire brought with them experience of brick dwellings that led to their replication of familiar Vale of York housing models (figure 4.1).7 The Chapman House of 1775 near Amherst, Nova Scotia, for example, is a two-storey Georgian farmhouse, a vernacular cousin of the squire's house in villages such as Yarm or Skelton (figure 4.2). Set on a slight ridge above the Tantramar Marshes, the Chapman house was not some crude shelter, but a surprisingly elegant two-storey house, some 39 by 281/2 feet, two rooms on either side of a central hallway, and in silhouette distinguished by end chimneys. Brick moulded and fired on the farm was laid in Flemish bond on the front and side elevations, the smaller glazed or fired headers of the brick standing out in darker hue as was the practice in that period.8 Further attention to decoration was found in the French or Dutch arch above the windows and entrance door, which was accomplished by means of a set of slanting bricks with a keystone. The upper-floor window above the entrance hall echoed Palladian design in its modest use of side panels.9 While few other examples of equivalent Yorkshire practice have survived in the region, local lore suggests that there were many such brick houses in the area, until the futility of relying on what proved to be poor-quality brick for
96 The Era of Mercantile Capitalism
4.1 Chapman House, Fort Lawrence, Nova Scotia. Constructed about 1780 of locally made brick by a Yorkshire farmer, this house reproduced the type of substantial dwelling then current in the region from which Chapman had recently departed. Because of the poor quality of local clays for brick making, few other examples of this generation of Yorkshire settler housing have survived in the Chignecto region.
weather protection in the harsh Canadian winters forced most of these expatriates to turn to wood by the 1820s. Significantly the later houses of the Yorkshire settlers, such as the Trueman House in Point de Bute, used mainly American neoclassical notions of decoration, specifically by means of prominent pilasters and cornice boards, while maintaining essentially the same two-storey central hall plan. The 'Yorkshireness' of such later houses was invisible. The brick phase had reflected a regional vernacular that was brought across to the New World as an almost 'folk' consciousness, and its dissolve into a broader and more pervasive American vernacular was symptomatic of the wider transformations of the period. If the two-storey vernacular Georgian had regional popularity largely
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4.2 A brick farmhouse at Kirkham, Yorkshire. The treatment of window lintels and the extensive chimney flues set within the end walls mirrors the treatment of these elements in the Chapman House (see figure 4.1).
through the replication of pre-existing models, a different form of vernacular evolution came through the expansion and transformation of the small and often diminutive fisherman's and farmer's cottage. The Cape Cod cottage and the folk houses of the Scots and Irish were, as we have seen in the previous chapter, mostly one-storey structures with an undifferentiated attic space. In many, a fireplace occupied the centre of the plan, and a staircase was made to fit around the chimney pile. There soon came a generation which viewed these earlier houses as old-fashioned, functionally insufficient, or ill suited to displaying social rank. Where possible these older 'folk' houses might be made to respond to those seeking more space, but in other cases the new requirements were merged with the scale and manner of construction that came directly from the received folk-ways. By taking advantage of developments in stove technology, the builder could move away from a reliance on the central or end-
98 The Era of Mercantile Capitalism dominant fireplace hearth to organize separate rooms with their own fireplaces. Once accomplished, a central hallway, with a staircase, might now separate ground-floor rooms. To give more head-room in a more developed upper-floor space, framing plans for a storey-and-a-half house were developed. In the Maritimes, and as we will see later in other parts of eastern Canada, the end product became a 'storey-and-a-half,' with central door and balanced windows, return eaves, and cornices which mirrored the fashions then current (figure 4.3). This wooden dwelling found wide favour with all groups in these regions, whatever their national background or duration of settlement. Its scale and its considerable adaptability made it fit the lifestyles of a broad cross-section of economic groups. Householders could, for example, construct the dwelling in stages as family size and prosperity dictated. Life within the house might be played out in a variety of ways. It is likely that in many households the kitchen still served as the principal gathering place in spite of the presence in the house of a parlour or parlours. Indeed, as the Victorian era stretched onward, the latter room's prescibed conventions of decoration and use became almost irrelevant and inaccessible to daily life. Rather it functioned as an ultra-formal room opened only on select social occasions such as when the clergyman called or when a body was laid for viewing, and for many a household, this custom must have rendered the parlour a precious extravagence. Nevertheless what is important is that many of these dwellings were still very close in spirit to the traditional folk dwellings but sufficiently able to express the popular architectural fashions of the nineteenth century. As an artefact of the society that produced it, it perfectly matched its time and place. Yet despite that, there was still much scope for aesthetic variation and change in the rendering of the storey-and-a-half house; the move to a more homogeneous housing landscape with internationally standardized style and building methods had not been fully realized as yet. By manipulating the plan dimensions and the heights of ceilings, builders could greatly alter the proportions to fit changing tastes. Similarly, dormers grafted into the roofline of these houses had interesting regional variations that help calibrate the vernacular expression across the Maritimes (figure 4.4). One example, a five-sided dormer, is seemingly an authentic Scottish signature - there being ample surviving evidence of this method of shaping the dormer throughout Scotland. It is found in Pictou, Nova Scotia, to be sure, but it is also evident in other non-Scots areas, such as along that province's South Shore, where it apparently was inserted onto houses having little or no architectural lin-
4.3 Marilime storey-and-a-half vernacular
4.4 Distinctive dormer stylings, Maritimes vernacular. Local carpenters found different ways to render the dormer detail on these buildings. With time these 'localisms' came to distinguish regions of the Maritimes.
The Vernacular House 101 cage to Scotland. Some have argued that it was Scottish workers made itinerant after being involved in building the Shubenacadie Canal who introduced the dormer to a broader region.10 Perhaps it was simply that regional carpenters and would-be householders absorbed the visual effect of the dormer while visiting Halifax, where these Scottish masons were known to have worked. Other examples include a centrally located gabled dormer that was particularly popular in the Annapolis Valley and Prince Edward Island, but even this seemingly simple style was subject to a remarkable diversity of stylistic treatment in the hands of local carpenters. Housing became vernacular then not simply by applique of design but more profoundly by the reorganization of space. Sometimes this led quickly to small delineated separate rooms, while in other cases the transition took over a century. Here we must stress the profound role that opportunity - or its corollary, isolation - played in accelerating or inhibiting this transition. In the case of the houses of the isolated Newfoundland outport, the folk space of the old hall-and-parlour house only slowly adjusted to the new social dictates and the potentials of new building technology. As David Mills has described for Trinity Bay, folk-inspired floor plans persisted even though a more apparent symmetry appeared on the outside, suggesting that a vernacular skin had been imposed. 11 Through a hundred years of change, the large kitchen remained intact and dominant, even though the roof profile shifted from one-storey to salt-box and then two-storey houses (figure 4.5). The last stage, a twostorey house with an almost flat roof, came when light construction lumber and asphalt shingles (or continuous rolls of 'tar paper' or roof felt) allowed a different roof pitch. This, by the 1890s, became undeniably a Newfoundland vernacular. 12 It was a home less beholden to a mimicking of the grand merchant house, though when one compares the early fisherman's cottage with the big house, and the size of these fishermen's houses several generations later, a clear line of evolution is revealed. For the most part, the merchant's house would still be the model for a largely isolated outport society which had little access to the changing currents of architectural design beyond the Island. It is interesting to note the few exceptions when they occur. One cannot help but be struck, for example, by the seemingly incongruous mansard roofs capping a number of houses in villages such as Portugal Cove. Evidently the mansard roofs of St John's provided a tantalizing model for visiting fishermen, who returned to their own community determined to reproduce the fashion on their existing dwellings. The result is all the more eye-catching because they are exceptional in a landscape of remarkable constancy.
4.5 The transition in Newfoundland vernacular form. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the Newfoundland house evolves from its folk hall-andparlour roots to a centre-hall vernacular plan.
The Vernacular House 103 The folklorist Gerry Pocius has shown other instances where the broader popular culture has been grafted onto outport life, stressing that the periodic remodelling of dwellings was a 'time-killing' activity in the winter season as much as it was a response to functional requirement or social display. In one case, what seemed a post-war ranch house was revealed to be a house of the 1840s that had been chopped down to size one winter; other houses changed in the other direction, and second-storey or new roof designs were added, again as winter work projects. li5 Although the design vocabulary of Georgian architecture diffused down the social range in colonial times by dint of its presence on both sides of the Atlantic, the revolution in the American colonies dramatically abbreviated its New World popularity. The new American nation turned its back on English models of social status and explored alternative symbols. The ancient Greek and Roman republics were more stimulating sources, and a conscious decision was made to articulate this new design vocabulary for major buildings in Virginia and elsewhere. M By the 1820s, a Greek Revival 'temple house' had emerged as a vernacular cousin of these grand forms, and they were built in the newly opened farming country of New York and Ohio. Only limited examples of Greek Revival styling can be found in Upper Canada, however. The Barnum house at Grafton, Ontario is often cited. 1:> Since the Greek Revival was a deliberately republican architectural model, it could not be sustained in a society where different allegiances persisted. As a result, the style rarely found vernacular expression in Canada, save perhaps for houses which presented the gable end to the road in a form of temple silhouette. This difference no doubt reflects the timing of settlement and the degree of prosperity to be found in upstate New York, Ohio, or Vermont, in comparison with the Ontario bush at the time. When the form did come into Canada, often it was modified away from the strict temple form. Some examples exist in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, which was in many ways a cultural extension of Vermont, and there are a few examples in the Maritimes as well, but these are all restrained versions of the American vernacular prototype. As we saw in the case of Nova Scotia, other regions also derived the inspiration for vernacular change from the presence of skilled workers, especially stonemasons, who were particularly capable of mediating grand style into simpler forms. Often these specialized artisans and tradesmen had been brought into an area for special government projects, and stayed on to find commissions from the broader population. Through their skilled hands the essence of the balanced plan could
104 The Era of Mercantile Capitalism
4.6 Rideau corridor vernacular, Upper Canada. Across Ontario local variations of the common one-and-a-half-storey vernacular house developed based on material preferences and builder's interpretation of the form. Stone houses abound in the Rideau corridor and in parts of Waterloo County, while in the Grand River Valley soft buff brick is abundant. Elsewhere red brick, polychromatic brick, or wooden clapboard is the material of choice.
be replicated, somewhat removed from the grand house. In the 1830s, Scottish masons employed to build the locks of the Rideau Canal between Lake Ontario and the Ottawa River later built elegant one-storey stone houses in Eastern Ontario (figure 4.6). 1() In a similar way, skilled workers turned to building distinctive textured pebble and stone dwellings in upstate New York after the construction of the Erie Canal east from Buffalo, and some of these same techniques were carried to the area around Paris, Ontario, when these workers moved on. 17 In both instances, the dwellings were for people of some prosperity, rather than the whole range of rural society. Nevertheless some of the considerable occurrence of finished stone houses in this part of Ontario is a reflection of the Scottish predilection for stone, especially in the parts of the towns of Brantford, Guelph, Fergus, and Gait built in the 1840s and 1850s. So far in this chapter, we have concentrated on mapping out the transition towards a housing form whose plan revealed a more complex geom-
The Vernacular House 105 etry, and we have hinted at some of the ways in which the construction of the house responded to the requirements of these changes. We have noted which groups were likely to initiate this type of dwelling, and we have examined some of the ways by which ideas were transmitted from place to place, and group to group. We have, however, skirted around the matter of style and popular fashion in the aesthetics of the vernacular house. It is appropriate to turn now to explore the accelerating flow of design ideals from the elite into the arteries of an increasingly lively and prosperous colonial middle class anxious to ape the taste-makers of an increasingly international cultural realm. More specifically, we will focus on one of the primary mechanisms by which aesthetic notions were transmitted to consumers. As we saw in chapter 2, the early nineteenth century was marked by a much freer and more experimental mood under the spirit of such notions as Romanticism, which began to permeate many aspects of popular design, literature, and music, especially among those who took their lead from British taste-makers. With respect to housing, this movement found expression in the architecture of the Picturesque and particularly in a genre of dwelling which some writers have injudiciously labelled the Regency Cottage.18 We have already seen that this particular architectural fashion reached Canada and especially Ontario through a small number of elite immigrants and that knowledge of the fashion was also available through pattern books. The small number of well-executed dwellings following the Picturesque ideals of site location and landscape congruence as well as the theoretical suggestions regarding the use of materials and colour, the employment of casement and French windows, elevated and elaborated chimney stacks, and delicately executed verandas and supports must have stood out on the rural Ontario landscape. For the ordinary Canadian-born farmer and for many of the land-hungry Scots and Irish immigrants who poured into the still rough pioneer concessions of Ontario during the 1830s and 1840s, these 'cottages' and 'villas' must have seemed the eccentric whimsy of a class of settler whose misplaced instincts and impracticality were already well known among parish-pump gossips. Few rural folk seem to have been persuaded to emulate these unconventional dwellings before about 1850, no doubt because of the strong associations that the house form had with this eccentric and excessively patronizing class of immigrant. Nevertheless, by mid-century there were a few who did effect a vernacular version of the Picturesque cottage. As in other instances of the vernacular absorption of architectural style, the adaptation comes about a generation after the fashion had reached it zenith.
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4.7 Prospect Cottage, near Grafton, Upper Canada. This vernacular version of the so-called Regency cottage was built for Justin Mallery in the 1840s and it reproduced in Ontario a form that flowed throughout the British Empire from origins in India. The Mallery family were among the oldest settlers in the district, having arrived in the 1790s, and this house undoubtedly represented the second generation's attempt to display a sense of taste and achievement.
Dotted here and there amid the townships of the north shore of Lake Ontario one can still detect examples of these simplified versions of the cottage. Significantly, in this part of Ontario would-be builders of vernacular versions of the house did not have to look far for a selection of more or less authentic Picturesque houses to serve as inspiration. The twotiered strand of counties stretching between the lakeshore and the Canadian Shield from the Ottawa River to Toronto attracted more than its share of the half-pay officers and others of their crowd. Some of the best surviving examples of these houses, including some of those constructed of log (for example, Langton's, Steele's, and Dunsford's Beehive - see chapter 2, p. 45), are found in this part of the province. It remains to understand who attempted to reproduce the vernacular examples of the Picturesque and what form the attempt took. An example of the typical Ontario vernacular execution of the Picturesque cottage is that built by the Mallery family on the Danforth Road between Cobourg and the village of Grafton. Known as Prospect Cottage, the house is a small one-and-a-half-storey brick building, more or less square in plan (figure 4.7). Typical of most of the genre, it carries a shallow cottage roof which rises to a carefully crafted belvedere, whose
The Vernacular House 107 dimensions in this case emphasize horizontal breadth rather than height. At the eaves the roofline extends well beyond the exterior wall of the dwelling to produce a generous veranda on the front and sides of the house. There is little attempt at decorative sensitivity. The builder chose not to incorporate the long casement windows of the ideal; rather, the two openings on the front elevation follow more conventionally the dimensions for double-hung sash. The front door also follows a simple form with plain rectangular side lights and transom light, and both windows and door owe more to the earlier vernacular Georgian patterns than to the new spirit of Picturesque indulgence. In fact the only concessions to style on the exterior were the delicately fretworked veranda supports and the two double chimney stacks, in which some care has been taken to effect a Tudor-like appearance. Probably built in the late 1840s, the house was likely the second or third built by Caleb Mallery, himself the son of an early and extensive owner of land in the locality.19 It is also interesting that the family were of American origin, having arrived in the tide of post-Revolutionary landseekers. Acquiring land in both Hamilton and Haldimand townships, Caleb and his brothers became prosperous farmers. By 1840 they lived in a rural neighbourhood which was already well past the pioneering era and into which a number of half-pay officers and other would-be gentry had collected. Many of these people had attempted with varying degrees of success to re-create a fashionable lifestyle for themselves. Not far away along the road to Cobourg was New Lodge - the house of Henry Covert, a prominent farmer and businessman whose half-pay father, John Covert, had erected an elegant country cottage in the Picturesque mode in the 1830s (figure 2.8).20 Some of the more prosperous American-born entered into the social circle of these immigrant gentry. It is difficult to assess the degree to which Mallery participated in this circle. He was a director of the Northumberland Agricultural Society in 1828, and his fellow directors included an even balance of prominent American-born 'squires' and recently arrived British 'gentry.' Through contact and with tangible examples, such as Covert's New Lodge, it seems likely that Mallery emulated an aspect of this class's lifestyle at least in so far as his house was concerned. Significantly, the attempt was muted. The resulting dwelling managed to copy the profile and selected elements, but in building in brick rather than using the preferred stucco, and by maintaining older approaches to sash and door, he revealed a reluctance to depart from the comfortable norms of an earlier generation. If we are right in judging the social context and the process of decision
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4.8 Folk dwelling re-dressed with brick and fretwork, Canada West. Many a small folk dwelling underwent, as this one did, a significant renovation of its exterior face to make it better conform to the vernacular fashions becoming current in the mid-nineteenth century.
making that motivated Mallery when building Prospect Cottage, we probably come close to an insight on a wide slice of other stolid farmers and townspeople in the middle decades of the century. The development of a mind-set that was ready to leap boldly towards new fashions in architecture developed only slowly, and in many cases the transition was only partial. We must not lose sight of the fact that in Ontario, the transition from the pioneer tent and shanty of the first season led rapidly to a solid, substantial log house within two years. For the most part these had the same balance and composition as the classical vernacular, and for a long time these houses reflected the limits of material progress and social achievement for a population that was itself only a step away from a more prosaic folk culture and whose principal preoccupations still remained fixed on wresting a livelihood from a rugged and at times unyielding land. As a modest prosperity was won, perhaps late in life, the occupant might look for a way to display to neighbours the fruits of the family's labours (figure 4.8). In many instances this might be accomplished with a few minor
The Vernacular House 109 modifications to the existing dwelling, and some log houses, for example, were later covered up with stucco to look like stone houses; others were veneered in brick and survived as working farmhouses for several generations. As we saw earlier, enumeration as part the census for 1842 and 1851 shows that the majority of houses in Ontario were log houses, mainly onestorey but some with two.21 By the 1850s most of eastern Canada from the Maritimes to the western margins of southern Ontario had passed through the pioneering period. Indeed, the saturated rural lands were beginning to disgorge surplus population to cities and factories of their respective regions and, in the case of Quebec and the Maritimes, beyond to the United States. The landscape of most areas began to take on a decidedly more finished appearance, and the accumulations of wealth, the appearance of a host of revolutionary technological forms of transportation such as railroads, and the erection of civic amenities all served to infuse a new spirit of progress and optimism among the people of British North America. 22 Viewed more broadly, this spirit was endemic to the Victorian era, and it reached deeply into the psyche of even the most ordinary of citizens of the realm. Fundamental to the social psychology of the time was a tendency to see the embodiment of the age in material terms. Status derived from birthright or office was challenged by status born of wealth alone, and, in the comparatively open and fluid world of British North America, people found it desirable to display their wealth visibly through possessions, of which the dwelling became an extremely demonstrative example. During the second half of the nineteenth century, then, a veritable explosion of building and rebuilding of houses responded to these concerns. Swept up in this new mood, householders were more open to breaking away from the conventions of the Georgian vernacular and folk idioms to embrace new fashions and to take advantage of altogether new ways of effecting social achievements through housing. The Popularizing of Gothic Style in Vernacular Form If the Picturesque cottage ideal failed to generate a significant vernacular response in Ontario, the Gothic Revival cottage proved to be widely acceptable in the two or three decades after 1850. Its rapid diffusion owes much to the spirit of the time, but also to the harnessing of new methods of communication to the processes of consumption and cultural change. Throughout the nineteenth century, an increasingly important conduit for house design was the architectural pattern book. Plans were dissemi-
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nated widely through farm journals, family magazines, newspapers, and entire design volumes. Printed plans enabled local contractors and builders to construct fashionable, efficient, and sound structures. The image of the grand house could be modified for those with moderate resources, the impression of unique design could be perpetuated by plan variations, and the implication of an expensive house could be maintained by formal architectural details fronting a utilitarian form. For the builder and the client, who participated less and less actively in the building process through the century, the pattern book provided information on building materials, techniques, and cost. For the contractor in areas where skilled labour was in short supply, the pattern book's precise set of drawings made it easier to employ labourers who were often no longer au courant with all aspects of house building. Pattern-book vernacular houses successfully brought the fashion of the elite to widespread use and, through further dilution by countless builders, into popularity for ordinary housing. Their design and execution contributed to a further and often final erosion of folk practice in local tradition. That is not to say that there was no differential regional popularity of these vernacular structures. Their relative rate of absorption or adaption is an indication of local economic prosperity and social preference. In this final section of the chapter, we trace the dissemination and implementation of vernacular design and assess its regional and national variety. The architectural pattern book was hardly a new vehicle for disseminating knowledge of building form. The genre did undergo an evolution in scope, intent, and audience, however. Pattern books had first appeared at the end of the eighteenth century, and often had a moralizing or reforming orientation. 23 Aimed at estate owners in the United Kingdom, they were written to urge better housing for estate workers - hedgers, ditchers, gamekeepers, and gatekeepers, if not the lowest labourers - and often integrated the new forms into consciously landscaped estates as items in a vista. Later the landscape architect J.C. Loudon assembled eighty-one designs in his Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm, and Villa Architecture, published in England in 1833. This publication broke with the earlier authors in its explicit and thorough detailing of every conceivable aspect of the dwelling and its landscape. It met with resounding success and spawned other publications, often by landed gentry themselves, showing designs that reflected a theoretical interest in the conditions of their labourers. In the United States, a decade after the Loudon encyclopedia, the American architect Andrew Jackson Downing 24 began to publish designs
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for farmhouses. Unlike the British volumes, they were aimed at farmers in charge of their own land and their own resources rather than a landowning class who might, or might not, seek to elevate the shelter of their workers. Downing's designs appeared first in farm journals such as the Agriculturalist and the Horticulturalist, and later in compendia known as Cottage Residences (1842 and some twelve editions by 1888) and The Architecture of Country Houses (1850 and nine printings by 1865) .2:) In these volumes he attempted to elevate the farmer's dwelling into a more dignified position: 'some of our dwelling houses are so meagre and comfortless in their exteriors that one might be fairly pardoned for supposing them barns.' 26 He also advocated a more realistic architectural mode: 'it would certainly be difficult for a stranger in some of our towns, where the taste for Grecian temples prevails, to distinguish with accuracy between a church, a bank, and a hall of justice.' 27 Downing's preference was for the Gothic style, an umbrella of design principles that were varied enough for him to present a range of floor plans and exterior facades for cottages and villas.28 His essays explained the appropriateness of styles and plans, and gave constructional details and advice. In a design for 'An Ornamental Farm-House,' for example, he intended 'first to offer to the large class of intelligent farmers a plan of a house of moderate size, somewhat adapted in internal accommodation to their peculiar wants; and second to give to the exterior, at little additional cost, some architectural beauty.'29 Prominent features for decorative attention were the chimneys, the windows, and the porch. The front entrance should be highlighted, he argued, even in the most humble dwelling, by the addition of a decorated veranda which gives 'shelter, prospect, and an agreeable promenade';'™ upper-floor windows in a gable or dormers gave useful space and light rather than cramped half-lights on a rigidly classical front. His design for a 'Suburban Cottage for a Small Family' would be a plain parallelogram were it not for its 'projecting eaves, its bracketed veranda, its dormer window and decorative chimney-tops,' all added for 'the trifling additional outlay of 7 to 10% of total costs.'81 While his volumes only contained some thirty designs, the impact of his work goes far beyond the construction of dwellings that were direct copies of these plans. Downing's essays provided a case for the eclectic addition of elements - in Gothic windows, dormers, gingerbread trim, porches - to many a simple house; at the same time the essays offered ideas on the better arrangement of rooms for comfort and convenience. Downing had considerable impact north of the border and is probably
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responsible for the most vivid set of vernacular structures in mid-nineteenth-century Canada. There do not appear to have been any indigenous Canadian pattern books on the market, although the British American Cultivator in the 1850s and the Canada Farmer in the 1860s did publish house designs.^ The publishers of these journals derived most of their materials not from Downing directly but by lifting sections out of American farm journals like the Country Gentleman, the Genessee Farmer, and the Albany Cultivator. Coinciding, in Ontario at least, with an economic boom brought on by high prices for export wheat, these new designs found ready acceptance among farmers seeking to affirm their achievement. Many farms in the 1840s were one or two hundred acres in size - depending on the cadastral system in place when the area was opened for settlement - and the extent of cultivatable land was growing by ten to fifteen acres per year. In the midst of this booming economy, farmers were chafing to refurbish or, better still, replace the houses that they had built or inherited, even though these might only be ten or twenty years old. For many, substance came as show and even older dwellings could be turned into appropriate icons of the age. Accordingly, log houses were hidden behind brick facades, often with polychromatic courses and decorative elements, and a cross-gable in the front facade that featured a Gothic arched window and gingerbread eaves trim (figure 4.9). For others, entirely new structures were built, either of brick or wood frame, and these also prominently displayed Gothic elements. In Downing's essays, it is clear that brick, or a stucco imitation of stone, was preferable to wood. The clay plains of southern Ontario provided ready material for brick, although not all could or would opt for it, Farm size and farm prosperity partly dictated the quality of housing. The larger land parcels were being subdivided - either through generational continuity from father to sons, or straight speculation in land - so that the Ontario countryside included many fifty- or even twenty-five-acre parcels. The high prices for wheat, prompted first by the Crimean War and then by the Reciprocity Agreement with the United States, meant that even a twenty-five-acre farm could be profitable.33 Thus a range of houses were built, some elegant, others simple, with this characteristic Gothic Revival form. In more settled areas, or on larger farms, the fuller version, more ornate and perhaps with a more complex floor plan, was to be found, while on the new land frontier, in the Queen's Bush or Huron Tract, the form might well be smaller or simpler and likely in wood. Later in the 1860s and 1870s, farmhouses began to be built with asymmetrical L-shaped plans that presented two or more decorated gable-ends on the
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4.9 Ontario farmhouse revealing its origin as a log building, Dufferin County. Abandonment and decay permit one to see that beneath the 'skin' of this neoGothic brick farmhouse lies an earlier log structure that presumably was recast in the economic heyday of the 1850s.
front facade (figure 4.10). Italianate-style villas also had some rural popularity, although more often than not they were built for merchants and professionals in the many Ontario small towns. While it is important to note the particular design pedigree of houses that appear with Gothic Revival features, it is perhaps as important to ask what was different about such structures. Did these new designs offer radically different ways of organizing internal space? Certainly there was a greater emphasis on functionally specific rooms - dining room, parlour, kitchen, bedrooms - than had been the case. For houses where the sentiments of Downing's essay encouraged alterations to existing structures, possibly the most profound changes came with the opportunities presented by the central cross-gable. Earlier access to the upper loft space
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4.10 Ontario Gothic farmhouse, complex L-shaped plan. Economic bouyancy and rural prosperity induced a major rebuilding of the housing stock of rural Ontario in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. For many farmers and townspeople, the house of choice was this fashionable vernacular form that was widely represented in popular builders' manuals of the day.
had been through an end staircase or ladder. The addition of the central gable allowed a lighted space for the upper-floor landing, and usually a set of separate rooms on either side of that landing. Illumination, ventilation, and the articulation of additional private space was possible through this one feature. One is tempted to speculate that such additions went hand in hand with family life-cycle shifts, as a growing family and the desirability of separating infants and teenagers, adults and children, pressed in on the small, multi-purpose living space. The aesthetic aspects of the new silhouette were undoubtedly a pleasurable bonus for the functional modification of domestic space. For a fanner in Ontario who had survived the grinding labour of clearing the forest, the fashioning of cultivatable land, and the erection of farm buildings, the issue of elegant shelter for himself and his family necessarily had been a low priority and little understood or appreciated. In time, how-
The Vernacular House 115 ever, the once-isolated farm properties began to see neighbours pull back the forest along rural concession roads. Forest isolation gave way to a more public landscape. In an increasingly prosperous agrarian economy, house appearance became as important an indicator of social standing as the prize bull or the newest farm implement. Journal articles and designs that directly addressed the farmer's desire to affirm his position in society were eagerly consumed. The many County Atlases in the American midwest and Ontario, all with their commissioned illustrations of farms, farmers, and farm buildings, are a stock-taking of vernacular conformity to the then current canons of taste.34 Although it may be an over-simplification, we are struck by the uniformity of people's response to these forces in Ontario. If house building is any indication, it seems that in spite of the considerable heterogeneity of ethnicity and experience, a cultural consensus revolving around capitalistic consumerism was unfolding in Ontario society by the 1850s. The same cannot be said with such certainty for other parts of eastern Canada. In Quebec, vernacular housing inspired by Downing and other mid-century Gothic Revival pattern books was restricted largely to the Eastern Townships, an area populated by American and British settlers in the early nineteenth century. Some of the best examples are near Stanstead, close to the Vermont border. Unlike the Ontario experience, existing Quebec housing did not seem to have been modified by these external fashions through the same set of processes. Rather, modernization of those farms, or the addition of new ones, involved an evolution of Quebec folk practice, with plank wall siding, modifications to the bell-cast roof for a smaller house, and other perpetuations of canadien style.8'* There are hints that some of the more pervasive North American vernacular ideals were percolating into Quebec through the agency of Quebecois who had migrated south to work in the milltowns of New England from 1850 onward. Exposed to a different set of house-building practices and idioms, some must have tried to recreate these new images when they returned to their homelands with a little money. But more generally it is important to see this failure to participate in the wholesale remaking of the late nineteenth-century landscape in economic, rather than purely aesthetic terms. Commercial agriculture was far less developed than in Ontario, farm sizes were smaller, and little surplus accrued to spend on decorative farmhouses. The Eastern Townships, by contrast, was a far more commercial, individualistic, and outward-looking society. It is even tempting to see the shift as one of political economy. In Quebec, the gulf between formal institutional architecture and the habitant
4.11 Anglo-Norman house, Montesson Island Manor, Becancour, Canada East. This house, probably erected in the mid-nineteenth century, was built for Pierre Laterriere, the general manager of the St-Maurice Ironworks. It represents one of the means by which Quebec housing forms began to integrate external fashions, in this case the Anglo-Indian cottage form, into local building practices. The plan re-creates the general configuration of the vernacular house, while the broad canopy of the eaves and roofline, and the very large windows, pick up the features that were born of the 'tropical' origins of these bungalows.
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house was not really bridged until after the Conquest, and the gulf was in some ways perpetuated by the subsequent development of a commercial class who drew heavily on picturesque fashion in Britain and the United States (figure 4.11). What is now labelled 'un cottage quebecois'^' or an 'Anglo-Norman house' is little different from the 'Regency cottage' or 'cottage ornee' form that under another name is the colonial bungalow found in Canada, India, or Australia (figure 4.II). 87 As Anthony King has argued, the appearance of such similar forms in widely different geographic locations is symptomatic of the production of a global culture brought about by the inclusion of more and more of the world into a capitalist economy.38 It is not just the pattern books that are part of the vernacular current, it is vitally the realignment of classes and their expression of position in appropriately similar, and interchangeable, ways. The ornate cottage of a Scottish merchant in Quebec, the plantation house of a Missouri cotton farmer, or the home of a Malay tea planter (themselves aping their aristocratic gentry betters) all created a demand for mimicked versions by administrators, senior clerks, and the like. Significantly, the degree to which this transformation was truncated in rural French Canada is an important measure of how much that society was shut out of the broader Anglo-American mainstream of popular culture in the nineteenth century. In the Maritimes, even less a region where the land could yield agrarian wealth on a large scale, there were fewer reflections of the Gothic Revival in ordinary housing (figure 4.12). Its most exuberant and faithful presence came in houses for doctors, sea captains, or merchants, who had both the worldliness to be cognizant of the new fashions and the wealth to implement the pattern faithfully. For many Maritimers, surviving through a combination of fishing, farming, and working in the woods, the progression from small cottage to larger house as experienced by Ontario farmers was inconceivable. Modifications to earlier houses were made, to be sure, and sometimes the central gable was lighted by a 'fisherman's Gothic' window distinctive to the Maritimes, yet on the whole the region did not embrace the style to the same extent as did Ontario. One significant exception was to be found in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia (figure 4.13). There, a decorative five-sided dormer, projecting as a hood over the front entrance, became a popular alteration to older houses and a central feature to new ones built from the 1870s on. While the precise origins of this feature are still unknown, in that no specific carpenter has been identified as having first developed this upper-hallway decorative element, nevertheless the economic context stimulating the housing mar-
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4.12 Carpenter's Gothic, the Anglican Rectory, Sackville, New Brunswick. Many carpenters' handbooks provided examples of rendering this house in wood as well as brick or stone. Regions where wood predominated saw examples of this house produced in modest numbers.
ket in Lunenburg is quite clear.*1 In 1873, the Lunenburg fishing fleet numbered some fifteen schooners (average sixty tons), each of which travelled to fish the Labrador banks. After a shift to trawl-line techniques on the Newfoundland banks, the Lunenburg fleet prospered, and by 1888 had expanded to sixty schooners (average ninety tons). An upgrading similar to that of farmhouses during the Ontario wheat boom seems to have occurred in a more prosperous Lunenburg. The most elaborate of these Lunenburg houses was undoubtedly that built by the merchant Morash in 1888, but many other houses had already been transformed in the 1870s.'10 Although one of the central thrusts of this chapter is to trace the translation of self-conscious design into pattern-book availability, it is interesting to observe how these decorative architectural details were, in turn,
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4.13 Lunenburg Gothic, Nova Scotia. Few localities have produced as distinctive a vernacular signature as is apparent in the Lunenburg region of Nova Scotia. There carpenters took particular pains to create elaborately profiled and decorated dormer and entries. Executed in wood, the so-called Lunenburg 'bump' is now much celebrated within the region.
translated into a sort of subconscious builder's model. 'Lunenburg houses' were built, or their distinctive dormer copied, in other fishing communities along the coast of Nova Scotia, especially in Clark's Harbour and Yarmouth - but almost never away from the coast in agricultural communities. One can speculate that there was a connection between those who could build boats, or knew bracing for boat and ship parts, and those employed for house carpentry, and that in the banks schooner communities, people had a knowledge of the type from seeing the feature on a visit. A similar continuity of a tradition can be seen in the spread of the 'Ontario cottage.' The decorated, central-gable, Gothic Revival house became an almost subconscious house plan when Ontario farmers moved
120 The Era of Mercantile Capitalism west in the 1880s. Their farms in Manitoba, 41 and even in the Fraser Valley of coastal British Columbia,42 present a modified version - nearly always in wood - that confirms the longevity of a vernacular innovation for some half-century. This is not to say that the Gothic Revival is weak on the west coast because of distance and the dilution brought about through diffusion. On the contrary, examples from the 1860s in Marin County and Ferndale, California,43 and sea-captains' houses in New Westminster and Victoria, British Columbia,44 are part of the sophisticated and designed landscapes hastily established on the west coast in the wake of the various gold rushes of the Sierra Nevadas and Fraser River; these houses and the later examples brought by Ontario farmers are a reminder of the ascendent qualities of the vernacular housing trend.
CHAPTER FIVE
Housing for Labour
The Canadian examples of polite, folk, and vernacular housing explored in the previous three chapters are part of a broader agrarian world, one where people's world-view, approach to settling, status, and accumulations of property were land-based. And yet a major component of the encounter with Canadian land was in connection with resource extraction, and that encounter involved activities that were seasonal, mobile, and often ephemeral. For almost five centuries, the extraction of Canadian resources has necessitated the organization of a migratory labour force in locations well beyond settled or established regions. European capital, through merchant intermediaries and agents, established production points for exploiting fur, cod, coal, and timber resources. Moreover, the fact that these enterprises were orchestrated under merchant control certainly led to some houses of prosperity and social pretension, many of which, as we have seen, mimicked the administrative elite in their choice of classical models. On the other hand, the shelter associated with the foot-soldiers of their trade - trappers, fishermen, loggers, and miners among others - was of a different form, often crowding many men into small, temporary, and invariably very primitive structures. The shanties, bunkhouses, and row-housing forms associated with these resource industries have been little understood. Not only are their basic structural components worthy of recording, but also we need to probe to what extent these forms of shelter were replications or modifications of existing Old World practices writ large on a broad frontier region, or New World inventions born out of necessity. In time, some elements of shelter associated with resource industries became more conventionally domestic, usually as women and then family groupings helped transform what had been predominantly male camps into more stable
122 The Era of Mercantile Capitalism settlements. Here then folk and vernacular forms of shelter might eventually develop alongside the camps, and for many of these settlements, the seasonality that resulted from some family-based attempt at farming spelled off with periods in the woods, on the sea, or down the mines, meant a life lived in quite different types of dwellings and under quite different social circumstances for many men. In examining shelter for the labourer in resource and later in industrial work, we also strive to locate all housing - polite, folk, vernacular, and industrial - in appropriate spatial and social juxtaposition. The extent to which all four types were proximate, or widely separated, is in itself as revealing an indicator of social and economic relations as is the form and substance of the types themselves.1 Proximity of control, the visibility of the social gradient, and the nuances of identity in each segment of the housing spectrum are more sharply revealed in such comparative analysis. By making that comparison in specific geographical as well as economic locales, we further stress the historical geography of Canadian shelter. In chapter 3 we noted that one of the most powerful explanations for regionally distinct house types in the New World comes from invoking the primacy of culture, especially where folk traditions were replicated in minimally modified form. Diffusion of these styles away from their New World hearth or changes through time in the same place, it is assumed, was often associated with some degree of dilution caused by adjustments to different building materials and climate.2 But that said, it is implicit that the forms themselves might persist through the strength of cultural continuity. 3 As we have shown in chapter 3, economic forces help explain regional vernacular housing for farming and fishing regions. For the most part, however, cultural geographers and folklorists have avoided analysing the creation or appearance of housing associated with industrial or resource enterprises. 4 Explicitly economic explanations for the production of housing have been advanced by the social geographer David Harvey and others who have focused on the social production of the built environment as the consequence of the division of labour/' Typically this line of analysis has ignored the form or appearance of the dwelling. Rather, the emphasis, in the case of industrial shelter, has been to see company housing as an instrument of social control in a distinctive economic relationship between capital and labour. Simply put, the provision of housing was a means of binding workers to their masters, and it was relinquished or 'socialized' only when management found other less contentious instru-
Housing for Labour 123 merits for achieving this end. Housing provided under this strategy allowed the captains of industry, regardless of sector or place, simply to utilize expedient construction techniques, materials, and methods to organize a labour force for specific short-term ends. In such an interpretive perspective there is no room for the influence of distinctive cultural forces. There is, however, a considerable body of evidence suggesting a regional face for capital accumulation and the organization of labour.0 One attempt to integrate cultural and economic contexts has been presented by Anthony King's analysis of the bungalow as a global house type from Bengali folk house to European colonial home, then weekend country cottage, all the way through to late twentieth-century suburbia. King traces the manner in which a specific culturally derived housing form became a device for the capitalist land market. 7 Similarly, the historical roots of industrial housing reveal the important moulding role of culture, and the longevity of folk-ways well into the modern period.8 In order to probe some of these interpenetrations of culture and economy in the form and meaning of shelter, we begin in this chapter to focus on one of two distinct phases of the Canadian resource economy: the house under mercantile or early capitalism, when European organizations were engaged in trade of Canadian resources to European markets. A second and later phase of this activity took place under industrial capitalism, when raw materials were produced for industries in Canada, the United States, and Europe but controlled by joint-stock companies.9 This phase will be the focus of our examination in chapter 9. In the earlier phase, the top and bottom of the social classes - masters and men, planters and servants, agents and colliers, merchants and shantymen - were most often located side by side in the resource landscape itself. Moreover, the composition of the labour force, as either single-sex or family-based units, influences both the form of shelter and the likely continuity of Old World forms. Mercantile Agents in Early Resource Exploitation
Between the middle of the sixteenth century and the first quarter of the nineteenth, French and English merchant adventurers established furtrading posts from the St Lawrence to the Pacific Ocean. 10 Some trading posts lasted only a few seasons and were abandoned, but most were built for several decades at least. Within a stockade wall, warehouses for furs, provisions, and dry goods, and workshops for metal and woodworking were laid out along with quarters for the officers and men of the compa-
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5.1 Hudson's Bay Factor's house, Fort Langley, British Columbia. This house is typical of many that were created by the company for their personnel. The construction form used a particular form of piece sur piece construction that came to be known as the 'Red River frame.' This house is notable for its generous scale.
nies. 11 In smaller trading posts, such as Naosquiscaw (east of James Bay) or Red Lake House (northwest of Lake Superior), masters and men shared different ends of the same long log house; storage was in cellars under the two rooms. In larger posts, such as Fort William on the shores of Lake Superior or Fort Langley on the banks of the lower Fraser River on the west coast, a square courtyard of buildings gave the master's or factor's house the prime location, with clerks and servants on the flanks (figure 5.1). Significantly, the floor plan of the big house included a 'great hall/ with bedrooms at both ends. Such a medieval arrangement of dwelling space, and the clear social divisions between officers and servants, indicate the persistence of contemporary European society in the New World. It must be recognized, however, that the fur trade was a complex and far-flung enterprise that required many of those employed in it to live and move well beyond the controlled confines of the trading forts and outposts. Segments of the industry were carried out in the 'bush,' where aboriginal skills and sheltering techniques were of necessity absorbed by Europeans. Here the specifics of the local ecology might be a forceful
Housing for Labour 125 determinant. Clearly the forested east offered a different set of building materials from the more thinly covered Aspen woodland zone or the remote barren ground of the north. Europeans who ventured into this way of life soon learned the advantages of quickly constructed brush huts or, more likely, some form of portable shelter, of which the tent became a commonplace. It seems also to be the case that there was a corresponding line of exchange passing from Europeans to Native culture. By the mid nineteenth century, as Native and Metis found themselves having to become more sedentary in their settlement habits, many adopted versions of the log dwellings that had earlier been perfected by the European groups converging on the great interior resource frontier. The source of this technology is moot - both the Hudson's Bay Company and the Quebec-based fur enterprise seem to have carried one or another form of log construction to the northwest. What is important is that the fur trade became a point of both innovation and cultural exchange in the matter of shelter and other survival techniques, and did so in a way that is unmatched in other resource economies. A similar mix of continuity and innovation occurred in association with the other major staple economy, the cod fishery. From the 1600s, English merchants from the West Country and French merchants from St-Malo and La Rochelle established land bases on the Newfoundland coastline for the more efficient organization of the migratory cod fisheries. The labour force was assigned to either the 'sea-rooms,' zones of sea water where men jigged for cod in dories or from small sailing shallops, or the 'shore-rooms,' beachside areas where the cleaning, salting, and storing was done before the voyage home to European markets.12 These 'plantations' thus became a landscape dominated by the flakes, stages, wharves, and warehouses of the salt-cod industry on the one hand, and a collection of residences typically composed of a big house for the merchantplanter and structures known as 'cook rooms' for the fishermen and shore-based 'servants' on the other. The cook room (or cooke-room) was a 'large building forming part of fishing premises or "rooms" in which food is prepared and the "crew" accommodated.' 13 The term has a nautical origin - the galley aboard a ship - but evolved to describe a separate building or outhouse. Bunks were arranged around the room like berths in a ship, with space for their storage chests underneath; tables in the middle were used for up to fifty men at meal times.14 Both the big house and the cook room are prominent on a map of Ferryland in 1790, accompanying a sale description of the Holdsworth premises on the south side of the harbour (figure 5.2). Robert Holdsworth,
5.2 This drawing is a conjectural reconstruction of the Holdsworth fishery premises located at Ferryland, Newfoundland, about 1790. As the shore base for a fishing enterprise, the plantation's ensemble of buildings were designed to serve the requirements of those involved in the fishery. Note the contrast between the large dwellings for planters and managers, and the rudimentary row of attached cottages for the workers. The two cook rooms were located at the centre of the settlement, while stores for housing gear and dried fish were close to the 'flakes' and the wharves. The cooperage located near the second large dwelling rounds out the array of functional buildings.
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a merchant from Poole in Devon, occupied a 'stone built dwelling house 60' x 24' consisting of parlour, counting house, and shop on ground floor, 4 rooms on first floor, and spacious attic over whole, fitted as a ware room for dry goods.'10 As well as stores, sail lofts, stable and hayloft, smith's forge, barking house, wharves, flakes, and beach moorings, the property included a range of stone buildings divided suitably to form five fisherman's houses, a cook room sixty-six by twenty feet, and five other dwelling houses with gardens attached. Those other five dwellings were two large houses (one for Holdsworth's brother Adam, the other for a person called Maddigan), a second cook room, and two detached dwellings away from the shore. Only when the migratory fishery evolved into permanent wintering populations did the separate fishermen's houses come to dominate the residential stock. At that point, fishermen were placed in outports away from the main merchant centres. There they established gardens for their food, utilized the local forest for boat and house timber, and were supplied by the merchants in exchange for salt cod. Their houses closely replicated plans from the regions from which they had come, mostly the West Country English counties of Devon and Dorset, or parts of southeastern Ireland near Waterford and Wexford.10 Where the farmhouse was too far away from the fishing shore, wood-pole structures known as tilts were built as summer shelter; these were little more than huts with a fireplace and bunk-beds, adjacent to the stages.17 In the French fishery, buildings similar to cook rooms - known as cabannes des pecheurs ou des terriers - were present, along with those cabannes for the admiral and officers.18 The fishery at Trois Isles, on the Newfoundland coast, employed over four hundred men in 1785. A map by Descartes for that year shows some fifteen cabannes, nine of which were spread among the drying flakes to accommodate the fishermen and shoremen, the rest being for the officers and located nearer the stages. From the sketch at least, there appears to be little difference in size or design detail between the two classes, unlike the case at Ferryland, Trinity, or other English plantations. All the houses were of piquet construction, somewhat like the upright-pole tilt.19 In the Gaspesie, a 1686 map rade de Vlsle Perce - shows les pastes depeche temporaires, around which several long cabannes are shown adjacent to the flakes (vigneaux). These houses persisted into the period after 1766 when the Jersey merchant Robin dominated the Gaspesie, Baie des Chaleurs, and indeed the entire Gulf of St Lawrence fishery. Many early photographs record the cottage rows as a typical element of the Robin-controlled fishing settlements.20 To this day,
128 The Era of Mercantile Capitalism a structure known locally as 'bachelor's hall' still stands at Paspebiac, Quebec, next to the Robin house. The fishery produced a replication of provincial Georgian architecture for merchants' housing, a set of distinctive Newfoundland vernacular forms for family-unit fishermen, and the cook room, a multiple-occupancy dwelling unique to the migratory fishery. Culture and economy both play significant roles in these forms. The merchant's house, while externally repeating familiar designs, contained offices and ware rooms as well as dwelling space, somewhat like the fur trader's house. The cook room, on the other hand, is a more explicit product of the economic equation of a labour-intensive fishery attempting to maximize its returns by salting and drying a larger catch. The earliest European fishery never had a foreign land base before, simply returning to European shores and local dwellings; whether the cook room was culturally distinct in the English or French shores, architecturally or in layout, is unclear. The fishery exemplifies one Canadian resource economy's housing that owes its morphogenesis clearly to the financial and logistical constraints of the economic enterprise, but with some hints of influences carried from antecedent cultural modes of building. In contrast to fur trapping and cod fishing, coal mining was more immediately organized around a conventional family-centred labour force, and collier housing reflected that difference. The coal resources of Nova Scotia had been worked in the early eighteenth century by French and New England merchants trading with Fortress Louisbourg. In the decades after 1784, various operators developed primitive pits along the coast between Louisbourg and Sydney Harbour, utilizing young Irishmen who had been employed in the Newfoundland fisheries and who were housed in barracks or cook rooms, forty men to a barrack.21 But the industry developed in a far more organized manner in 1827, when an English syndicate, Rundell, Smith, and Rundell, capitalized the General Mining Association (GMA) after being granted the royal mineral lease for all of Nova Scotia.22 Within a decade, the GMA had added railway lines, steamships, steam engines, several pits, and some fifteen hundred employees on both sides of Sydney Harbour on Cape Breton Island and at Albion Mines on the mainland near Pictou. The technology, labour, and organization were all imported from Britain. At Albion Mines the company built a series of row-type houses for the colliers. Experienced miners were brought over on contract from England and Scotland. In 1842, a survey of Albion Mines recorded '91 dwelling houses (18'x 30' and well finished), 21 smaller and inferior houses, and 110 old log
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5.3 Albion Mines, Stellarton, Nova Scotia. This row, one of several nearly identical streets of company-built duplex houses, is now notable for the diversity of renovation treatments following the selling of these units to their occupants.
houses, quite uninhabitable.' 23 From archival and field evidence, miners' houses seem to have been of two basic types of terraced wooden cottages. In one variant each dwelling unit had a living-dining room, separated from the bedrooms by a centrally located chimney. A rear extension contained the kitchen. A second variant of the connected cottages utilized a party-wall chimney between two units. This presented a sixty-foot frontage along the street. In both cases, upstairs accommodation was at best rudimentary, likely little more than a space reached by a ladder. By 1866 the cottage rows were a significant part of the housing stock around four pits at Albion Mines (figure 5.3). Adjacent to the Foord Pit and Crushed Mines were clusters of three- and six-cottage rows, along Cricket Row and Leahy's Row. Rows of four pairs of cottages along Cunard and Mount Pleasant Terraces served the Dalhousie and Cage Pits. Twentyfive pairs of connected cottages flanked Victoria and Pleasant Rows. About fifty tiny detached cottages completed the housing stock. Two churches, a school, and a store rounded out the non-mining buildings in the community. At the other GMA mines, at Sydney Mines and Bridgeport on Cape
130 The Era of Mercantile Capitalism Breton Island, similar arrangements of agent's house, cottage terraces, and blocks of company houses were constructed. Here, but not apparently at Albion Mines, some of the rows were two-storey houses. Neither the cottage rows nor the two-storey rows are to be found anywhere in the Maritimes outside the coal-mining region. Rather they are direct imports of an already established industrial landscape in Britain. The row silhouette was the norm for early miners' cottages in Northumberland and Durham pit villages. As Stefan Muthesius has noted, the form has a particular regional popularity, although he is unclear as to its origin.24 It would seem plausible that there is a continuity from traditional rural housing in the English northeast. The similarity between farmhouses in the Northumbrian dales and the cottage rows of pit villages suggests a house type, albeit now in a row rather than detached, that was familiar in the rural areas in the midst of and to the west of the Northumberland coalfield.23 Certainly, long terraced cottages had been used as improved housing for agricultural workers on Scottish estates in the late seventeenth century, 26 and Michael Daunton's analysis of the Durham coalfield notes the persistence of agricultural workers' attachment to 'tied cottages' in miners' attitudes to company houses in the twentieth century: 'the men not only look upon the "free" house as an "inalienable right" which has descended to them through centuries of practice, but they realize that whatever the disadvantages of the system may be from their point of view, the advantages of having a rent-free house where no wages are being earned are too solid to be given up lightly.'27 The origin of the two-storey GMA row may also be connected to the Northumberland coalfield. Martin describes a Stone Row (built of stone removed during the sinking of shafts) and a Wood Row, both in 1842 at Barrington Colliery north of Newcastle, and these bear a remarkable resemblance to those in Cape Breton.28 The strength of the North British connection in Cape Breton, for the overall mining community if not definitively for its housing, is clear from the views of an English mining engineer who visited the area in 1870: The Sydney Mines, located on the North side of the Sydney River. This establishment is probably more like an English colliery than any other of the Cape Breton mines. Owned by the General Mining Association of London, a wealthy English corporation, the whole of the equipment of this colliery are purely English. A stranger arriving at Sydney Bar from England after a long sea voyage, and seeing the old-fashioned chaldron, or 53 cwt coal wagons on the GMA wharves, would fancy he was near one of the Newcastle collieries.29
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5.4 New Caledonia miner's house, operated by the Hudson's Bay Company, Nanaimo, British Columbia. This house provided accommodation for a family on what was a remote resource frontier. No doubt the provision of housing such as this was a necessary inducement to lure workers here. Notably, the housing would have been familar in scale and form to people from elsewhere on the continent.
Coal mining was not confined to the margins of Canada's east coast. On the west coast the Hudson's Bay Company worked coal seams on Vancouver Island, beginning after 1846. Skilled Scottish miners were brought in to open mines near Fort Rupert. Later shafts were sunk in 1852 at Colville Town, now known as Nanaimo. To this community mine agent George Robinson of Worcestershire, England, brought twentythree miners from Brierly Hill in the Staffordshire coalfield; each was chosen for having a wife and two children, so as to encourage a stable labour force.30 Initially the miners were housed in temporary cabins, four measuring fifteen by twenty-six feet, and six more twenty by thirty feet. Later each miner had to build a wooden dwelling as part of his contract. The miner-built dwellings appear, however, to have been identical one-storey cottages, with central door and central chimney (figure 5.4). As such they do not replicate either Staffordshire vernacular houses or those of the West Midland coalfields, except perhaps in that long rows of miners' houses do appear near the pits on early British Admiralty charts of the area.31 It is possible that the remoteness of this coalfield from the cultural hearths of settlers, and the lack of any Hudson's Bay Company
132 The Era of Mercantile Capitalism tradition of coal in the Old World, diminished the possibilities for cultural transfer.82 Shanty, Camboose, and Dingle: Housing on the Forest Frontier The timber economy, unlike mining, involved considerable mobility of operations as seasonal labour was recruited and deployed, and on a larger scale, as the industry itself cut through the vast tracts which constituted the forested frontier of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Crews were needed for cutting and then squaring timber in the woods during the winter, and for spring drives on the rivers down to the booming grounds to meet ships arriving on the Great Lakes, the St Lawrence River, and the Atlantic ports.33 In New Brunswick, agents for Glasgow and London timber merchants occupied spacious stone or wooden Georgianstyle houses at towns such as Douglastown and Chatham near the mouth of the Miramichi River.34 But the industry operated as strongly on the northern American frontier as well, and it is important to see the logging developments of these two nations as an interconnected whole. In the American case, cutting began in Maine, moved through Vermont, New York, and Pennsylvania, and on into Michigan in pursuit of untapped white pine for the squared timber trade. From there it moved on through Wisconsin and Minnesota, as well as south to the Mississippi pineries and west to the Rockies and the Pacific northwest.30 Maine labour, capital, and know-how were at the forefront of that frontier, at least until technological shifts associated with logging railroads made Michigan a more important source area for expertise in transforming the Pacific coast rain forests. The Canadian frontier similarly moved west from New Brunswick to Quebec, Ontario, and then British Columbia, again with much transfer of men and money.30 In reality there was only one frontier, for much of the labour and capital criss-crossed the borders between the two countries. Indeed half of the loggers in Maine at the turn of the century were from Quebec or New Brunswick, New England money began logging operations in the Ottawa Valley, Michigan and Wisconsin mills processed Ontario logs, and the earliest sawmills in Vancouver were established by Maine lumbermen, to name but a few instances of this intertwined resource economy.37 Evidence from the world of folklore underlines this movement of people within the logging frontier. The noted song-writer Larry Gorman, for example, moved from Prince Edward Island to the Miramichi River in New Brunswick, to New Hampshire, and then to Brewer, Maine.38 As David Smith has summarized:
Housing for Labour 133 The frontier was not a static one of men and investment. Tools, techniques, and songs went west to form part of this frontier. The cant dog or peavey stick, log marks, boom construction, driving methods, rafting, camp construction, food and methods of entertainment both in the woods and out reflected eastern influences. And although they were soon modified with the arrival of the Scandinavians into the woods, it was no more than the accretion which had earlier come into the Maine woods from Irish and French who had joined first the Yankees and Indians, and later the 'buckwheat eaters' and 'herring-chokers' from the Maritime provinces, in cutting and driving timber.39
Within such interweaving of men, money, and folklore there seems to have been a transfer of material culture as the industry moved west. Whether there were distinct regional variants in the form and appearance of logging camps through this period and across such a great distance, or whether camps everywhere were purely utilitarian forms - built quickly and cheaply, with no regional distinctiveness - is a complex question. The earliest form of shelter for seasonal logging crews was associated with the nineteenth-century squared timber trade, when men were housed in a camboose (also cambuse or caboose) shanty.40 These were large rectangular structures, perhaps forty by thirty-five feet, often only three or four logs (or seven feet) high, with a sloping wooden roof of slabs, bark, or hollowed-out trunks arranged in corrugated fashion. Their distinctive hallmark was a massive open fireplace in the centre of the floor (figure 5.5). An area maybe eight to twelve feet square, delineated by logs and banked by sand, contained an open fire. This provided heat for cooking, which was done on pots hung out over the fire on irons, and for warming the rest of the interior. Smoke escaped through a large hooded chimney or opening cribbed into the middle of the roof. Between twenty and eighty men occupied such structures, sleeping in two tiers of bunks that ranged around the edge of the shanty, often two to a bed or sometimes in a long line. The structure also contained space for the cook to prepare meals, a desk for the foreman's bookkeeping, and a store chest (or wangan, derived from an Indian word) for supplies the men would purchase against their wages. The only other building in the camp was a 'hovel' or stable for the animals. The word 'camboose' is an anglicized version of the Dutch kaban huis, which described the kitchen deck-house on a sailing ship or on barges in the Low Countries.41 In the English navy such a deck structure was called a cook room, 42 which as we have seen became the name for a building on
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5.5 Camboose shanty. These log structures housed men cutting timber. The essence of the structure was the great pit fireplace at the centre of the structure for heat, light, and cooking.
land that both housed and fed up to forty fishermen in the early, seasonal, Newfoundland fishery. The temporary galleys on the decks of emigrant ships between Ireland and Canada in the 1830s were also known as cambooses; here too a square of bricks held in place by iron brackets protected wooden decks from open fires. Such fire-hearths were dismantled at the end of the voyage, and the bracket irons sold at dockside.48 Similar temporary camboose fires were built for cooking and heating by crews on the huge rafts of timbers that were floated down the Ottawa and St Lawrence rivers to Quebec City. The camboose, an open fire in a temporary building, was clearly associated, as a building type, with a large shanty for cooking and sleeping. The word 'shanty' also has associations with earlier building types. One root would explain it as an Irish word, from sean meaning 'old' and tig meaning 'dwelling': thus a hut or mean dwelling, a slight temporary building. 44 Its use paralleled that of other temporary structures (known as botheys or booleys in Scotland and Ireland), but these were all typically small. Another root sees 'shanty' as derived from the French chantier^3
Housing for Labour 135 meaning work yard, which is also appropriate in that the camp was a work yard for marshalling logs prior to spring drive, or the place where axes were sharpened and sleds repaired. There do not appear to be specific buildings associated with the French word, however. A more appropriate antecedent for these large log shelters in the New World woods would seem to be the cook room of the fishery, or else single-room structures known as 'barracks' or 'lodging shops' which housed up to forty migrant lead miners in the English Pennines during the seventeenth century.'10 The name 'shanty' applied as well to shelter for the early nineteenthcentury coal mining operations in Gape Breton. 4 ' The camboose or cambuse shanty was certainly present in Maine and New Brunswick, and through the St Maurice and Ottawa valleys in Quebec and Ontario from the 1830s.4a When the Minnesota woods were first cut in the 1850s, cambooses, known locally as 'State of Maine' camps,49 were constructed for the lumbermen. As Blegen notes: 'The early St. Croix shanties of the Maine style were single room, all-purpose buildings for cooking, eating, sleeping, drying wet clothes or sitting on the deacon seat, a bench which in some shanties ran the length of the room.''""0 The most westerly Canadian example appears to have been a lumber camp in the Kirkwood, Ontario, area (just east of Sault Ste Marie) on the north shore of Lake Huron; Scots from Glengarry on the Ottawa River built a camboose camp there in 1871.ol The camboose shanty persisted into the first decade of the twentieth century. By the 1870s, a different form of logging camp was beginning to appear. Barrel-shaped stoves replaced the open fire, and camp configurations changed away from the massive one-room structure to a multibuilding complex/'2 Separate structures were built for the men's bunkhouse (also known as the 'men's room' or 'men's part') and for the kitchen-dining area or cook room (figure 5.6). Typically these were built in line with each other on one side of the camp yard, with the stable for horses on the other side. There would also be a separate building for the foreman's office (with space for a clerk's desk and wangan, as well as blinks for the boss, clerk, and visiting sealers), a filer's shack where the saws were sharpened, and a blacksmith's shop. Teamsters might also have their own accommodation. The cook room contained the bunks of the cook and his helper or 'cookee.' According to John Lynn, there was 110 one morphology for camp layout in Maine/'3 although there were certainly regional types. Most often, variations would be in the orientation of bunks in the bunkhouse - either at right angles to the side wall, in which case they were known as muzzle- or end-loaders, or parallel to the wall. There were important regional variations in the placement of bunk-
j.G Dingle shanty, Miramichi, New Brunswick. This building consisted of a sleeping quarter, cook room, and a storage space for gangs of men working in the woods. The cook stands at the 'men's end,' while the other man stands at the door to the 'dingle' or storage section.
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house and cook room in these 'stove shanties.' In some examples in Maine, and certainly in New Brunswick, the ten- or twelve-foot space between the two structures was roofed over, and occasionally walled in on one side. This space was known as a 'dingle.' In it were kept meat carcasses and other food supplies; one member of the kitchen staff was the 'dingle-keeper,' a pantryman of sorts. Entrance to both bunkhouse and cook room might be from this dingle only, thus helping to keep the structures warm, or at least minimize the intrusion of the winter cold. The linguistic roots of 'dingle' as a passageway defined by adjacent structures is obscure,34 though its usual meaning of a small wooded valley (thus like a 'dell') seems appropriate. The dingle, by another name, is the dogtrot, breezeway, or open hallway of houses in the Appalachian south31' or the laithe-houses and longhouses that persisted until the seventeenth century in northern Britain, where men and beasts shared one long building divided by a central breezeway.:lt) Interestingly, the dingle shanty form, and the term, are found in Maine and New Brunswick, and also in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Wyoming,"7 but not, it would seem, in Quebec, Ontario, or Michigan. Whatever its source, its presence again suggests that the specific form is not a unique product of expediency or economic utility, but a practice that has familiarity in earlier housing as well as widespread adaptation in the woods. Another variant on camp form was popular in the Quebec woods, according to evidence gathered for the Price Brothers' operations.:>K Using the oral history of camp builders near Rimouski in the 1930s to argue that the same methods were used well before the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Leoiiidoff describes a camp de bucheron that typically had three components or rooms (rather than employing a linking dingle space), in one long (forty-five by eighteen foot) structure: a camp des homines (or bunkhouse), a cookerie (or dining room), and the office of the jobbeur (figure 5.7). Often parallel to this structure, across a yard, were the ecurie and sheds a Join for the animals. Some of the cookeries also contained beds, a point also made by Belanger for the Gaspesie.' In later camps, prefabricated elements were used for door and window openings, and logs were de-barked if the camp was to be used for several years. Different designs within Quebec seem evident, if one compares illustrations of camps on the Tartigan River from the 1870s with those near Rimouski.''0 Evidently these regional differences were more widespread. Leonidoff documents several extra-long structures which linked camp des homines, cookerie, and office of the jobbeur. In some cases these were over one hundred feet long. Again evidence from the associated material cul-
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5.7 Quebec logging camp layout Within these isolated working communities buildings were suited to precise functions.
ture of the region, namely the distinctive long Quebec barns,61 suggests that regional building tradition spanned both permanent and temporary dwellings. There may be non-francophone sources as well, since very long shanties were recorded in Maine and there was a strong tradition of the connected house in New England during the nineteenth century.' Some French Canadian camps utilized a rounded-roof shanty somewhat like a Maine or New Brunswick potato barn. 63 These were found in Quebec64 but also in Maine and in camps on the north shore of Lake Superior in the 1920s, where French Canadians from the Ottawa Valley worked the Pukaskwa River north of Wawa.Cj Industrial Villages For the most part, shelter for large numbers of workers in mercantile Canada was exclusively related to resource exploitation. Colonial restrictions on local industry helped sustain overseas markets for factories based in the British and French home cities. In the rare instances of early industrial enterprises allowed under colonial government, such as the forge at Saint-Maurice near Trois Rivieres from the 1730s, la grande maison and the workers' houses near the forge seem little different from the landscape
Housing for Labour 139 created by the factor, planter, coal agent, or timber merchant. 00 Similarly, the juxtaposition of merchant, sea captain, and shipbuilding shacks and shops along the Fundy and Atlantic shores brought masters and men into close residential and business worlds. As in the examples reviewed above, the houses for labour were not specifically industrial, but rather products of New World expediency and close approximations of familiar forms in rural Europe. Les Forges du Saint-Maurice was the first site of the Canadian ironmaking industry. Most manufactured products came from France and then Britain, and so its sheer existence is noteworthy. Both cast iron and wrought iron were produced there between 1729 and 1883; English and Quebec-born anglophones took over the works after the conquest. 67 The variety of residential shelter at Les Forges du Saint-Maurice underlines the social system of the mercantile age (figure 5.8). The 'village' embraced both the ironworks and a range of houses from the big house of the director to single-family units for skilled workers, multi-family housing (either a large house divided into distinct units or a detached house that was shared by more than one household), rudimentary cabins (baraque) for tradesmen and day labourers, and huts for the colliers or woodcutters that were little more than log tents covered in sod. But the divides were not absolutely clear. The grande maison was home not just for the director but also the clerk, the merchant, servants, sometimes the chaplain, and, in the attic, journeymen. As was the case with the agent's house in outport Newfoundland, the building was also a storehouse and an office, but in this case also a chapel. It is not surprising then that la grande maison, built of sandstone, was four storeys high and had over thirty rooms, even if one floor was a basement and two were attic levels in the sloping roof.68 Of the other houses, some fourteen were owned by the ironworks for lodging workers and foremen. Seasonal workers came from neighbouring parishes. The complex expanded under anglophone owners. An inventory that was taken in 1807 included the fourteen structures from the 1740s, occupied for the most part by skilled workmen - carpenters, moulder, foreman, quarryman, and filler. Another fourteen dwellings on site were apparently built by day labourers and other workmen themselves. There were also four lodging houses, including one that was one hundred by twenty feet that housed five different households. This spectrum of housing, distinctive in size and materials, was geographically mixed. Seen from the twentieth century's now taken-forgranted spatial separations of social groups, this juxtaposition and proximity truly seems pre-industrial. It echoed, however, proto-industrial patterns found in places such as Merthyr Tydfil in Wales, or Hopewell or
5.8 Les Forges du St-Maurice, Lower Canada. Many rural industrial sites were effectively self-contained 'company towns.' In this case the scene is dominated as much by the great house as by the industrial buildings.
Housing for Labour 141 Cornwall Furnace in Pennsylvania's piedmont,*'9 or Brady's Bend on the Allegheny River in the 1830s, where row houses for skilled Welsh ironworkers and shacks and cabins for labourers cluttered a site around furnace stacks. The charcoal makers' or colliers' huts were the same in Pennsylvania, Quebec, the Forest of Dean, or Carinthia. 70 In both the French regime and later, most workers' quarters were small; half of the houses were two rooms, but shacks were single-room lodgings. For those more than one room large, variable partitions were the norm, and space flexibly used inside. As in many other iron plantations in colonial North America, time was allowed for garden production, hunting, and other activities to enable self-sufficiency. There were some 425 inhabitants in the complex by 1830, and the majority were involved in agricultural and forestry work, unless they had specialized occupations such as furnace keeper, forgeman, or moulder. Another setting for work that was organized at a specific site but that was seasonal, and for all its order had a pre-industrial structure to it, was the making of wooden ships and boats during the mercantile era. Unlike the age of iron and later steel, when shipbuilding required investment in considerable infrastructure at a proper shipyard with a permanent labour force, the age of wooden sailing ships found expression on beaches all along the Atlantic littoral. Skilled carpenters, metal workers, and sailmakers were brought in as needed for specific phases of the making of a vessel. Men skilled in reading standing timber for its likely contribution to aspects of the building process were highly valued as timber agents; for example, the junction of the trunk and the roots could provide strong angled pieces - ship's knees - that tied keel and deck effectively. More mundane labouring roles in the construction crews brought farmers or single men to the coastal setting who were hired on for the winter season. They were often boarded at houses in the village or town. One surviving example of such a larger-than-single-family house is that built by the Palmer family of Dorchester, New Brunswick. This can be seen as a consequence of the need to house crews. Sometimes when a place developed a tradition of shipbuilding, boarding-houses would be needed to shelter several dozen men. These structures were as rudimentary as necessary. They rarely survive to offer a record in today's settlement landscape. Occasionally, one finds examples where houses had ship's knees as braces in the basement, and roofs that were bowed as in the deck of a ship (figure 5.9).71 A good example of a shipbuilding village is the Bay of Fundy community of St Martins, New Brunswick, twenty-five miles east of Saint John. In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, wooden ships accounted
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5.9 House ai Si Martins, New Brunswick. This small house probably housed a ship's carpenter or fisherman. The bow roof on the original half of the house suggests a construction form that owes much to the technique used to cover deckhouses on wooden sailing ships, and many houses along shores of the Bay of Fundy are similarly roofed.
for almost a quarter of all the colony's annual tonnage, and up to eighteen sailing ships were in the ways on her beaches at any one time. Documents found in the Caleb Ward house near the beach record how James Moran built a three-hundred-ton vessel for John Ward and Son, a prominent trader in the New Brunswick-England lumber trade.72 In September of 1814, Moran writes (with bad spelling and syntax) to Ward discussing logistics of wood and construction materials, but also notes, 'in respect of boarding the men this winter as we shall not have a great gain I think we had better board at my house as we can get them to work by sunrise & carry dinner. When I build the shead it will Due for stormy weather to work in.' 7< Six weeks later, as work progressed, the circumstances of shelter change: Mr. Bradshaw says that he will indever to get sum timbers out to keep Mr. Hicks to work at the frames himself alone so you may send him in 14 days from this date. He will have to see to fitting the yard & as there is a better
Housing for Labour 143 chance to hall limber as the snow falls he will gel to it as soon as possible. I shall get a shop built for the yard which will serve as a shop this winter & to lodge & board the men in the summer & to store many artikels that aught to be under cover for wich you will please send boards for.' 1
As we saw earlier, the word 'shop' was used in the English Pennine lead-mining region to describe a place that was both a workshop and a boarding-house, and it is reasonable to imagine the skills of shipbuilders being used to rough up an expedient shelter with boards. The labourers that were to use it seemed to have been part of a floating pool: 'If I find I cannot get men anufe fr the winter I will let you know as I think it not best to get many men untill their is timber to keep them to work, we shall be able to know in a short time. I have 3 men if they do not disapint me. I mink I can get 3 more.'71 He worried also about keeping Mr Hicks away from the rum, to get the ship's frames erected so that carpenters could be hired. The saloons and taverns of 'rum row' were clearly a part of the built environment of this shipbuilding village. If the shop was intended to be used for summer living, the bitter cold and snow of March underlined the need to make it more inhabitable: 'We can keep some more [men] at the house, the shop is covered but there must be a chimbley & other conveniences before we can live there.' ° This must have happened immediately, for when Caleb Ward visited in April, he found them living in the shed rather than boarding with Mr Moran. Sixteen men were working on the ship at that point. Even as masters and caulkers were working, the ship was being loaded with ballast and its first cargo of 150 tons of birch. The square-rigged ship, named the Waterloo in honour of the victory against Napoleon, was launched in November and sailed for Liverpool. Such a rhythm continued year after year along the Fundy and Gulf of St Lawrence shores. Even in small villages where the building of wooden ships might constitute a seasonal activity, the recruitment of men from nearby townships meant the need for a temporary housing solution. Shipbuilders like Gideon Palmer of Dorchester housed men as boarders in a large dwelling opposite his shipyard, and this pattern was no doubt repeated in other places of like scale. Fingard notes that every port had its crimping shops and other port-related shelter for sailors between voyages,77 but we have little evidence today of the tremendous volumes of men and materiel used to build the sailing fleets for the likes of Ward or Cunard. The ephemeral shops, like the ephemeral camboose, were expedient shelter for contract gang labour. Only when Canadian labour turned to the land, for subsistence farming as an adjunct to employment
144 The Era of Mercantile Capitalism in one or other of the resource sectors, was there any degree of replication of European society. Then the forms of their shelter show continuity and evolution of antecedent forms, rather than radically new dwelling types that were the product of New World circumstances. It is in accommodation for large work crews, often mobile, migratory, and seasonal, that economic necessity moulds new forms - and even there with important cultural modifiers.
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PART TWO
Canadian Housing during the Era of Industrial Capitalism
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CHAPTER SIX
The Self-Conscious House
In the transition from a mercantile and agrarian society to one that was shaped more by urban and industrial development, Canada only slowly and only partially gained the domestic architectural exuberances often associated with Victorian wealth and confidence. Whether this was due to a lack of generational continuity in wealth, or to a persistence of the Scots-Presbyterian ethos, or to the fact that the Canadian economy was far smaller than that of the two industrial giants, Britain and the United States, it is certainly clear that there are only a few dozen houses that truly stand out as self-conscious statements of individual wealth. In their lee, there are perhaps a couple of hundred others that gain note by their juxtaposition one to another in creating elite neighbourhoods of the country's major urban areas. No real Canadian indigenous architectural tradition developed in the period of industrial and corporate capitalism, at least with respect to domestic architecture. No Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Norman Shaw, or C.F.A. Voysey stands out.1 In large part this was because there were insufficient clients. Historically the Canadian elite had been managers - colonial administrators, Hudson's Bay factors, managers of transnational corporations such as the General Mining Association, agents for lumber or fish merchants - and in the period of national expansion after Confederation, the forces of metropolitan dominance of the Canadian economy made most regional elites merely managers of operations based in Toronto, Montreal, or the United States.2 In 1913, the Grain Growers' Guide published a list of the fifty leading 'plutocrats' in Canada whom they regarded as having an undue influence in running the country; twenty were in Toronto, twenty were in Montreal, and the other ten were scattered across the rest of the country!'1 Little
150 The Era of Industrial Capitalism wonder that there are no really elaborate houses in Sydney, Nova Scotia, despite the coal mines and the steel mill, or in Trail, British Columbia, despite the presence of the Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company smelter. Canada's railroads had regional superintendents in the Maritimes, the Prairies, and British Columbia, and many of the American- or British-financed resource companies ran their Canadian operations with managers as well. Only in Montreal and Toronto were there significant clusters of wealth, associated with the owners of domestic manufacturing, retailers, railroads, and utilities. In Montreal, the so-called Golden Square Mile on the lower slopes of Mount Royal developed as a cluster of mansions that resembled Tuscan villas, Florentine palaces, or Highland castles where British-style society events were staged about a mile from the financial district along St James Street.1 In Toronto, a more dispersed set of elite districts -Jarvis Street initially, Queen's Park then Rosedale and the Annex, and escarpment settings along the exposed shoreline of glacial Lake Iroquois - reflected the growing industrial and financial strength of Ontario's capital city. Winnipeg's Wellington Crescent housed those who prospered from that city's function as the gateway to the west, and Vancouver's Shaughnessy and Victoria's Uplands would develop early-twentieth-century concentrations of mansions that reflected the successes of British Columbia's resource-based capitalists. Elsewhere, the houses of local elites such as the Conkley house in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, the Labbatt and Goodhue houses in London, or Pat Burns's house in Calgary, stood in a more isolated manner appropriate to the relative paucity of a local capital base." The standards for marking exuberance or taste broadened to include American as well as the British or European models which had long been associated with Canadian elites of the mercantile era. Canada was becoming far more of a North American country in the latter third of the nineteenth century and first part of the twentieth. Railroads and then roads bound interaction north and south as much as east and west. In some regions the north-south axis was more convenient than that to other Canadian regions. Enterprises, especially those in the new mass-produced consumer industries and also the financial sector, followed models of business being refined in New York, Chicago, or other American cities. The taste-making industry, brash and extravagant, promoted items of furnishing and decorative art that could be piled up for conspicuous display, and a sequence of new architectural shells were developed for displaying new-found wealth and confidence. 6 Many of these new ideas came north. As Eric Arthur has observed of Toronto: 'many streets in the Annex and
The Self-Conscious House 151 much of St. George Street are still evidence of a period of taste that led us to Northern Italy by way of Chicago." Those inspirations from south of the border are important for another reason, since it was American models of architectural and social lone that were diluted into a pattern-book vernacular for middle-class housing on both sides of the border. There were few instances where a Canadian selfconscious house provided a model for cheaper Canadian copies. More to the point is a transfiguration of those American models when they came north. There is a dour baronial quality to much of this architecture, as if it should be saved for an even colder day in the Canadian north. Whatever the relative originality or elegance of Canadian self-conscious houses compared with their American cousins, these massive structures nonetheless had important local impacts. They were a visible marker of a restructuring of spatial order in Canadian society. Whereas masters and men, merchants and artisans, seigneurs and farmers had lived in relative proximity and often in socially mixed neighbourhoods, there now began to develop a more deliberate separation of social groups, and this was initiated by the retreat of the elite from their central-city locations. Houses were located in more spacious garden settings, and the journey to work was by horse and carriage and then later by chauffeured automobile. Lower-density neighbourhoods evolved that were more homogeneous than those in place at the middle of the nineteenth century. Middle-class suburbanization followed in the wake of this compartmentalization, more clearly defining the city along class or occupational lines. In Montreal, the shift away from downtown involved a move westward and to elevated lands. After mid-century, merchants and industrialists exchanged homes in terraced rows on the lower slopes of Mount Royal for more ornate and individual mansions that edged up the mountain. This area had first been colonized by men who made fortunes as fur traders and exporters of wheat and timber, such as James McGill with his country home, Burnside, Simon McTavish's 126-foot-front chateau, and William McGillivray's Chateau St-Antoine. A later generation of merchants who had benefited from the 'carrying trades' — Ottawa Valley timber, export wheat, shipping lines, or related processing industries such as breweries or sugar mills - added a second round of mansions to the area. John Molson bought and updated merchant John Torrance's Belmont Hall with its six hundred acres of grounds, John Redpath built the Gothic Terrance Bank in 1861, and Hugh Allen built the enormous Ravenscrag on part of the old McTavish lands in 1863. Ravenscrag began a trend of Italianate-style mansions for the next thirty years, but few could come
152 The Era of Industrial Capitalism close to the size and cost of Allen's mansion, whose 'thick walls, loggias, columns, hipped and gabled roofs, ornate stonework and square, seventyfoot central tower, resembled a 15th-century Tuscan villa.'8 Allen reflected the transition from carrying trades to modern corporate capital, integrating finance, industry, and transportation into a powerful fortune that then sought a social setting worthy of visiting English royalty. Others of his generation also sought fanciful Scottish or ancient names for their homes, such as lononteh, Braehead, and Dilcoosha. As the slopes of Mount Royal filled in, a third generation of ScottishMontreal capital made their mark, especially the Bank of Montreal directors involved with the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Donald Smith bought an existing mansion and remodelled it three times in French and Scottish styles to produce a three-storey Gothic castle with battlements and turrets; George Stephen built a palatial Italianate Renaissance house with a block-long English garden that allowed him to 'outentertain' Hugh Allen's Ravenscrag; Richard Angus built a house that reminded visitors of bankers' houses in Scotland, and Douglas Mclntyre built in Scottish Baronial. George Drmmnond and Henry Holt, two other corporate giants, chose the area as well. Donald Mackay observes that while this concentration of wealth placed Sherbrooke Street on a par with New York's Fifth Avenue, it had more in common with London's Knightsbridge or Edinburgh's Princes Street.9 British fashions and Edwardian attitudes persisted well after the First World War. New-money arrivistes went to Westmount, the other elite suburb further west. In Toronto, social separation and outmigration from the central core had begun early. The 'park lots' north of Queen Street on the east and the zone west of town - an area which by the 1840s became known as the 'Liberties' - had long been home for members of the Family Compact; artisans and craftsmen were largely south of Queen Street. By the 1840s the heyday of the Family Compact was drawing to a close and many found it desirable, or financially necessary, to subdivide their holdings. The case of the churlish and inept superintendent of the Indian Department, Samuel Jarvis, illustrates this process.10 Jarvis found himself embarrassed in the mismanagement of his governmental affairs and was forced to subdivide his park lot in 1845-6. The result was Jarvis Street, a well-situated stretch of new residential land located between Queen and Bloor streets, which in subsequent decades, as it attracted members of the capitalist elite, came to be known as the 'Champs Eh/sees' of Toronto. In the 1850s, as the city expanded its manufacturing importance in a period of agrarian prosperity and railway building in Ontario, the iner-
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6.1 Oaklands, Toronto. Built in 1860 for Senator John Macdonald, this house sits on the Avenue Road hill overlooking the older section of Toronto. At the time of building, its semi-rural setting and prospect established a means for the elite to separate themselves from the city and its toiling masses.
chants and bankers and manufacturers moved their homes further north into these newly subdivided lands. The distances seem small by today's standards: a half-mile of Jarvis Street was built on by 1858; a mile to the west lay Queen's Park, opened in 1860, and it was soon edged by notable homes; and a further half-mile to the west and north of Queen's Park was the Annex area east of Spadina. Thereafter attention turned both to later park-lot subdivisions in Rosedale (named after Jar vis's house), and to areas north of Bloor Street. The latter location provided the suitable prospect for John Macdonald, a leading dry goods merchant and patronbenefactor of a recently arrived storekeeper - Timothy Eaton. Macdonald built. Oaklands in 1860, which now survives as de la Salle High School (figure 6.1); further west was James Austin's Spadina House, built in 1866
154 The Era of Industrial Capitalism on the site of the home of a doyen of the Family Compact - W.W. Baldwin. 11 Expansion into these areas proceeded haltingly, however, and for several years what were later to become fashionable avenues were little more than rough streets under development. It was not until the 1870s and 1880s that a sense of grandeur could be claimed. By this time Jarvis Street, for example, was the site for such selfconscious residences as the twenty-five room Euclid Hall, the house of Hart Massey. Massey was the president and manager of Massey Manufacturing, makers of farm implements and a company on its way to becoming in the 1880s one of the principal jewels in Toronto's, and indeed in Canada's, industrial crown. Interestingly, the house, remodelled after Massey purchased the McMaster property in 1882, took its name from Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio, where Hart Massey had lived for twelve years.12 By 1890 Massey's two sons had built houses of their own on nearby lots, and other younger members of the industrial clique were building in the area. For example: George Gooderham, Jr, son of a distilling magnate, and Joseph Flavelle, later to be Sir Joseph Flavelle, built substantial residences on the street.1'* At the same time, areas near the university developed as new nodes of status. George Gooderham, Sr, had moved to the corner of St George and Bloor streets by 1891 to occupy a very large redbrick Queen Anne mansion, 14 and Sir Joseph Flavelle, who had made his fortune first in meat-packing then in groceries, banking, and insurance, relocated in 1901 to Holwood (a porticoed Edwardian Georgian mansion) on Queen's Park Drive. Retail magnate Timothy Eaton moved to a turreted mansion on Lowther Avenue in the Annex in 1889, and in the same year Edmund Walker, president of the Bank of Commerce, bought Long Garth on St George Street, another brick Queen Anne with a remarkable garden. Although architectural historians have focused on these houses because of the prominent role that their owners played in the development of Toronto's industrial and financial power base, from our perspective of developing a more inclusive historical geography, two points are worth noting. The immediate neighbours of these houses, especially in the Annex and Queen's Park area, and even in Rosedale, include many comparatively modest middle-class houses. The Toronto pattern of closely built streetscapes, with little side yard and rarely, in the Victorian era at least, a sense of spacious estates, diminishes the aura of many plutocrats' houses. Secondly, few of these houses matched the exuberance or presence of the Montreal mansions of the Square Mile, and it is tempting
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to compare the Methodist and philanthropic tendencies of the Toronto nionied elite of this period with those of the more exuberant Montreal money in what was still Canada's premier industrial and financial centre. 1:) The exception to this pattern developed further north along the rising ground of an old glacial shoreline, where John Eaton built Arnwold on Walrner Road in 1909, near Austin's Spadina; real-estate developer Simeon Jane built the opulent Benvenuto across from Senator Macdonald's Oaklands; both were on parts of what was by then Senator William McMaster's Rathnelly estate. Towering above them all on this height of land was Henry Pellatt's Casa Loma (discussed below). Later iterations of imposing estates existed beyond the city and included the thirty-room chateauesque pile, Lady Eaton Hall, north of Toronto on the Eaton garden farm, which supplied their store; Massey's Tudor-styled Devonia in Scarborough to the east of Toronto, and the Walker summer house on Lake Simcoe. There are no other places in Canada that come close to the opulence found in Montreal and Toronto during the era of industrial and corporate capitalism. Halifax and Saint John had hardly grown at all in the fifty years following Confederation, and significant portions of their mercantile elites moved their base of operation to Montreal and Toronto. The most vivid symbol of this diminished role was the relocation, by 1901, of the Halifax-based Royal Bank to Montreal and the Bank of Nova Scotia to Toronto; these two central Canadian cities being viewed as the more appropriate centres for concentrating national industrial and resource development.10 Quebec City, Ottawa, and Hamilton, together with London and Windsor, grew noticeably in the industrial period, but were increasingly production sites of multi-locational enterprises that managed their corporate empires from Montreal and Toronto. Some merchant families ensured that the housing they created for family members in the field achieved the standards of taste and scale found in Montreal. A Molson house in Kingston, for example, stands in a row of other pretentious mansions stretching along the lake away from the old colonial town (figure 6.2). In western Canada, most urban places with the exception of Winnipeg and Vancouver were relatively small, and their key economic sectors similarly were managed from Montreal, Toronto, or an American city. Usually it took a generation of growth for a local elite to reach the critical mass that could support distinctive suburban settings. Here and there one or two conspicuous houses might appear in, say, Lethbridge or Moose Jaw,
156 The Era of Industrial Capitalism
6.2 Molson mansion, Kingston, Ontario. The Molson family had banking, grain merchant, and brewing interests throughout the Canadas in the nineteenthcentury, and members of the clan were deployed to oversee these interests. In style this house is unlike others in Kingston in the period. Rather, it reproduces a style that was more common among Montreal's 'Square Mile' elite, to which the family belonged.
but they would have been no more than a part of the backdrop of a broader middle-class speculative housing episode in Toronto's Annex or Montreal's Westmount. In the larger urban places, land development companies often produced instant prestigious subdivisions ahead of any construction, providing a setting of curving streets, tree-lined boulevards, large lot sizes, and architectural controls in an effort to invent a local equivalent of the older, gradually established, elite neighbourhoods of Montreal or Toronto. Winnipeg's elite, for example, were attracted to enclaves along the rivers awav from the congested downtown and the dense North End, which
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lay literally and figuratively beyond the tracks. The Red River peninsula of Armstrong's Point in the West End was packaged as the 'Faubourg St. Germain, the most fashionable drive in the city,' 1 ' where castles, not homes, were the norm, and south, across the Assiniboine River, Crescentwood was defined by river lots extending back three hundred feet from Wellington Crescent, a street that hugged the meandering curves of the river. Building restrictions that controlled the minimum value of housing on those large lots guaranteed the area's exclusivity, which was soon home to leading western merchants and politicians such T. Sharpe and J.H. Ashdown. 18 In Calgary, the CPR's Mount Royal subdivision was distinctive - 'huge mansions were set on spacious lots on specially contoured thoroughfares' 19 - and in Edmonton, the north bank of the Saskatchewan River provided preferred settings for a few wealthy families. Vancouver grew as the Pacific terminal city for the Canadian Pacific Railway after 1886 and quickly became a centre for employment in sawmilling and salmon canning as well as management of the logging and coal- and hard-rock-mining areas in the province. The managers and proprietors of this resource-rich province quickly filled the gridded streets of the West End, the ten blocks lying west of downtown towards Stanley Park, with architect-designed wooden houses mostly in the Queen Anne style. The neighbourhood's main thoroughfare, Georgia Street, was 'blueblood alley' for the CPR executives, and other streets were home to leading lumber magnates such as John Hendry or sugar refiner Rogers.20 Encroachment by apartments began after 1900, however, and wealthier families began to move south to Shaughnessy Heights. This exclusive subdivision, located south of False Creek across the Granville Street Bridge, was laid out by the CPR following plans developed by Montreal landscape architect Frederick Todd. Not surprisingly, many streets were named for CPR officials. Between 1909 and 1914 several large mansions were built on large lots. Many adopted a half-timbered Tudor Revival style, which blended in with picturesque garden plantings, treed boulevards, and open spaces of the subdivision to create a world apart from the smoky industrial city below. Further phases of growth in Shaughnessy during the 1920s and 1930s took place on carefully released limited segments of the CPR tract, thus continuing the evolution of a wealthy enclave. Several other sites were available away from the West End and downtown, notably a series of stunning shoreline settings along roads close to the north arid southwest edges of the Point Grey peninsula. In Victoria, a city of only twenty thousand in 1901 arid not double that by 1921, the presence of the provincial government and retired British
158 The Era of Industrial Capitalism Navy and Army officers, together with owners of fish, coal, and lumber industries on Vancouver Island, helped to produce a set of neighbourhoods and individual estates on a par with those in Vancouver, and occasionally, with those of their central Canadian counterparts in Montreal and Toronto. The James Bay district - south of the Colonial Administration (and later Legislative) Buildings and west of Beacon Hill Park - had been built on in the decades after 1858, but had insufficient space for the post-railroad-era industrialists who looked east towards Oak Bay. The tone of that eastward area was set by Gary Castle, the seat of the colonial governor, first erected in 1860 and rebuilt in 1903 for the lieutenant-governor. But it was Craigdarroch Castle, a remarkable Scottish baronial pile set in twenty-seven acres of formal gardens, that gave the area its real cachet. The latter was built between 1885 and 1890 for Robert Dunsmuir, whose wealth was initially in coal but later in railways, steamships, and ironworks. Fixed by these two social keystones, the area of Oak Bay became an appropriate setting for the 'English country manse, the rambling ancestral mansion of the New World, new-made, "country squire."' 21 A projected capstone for these businessmen's country seats was to be the garden-city residential subdivision, the Uplands Estate, laid out in 1908 according to plans by John Olmsted; however, sales of lots suffered in the depression prior to the Great War with only fourteen houses being built by 1914.22 The same process of spatial sifting occurred in smaller towns as well. In the nascent industrial town of Amherst, Nova Scotia, for example, a once, relatively eclectic neighbourhood was reworked with the rapid onset of urbanization: the capitalists moved out to the northeast, along Victoria Street, followed by the middle class, while new enclaves of workers' housing spread southwest beyond the intercolonial rail line and adjacent to the factories. Few towns epitomized the phrase 'the other side of the tracks' as did Amherst (figure 6.3).2'* The self-conscious house, wherever it was built across Canada, was a more social house. Inside, restructured spaces were venues for a more overtly haute society. The importance of large entrance halls, dining rooms, drawing rooms, and libraries increased, as if somehow the retreat from the city relocated elements of the club and the institutional library inside the house. Perhaps it was a function of the uncertainty the occupants felt about their new-found wealth and social position. Opulence would compensate for pedigree. Formal social rules for entertaining, visiting, hosting 'at homes' and soirees developed, stiffly animated, one suspects, in rooms that, compared to those of earlier generations, were overly large.' 1
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6.3 Queen Anne house, Amherst, Nova Scotia. As many small Canadian provincial towns underwent industrialization, the local oligarchy of owners and managers vied with each other to produce large and pretentious housing for themselves and to separate their neighbourhood from those of their workers. This house sits on a street that is a remarkable testament to this pattern of behaviour.
Recent scholarship informed by feminist perspectives has begun to reanalyse these houses with a view to identifying a set of distinctly gendered spaces.20 Exclusively masculine areas received prominence in layout, with gentlemen's smoking rooms, billiard rooms, libraries, and the like as spaces where hunting trophies could be displayed. The social historian Peter Stearns sees these settings as places where male identity, under crisis in a period when managers and industrial owners were divorced from manual labour and all the historical criteria of male
160 The Era of Industrial Capitalism strength and skill, was reinvented. The new expression of manliness for the upper middle class came through prowess in sports, and these male lairs were appropriate (thus important) architectural settings to be integrated into the new house.20 Spaces for women were equally clear, but, by contrast, far less public.2 The drawing room was the place that the ladies 'withdrew' to after dinner, while the men smoked or played billiards, and it was to be decorated in a more delicate and ladylike fashion. The breakfast or morning room, and the boudoir (next to the bedroom and never entered without an invitation), were the only exclusively feminine spaces in the grand house. An almost separate, private house existed upstairs.28 Even though an impressive staircase might link the entrance hall (often with an oversized hearth and inglenook seating that conjured a manorial feel upon entering) to the world upstairs, this upper space was decidedly set apart and mysterious. In fact, these houses were far too codified and given to formal social ritual to be 'dwellings' in the folk sense of the word, which conveys an intimacy born out of space constraints. Wealth was evident in elaborate wooden trim in mantels, staircases, and door surrounds, the ornateness of glassware and marble, and the clutter of paintings that looked like an art gallery stockroom by today's spare taste. From the outside, theses houses looked even bigger than they were. Elaborate entrances - portes cocheres to shelter people alighting from carriages - glassed conservatories, verandas, and terraces extended the limits of the house, and estate gardens, sometimes with servant's lodge and stables, magnified the separateness of such houses from the city. In an era of dynamic restructuring of urban and regional economies, the architectural shells for such social intercourse varied considerably. A bewildering range of architectural styles was explored in which the common denominator might be seen as a search for historical association by the nouveau riche. Elements of many periods were juxtaposed in a new manner; many materials were used at the same time, and silhouettes vied to be more eye-catching than the houses of their competitors. Broadly then, for our purposes in the pages below, the period was one marked by an explicit eclecticism in which there was at once a cavalier historicism used for a blustery present and an even better future; and a period of academic correctness, restated for the comforts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, an era when architects and designers created forms which attempted to cultivate an image of rural gentility, thus disguising industrial wealth with the images of a pre-industrial world. Our treatment of self-conscious houses is deliberately less detailed than many treatments by
The Self-Conscious House 161 architectural historians, since our purpose is to position them at one point on the spectrum of shelter, a relational fix to help us understand the more vernacular folk and industrial shelter that was built in the same period. The Styles of Eclecticism By the 1890s the innovative originators of this succession of styles were mainly American. Architectural firms such as H.H. Richardson, Bruce Price, Daniel Burnham, and McKim, Mead and White, among others, generated commissions that were widely published and thus served as prototypes for less prominent architects to adapt and copy. An emerging Canadian cadre of architects, 29 including William Thomas, John James Browne, E. and W.S. Maxwell in Montreal, and Edward James Lennox, Frank Darling, John Pearson, and Edmund Burke in Toronto received important residential as well as commercial and institutional commissions. Important architects appeared even in some selected smaller cities. For example, George Durand in London built for merchants such as Goodhue (Waverly, 1882) and brewers such as John Labbatt (Erdiang, 1882) and others 'who proclaimed their affluence in ostentatiously large and imposing residences.'30 There were also some important British ideas, especially of Edwardian gentility and country-like Arts and Crafts, that influenced self-conscious house design. In British Columbia, Francis Rattenbury 31 and R. Mackay Fripp were notable mediators of British taste. Samuel Maclure, trained in Philadelphia and influenced by some dimensions of Frank Lloyd Wright's Prairie style, was perhaps the most successful at harnessing the English Arts and Crafts and the yearning for a country seat, by means of his Tudor Revival commissions in Vancouver and Victoria.32 It is easy to overemphasize the architecture associated with the homes of the rich and famous in the era of industrial capitalism. Since the wealthy could afford architects to design distinctive and unique shapes and masses, and the best of materials for exteriors and interiors alike, any subset of self-conscious houses hardly stands as a generic model for others of their ilk, whether it is a similar time period, or region, or resource sector, or ethnic origin group, or political affiliation. During the mercantile era, especially for the houses of colonial officials, the stable tenets of classical design led to a persistence of silhouette and massing across regions and among individuals. In the era of industrial exploitation, however, architectural eclecticism was the norm.
162 The Era of Industrial Capitalism Although Canada did not have any real chateaux or Beaux-Arts palaces such as the Vanderbilts' Biltmore or the Breakers of Newport, Rhode Island, there was Sir Henry Pellatt's Casa Loma (Spanish for 'House on the Hill') in Toronto. This was a studied composite of several European castle elements, combined in the largest house in Canada on an estate that included a stable court, greenhouses, and a lodge. Alan Gowans summarizes Casa Loma: 'Architecturally, it is a great witness to the supersession of the High Victorian architecture by archaeological correctness, reversion to specific symbolism, and grandiose bombast of the academic Late Victorian.' 33 More than that, though, for later generations it is an architectural morality play. Pellatt made his money in hydroelectricity from Niagara Falls and in utilities, and lost it in the last bank failure for fifty years. It did him little good that the doors were exact copies of some Italian hall, or a room a replica of one in Windsor Castle, that one tower was Scottish, another Norman. It was an 'image of overwhelming lavishness, limitless luxury'3'1 that hindsight smugly denies. The same morality surrounds coal baron Robert Dunsmuir's Craigdarroch in Victoria, a wedding present for his Scottish wife and her home as a widow soon thereafter (figure 6.4). Both had rooms for entertaining that outdid anything the lieutenant-governors could offer, 3 ' but both have a hollow ring to them. Such buildings were attempts to connect with the power elite of yore - the English country estate, the Loire chateau, the castle on the Rhine. But in Canada there were few people willing to act out such fantasies. The closest opportunity was provided in the Alberta foothills, where English gentry did indeed participate in lifestyles that were leisurely and landed. The ranches of the early cattle barons were initially substantial log structures, such as the Bedingfeld Ranch west of High River, and were replaced by manorial piles. The William Roper Hull ranch, built in 1892 for a wealthy rancher and meat producer, became the country estate of another famous rancher and meat-packer, Pat Burns, in 1902. Both had urban houses in the estate part of Calgary, but the ranch beyond was more to their liking. S() Polo was the preferred sport. There was a contingent of ex-British Indian Army types in the ranching community, and they also sought to replicate a life of leisure and privilege on the other side of the mountains. Ranching ventures in the Cariboo, orchards in the Okanagan and Kootenays, and hobby farming on Vancouver Island, all were opportunities to act out life as landed gentry in British Columbia.37 Certain summer resorts became by virtue of their clientele rather fashionably chic locations in which to spend the summer, and by the end of
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6.4 Craigdarroch, Victoria, British Columbia. Built for Robert Dunsmuir as a baronial castle, this house dramatically punctuated the housing landscape of Victoria in 1889. As perhaps the leading capitalist of Vancouver Island, Dunsmuir had made his fortune exploiting Chinese and other workers in his coal mining, railroad building, and other operations.
the century, several prominent members of the North American financial and industrial elite were building their own summer villas in places like St Andrews, New Brunswick,H8 north of the popular Maine coastal settings like Bar Harbor (and Mount Desert favoured by Rockefeller), or Murray Bay and nearby Pointe au Pic, Quebec.:w The origins of this Quebec resort date to the 1830s when cruise ships first began to bring visitors anxious to savour not only the rustic charms of the St Lawrence's north shore but also its equally picturesque habitant population. Increasingly, after the 1870s, visitors might spend a part of the season in one or other of the hotels built to cater to this trade, and by 1899 several large houses had been constructed for families like the Blakes of Toronto, the Tafts of Cincinnati, the Cabots of Boston, and many prominent members of the francophone elite of Montreal. Styling itself the 'Newport of the North,' the resort could back its boast with summer houses built in the gamut of
164 The Era of Industrial Capitalism American colonial revival styles as well as the then-fashionable Shingle Style. Prominent American architects such as Charles F. McKim and Canadian architects such as Louis-August Amos, a champion of the Beaux-Arts style, found commissions from among the wealthy summer residents, and as the twentieth century progressed the settlement accumulated a diversity of romantic neo-Norman chateaux. However much these summer contacts threw Canadians and Americans together, it is noteworthy that several innovative American forms did not really take hold in Canada. The Shingle Style was diluted in Canada compared to nearby New England; some of the best examples of the style - large houses, with a mix of picturesque elements and variegated skyline, wrapped in the simplicity and informality of shingle weathering - were summer homes for Boston and New York money along the New England coastline from Mount Desert and Portland, Maine, through to places like Narragansett and Newport, Rhode Island, as well as suburban settings such as Tuxedo near Philadelphia or Hudson Valley settings north of New York.40 The involvement of American engineers and architects in the making of the CPR and its stations meant that this regional architecture was familiar, and indeed it was used for managers and superintendents of the CPR in Winnipeg and Vancouver between 1886 and 1905. It also was absorbed, along with elements of the earlier Queen Anne fondness for turrets and verandas, into a fashionable design for prominent businessmen and politicians in many towns and cities, such as the Hammond house in Sackville, New Brunswick (figure 6.5). The designs developed by the Maritime architect William Critchlow Harris for clients in Charlottetown and Summerside, Prince Edward Island, and in the Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia show an interesting progression from mansard Second Empire mansions in the 1870s to Queen Anne in the 1880s and then to Shingle Style in the 1890s and after. Among the latter, Harris updated in 1901 a mid-century rectangular house for Sir Frederick Borden in Canning, Nova Scotia, by adding a large arched veranda with a large round tower at one end and an octagonal gazebo at the other, the whole clad in shingles." Harris, best known for his Gothic Revival churches in Prince Edward Island, also added round shingled towers as prominent features to three Presbytery houses that he designed. This deliberate mixing of shapes and silhouettes, of materials and trim, seems formulaic and almost vernacular when seen in different cities across the country. In all cases, the architect's intention for the local client was to indulge a sense of importance and to conjure a sense of the fantastic. It is these Queen Anne or Shingle Style houses that were
The Self-Conscious House
165
6.5 Hammond House, Sackville, New Brunswick. John Hammond was a prominent arlist well known for his paintings of maritime and marine settings. For many years he lived in Sackville as instructor of painting at Mount Allison Ladies' College, and he built at least two houses, both of which reveal a particular penchant for the Arts and Crafts modes then becoming popular. This house was designed by his son-in-law, the Toronto architect Edmund Burke, and embodies elements of the Shingle Style.
labelled 'castles not houses' in Winnipeg, just as they had been along the Intercolonial in places such as Amherst, Nova Scotia, or at the end of the rail in Vancouver's West End during the 1880s.'12 For the most part these structures were built of wood, as the styles required, but if they were compared to similarly turreted houses in Toronto or Montreal, built in brick or stone with elaborate terra-cotta decorative brick trim, the distinction between core and periphery would be clearly seen. The Shingle Style, and the Queen Anne before it, harked back to colonial days as industrialists and their architects searched for an appropriately non-industrial setting for home life and social entertainment. Other revivalist styles that were popular in the United States included the Spanish Mission and the California Bungalow. In the United States, the self-
1(56 The Era of Industrial Capitalism conscious end of the spectrum (grand mansions with many verandas and porches, some intended for sleeping and others as semi-outdoor eating areas) is best characterized by the firm of Greene and Greene, whose designs include the winter homes built for the likes of Cincinnati industrialist Gamble in Pasadena. 48 In Canada, even on the west coast, there were few high-style examples (even though, as we shall see in chapter 8, the vernacular form of the California bungalow was exceptionally popular in its pattern-book dilution). Perhaps this reflected the reality of the colder northwest contrasted to the winter warmth of Pasadena, and the fact that few central Canadian elites saw Vancouver or Victoria as winter or retirement settings. Muskoka, Murray Bay, Campobello Island, and the New England coast provided suitable destinations that were far closer. The stucco and tile of the Spanish Mission style similarly failed to find ostentatious support. 44 Styles that had more popularity, especially in the early twentieth century, were various revivals, two of which had distinctive impact. One was generally classical in form, drawing from Georgian English inspiration and the American south. The other might be called 'Stockbroker Tudor."1:> Both struck a responsive chord for entrepreneurs and managerial classes across the country. Revivalist Styles
For our purposes, there was one element of revivalist styling - which included colonial, Spanish, Dutch, and Norman - that seems disproportionately popular for the wealthy and was copied widely by the middle class. The Tudor Revival, notably in British Columbia but also in elite neighbourhoods in early twentieth-century Winnipeg and Toronto, connected with the Britishness that was still Canada in the industrial age. This too involved an American filter of English taste - Tudor styling was popular throughout the continent, and just as evident in the mansion that Goodyear Rubber founder Frank Seiberling built in Akron, Ohio,40 or the Tudor mansions of the Main Line districts of suburban Philadelphia 1 ' as it was in a province that was especially attractive to British settlers. Whereas Tudor was but one of many revivalist styles for American consumption, it did strike a distinctive cultural chord in British Columbia.48 Victoria was the provincial capital, and in addition to the legislative buildings, the English social landscape included tea parties at Government House, the Empress Hotel, and many homes that had extensive gardens.19 Esquimau, west of the Inner Harbour, was home to the British
The Self-Conscious House 167 Navy's North Pacific squadron, and the countryside outside Victoria especially in the Saanich peninsula, was home to ex-Indian Army types able to live a life of leisure in an invented rural English setting rather than return to the more constrained possibilities in an industrialized Britain. Resource barons who had 'made their fortunes and wished to withdraw from the rude bustle of the mining and commercial centres' also sought association with this court-like setting/'0 If Victoria was the political capital, Vancouver was undeniably the commercial capital once the CPR completed its transcontinental railroad to the terminal city in 1886. It was the management node for most of the province's resource-based economy, and owners and managers sought Vancouver home settings appropriate for their station/'1 The veneer of that wealth in a city of predominantly English immigrants was English Tudor/'2 Samuel Maclure is the architect most closely associated with the British Columbia interpretation of Tudor Revival, and architectural historians regard him 'as the peer of Maybeck or the brothers Green in California. '°3 Some of his work with architect Cecil C. Fox echoes the Arts and Crafts stylings of the English architect C.F.A. Voysey, while others that are characterized by the cross-axial plan and overhanging roofs show a close understanding of the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. Often these houses had a stone ground floor, and the second storey was half-timbered, but sometimes sections were covered with shingles and clapboards, the multiple surfaces suggesting a manor built over several generations rather than in an instant. Porches and terraces added to the variegated outline (figure 6.6) Inside, these designs conjured the feeling of a great hall, echoing a medieval house, with a fireplace and inglenook to make a homey impression, and with a galleried upper floor that used a grand staircase as transition between the social space of the ground floor and the more private family space above. Servant and kitchen wings were typically placed at one end of the entrance hall, with great dining rooms and morning rooms at the other. In Vancouver, several Tudor Revival examples (for lawyer A.E. Tulk, timber magnate John Hendry, and newspaper publisher Walter Nichol) are Shaughnessy landmarks/' 1 so much so that they are almost synonymous with that garden suburb/''' Large Maclure-designed mansions on generous estates were to be found along or near Marine Drive, which edges the Point Grey peninsula (Abathua for J.S. Rear, Thorley Park for E.P. Gilman, and Kanakla for E. Davis), offering stunning views of the sea and coastal mountain.' )(> In Victoria, Maclure designed several great mansions in the Rockland district, as well as Uplands, and his commissions reached a pinnacle with the new
168 The Era of Industrial Capitalism
6.6 Tudor Revival mansion, Vancouver. Designed by the Vancouver architect Samuel Maclure, the dwelling employs echos of the Tudor style. It also integrates eclectically Arts and Crafts and Californian influences.
Lieutenant-Governor's House of 1903 (Gary Castle, designed with P.M. Rattenbury), then the later Hatley Park, inspired in part by the Warwickshire, England, medieval pile Compton Wynyates, for another member of the Dunsmuir family.''7 British Columbia was not the only place where this English motif received emphasis. In Toronto's Kingsway scheme, a western suburb along the Humber River started by real-estate developer Home Smith, the English country-estate look was preferred, and half-timbered houses were its prominent signature. :>H In the northern suburbs of Rosedale, Deer Park, the Annex, and Wychwood Park, the architect Eden Smith honed his 'Canadian Domestic Revival style' through 'the design of a seemingly British house, drawn directly from the vocabularies of Voysey, Shaw, Webb and other well-known English architects, but reformed and marketed in Toronto as a distinctly Canadian house-type. >; ' 9 In the case of Wychwood Park, winding roads, paths, and gates consciously offered a bit of Old England for wealthy Torontonians. bl After all the lofty villas and cottages promoted and popularized by Asher, Downing, Comstock, Hodgson, et al., post-war suburban Cape Cod or 'ranch'-style houses seemed to have come full circle to the size arid appearance of the far earlier folk houses. Critically, however, the floor plans had radically changed, life being lived in and outside the house in a totally different manner from before, and using construction materials that became increasingly beyond the capacity of the owner to fabricate, let alone install. So too had the house taken on a new meaning. It was by the 1950s if not the 1920s a commodity, built by an industry, to be bought and sold as a mobile family increasingly passed through its doors only briefly before moving on to a better job or a more desirable neighbourhood. This mobility in its own right fostered sameness. Perhaps paradoxically, people on the move came to expect the uniformity of arrangements and amenities - so that their living patterns did not have to be disrupted by their mobility.
CHAPTER N I N E
Housing the Industrial Worker
In chapter 5 we examined the nature of housing that appeared in those parts of Canada where migrant labour, usually a male work-force, was employed to harvest natural resources such as furs, fish, minerals, and timber under the aegis of mercantile capital. The types of expedient housing erected to serve this often transient population located on an equally transient resource frontier contrasted sharply with the dwellings being laid on the land concurrently for agrarian families. We noted that while there were some evident antecedents for the cambooses, cook rooms, and shanties of these labour camps, the lineage back to the folk world of the rural parishes of Europe was anything but clear and direct. Indeed, unlike the immigrant farmers and independent settlers who occupied the agrarian lands of eastern Canada, the individual labourer played little or no part in determining the nature and form of the dwelling that he occupied. We turn now to pick up the threads of this phase of Canadian habitation to focus on the housing that came increasingly to mark the last decades of the nineteenth century - housing for the industrial labour force. In this examination we will return again to look at many of the same activities and to measure the profound shifts in organization and control that went hand in hand with the transformation of mercantile capital to industrial capital in these industries. With respect to housing, much of what occurred in this transformation foreshadowed the housing assumptions and developments of the twentieth century and our present condition. At varying times for different resources during the nineteenth century, the circumstances of technology, capital, and markets changed significantly. New transportation links opened up new resource areas and broadened the market for the goods and services being produced by
214 The Era of Industrial Capitalism existing cities. Innovations in processing techniques enabled a different scale of production; some of these decreased demand for labour, others diluted its skill levels. Of the four resource sectors examined above, only the fur trade declined to a position of marginal importance in the later nineteenth century. Quite simply, other materials could be substituted for fur in the European clothing market. The residual industry engaged predominantly Native populations, largely in the far north, and in a general sense did not take on the aspects of an 'industrial' activity in the way that certain of the other resource activities did.1 The buildings used to house men and trade goods did not change significantly. If anything, the clarity of the piece sur piece and Red River frame system devolved to more makeshift shacks as other companies challenged the Hudson's Bay Company's monopoly. For example, the Bredin and Cornwall post at Fort St John, British Columbia, used notched logs for structures as rudimentary as any initial settler's shack. When cattle ranching entered the west, the need for cowboys and other hands invariably led to log bunkhouses. On the Bar U ranch in Longview, Alberta, for example, 'log bunkhouses and barns [were] laid out like a village.'2 The long-established cod fishery persisted almost unchanged in the Atlantic region well into the twentieth century. Until the salt cod market collapsed in the 1930s, there was continuation of the labour-intensive, isolated outport way of life in which merchants dominated. 3 This was especially true in Newfoundland. Elsewhere in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, where the cod economy was surpassed by lobster in the early part of this century, a somewhat more industrialized fishery developed in connection with canning and processing plants.4 Even so, there was little change in the nature of the labour force, since they participated as part-time fishermen-farmer-loggers at a semi-subsistent level/' There were some limited attempts to develop co-operative responses to merchant control before the First World War through Coaker's Fishermen's Protective Union in Newfoundland and, during the Depression, by the church-organized Antigonish Movement in the Maritimes; both brought only limited success. Not until the 1970s did industrial class organization enter the Atlantic Canadian fishery.' The housing associated with the fishery certainly evolved through the nineteenth century, and the typical shallow-roof two-storey house that developed in the 1890s was a long way from the earlier folk house in appearance, even if internal plan preferences showed continuity. The massing of the two-storey house owes a lot to the availability of milled lumber, and the shallow roof slope to the availability of new roofing mate-
Housing the Industrial Worker 215 rials; both involved more of a cash exchange than would have been the case when earlier housing drew on locally felled and shaped timber. As we noted in the discussion of the vernacular (chapter 5), transitions in outport house form sometimes involved activities that were labelled 'killing time' in the winter. The transformation of the old Sweetland house in Calvert from two storeys to a one-storey cottage in 1935 is but one of many examples of change-within-persistence in outport Newfoundland. 8 But these fishermen's houses were part of the owner-built tradition, not the provided and tied shelter that we consider in this chapter. Cannery Town
By contrast, the west coast salmon fishery was industrially organized from the outset. Located far from fresh fish markets, British Columbia companies relied on technological innovations in canning techniques to make significant capital investments worthwhile.9 The companies' demand for labour varied. During the intense fishing season, hundreds of two-man dories filled the estuaries at the mouths of the Fraser, Nass, and Skeena rivers. Once caught, the fish needed speedy processing. A seasonal labour force occupied bunkhouse camps near the thirty or so canneries scattered along the British Columbia coast. Both fishermen and cannery workers travelled by coastal steamers to the cannery sites at the appropriate time of the year. The major concentration of canneries in the pre-1914 period was at Steveston, at the mouth of the Fraser River south of Vancouver. There, a sizeable Japanese population - at first all male, working on contract occupied tenements near the canneries. Later, in response to pressure from white labour who argued that these bachelors were undercutting the wage rates they needed to support a family, immigration restrictions were eased to let in Japanese women, many of them 'picture brides.' 10 Houses for married workers were thereafter provided in the vicinity of the canneries. Unlike the evolution from cook room to outport house in Newfoundland, this move from tenement to house did not lead to replication of pre-migration folk or vernacular forms. Many important cultural traits persisted, however; some related to interior design, even on a float home. 11 Segregation was rife in the canning industry; ethnic groups were pitted against each other for piece-rate work in the short fishing season. Sites such as Mill Bay on the Nass River had separate Japanese, Native, Chinese, and white housing. 12 The owners of these canneries were rarely
216 The Era oflndustrial Capitalism present themselves and few lived near the cannery, even in Steveston. Instead, managers and owners lived in substantial mansions in Vancouver or Victoria. Coal and Steel Town The residential landscape of Canadian coalfields changed dramatically after Confederation. An expanding regional and national railroad network, a larger domestic market, new overseas contracts, and the removal of the old monopoly owners brought an infusion of new investment capital and led to the development of new pits. Most of the new coal mines were owned by companies also involved with railroads, utilities, and iron and steel mills. 13 In Nova Scotia, the earlier nuclei of General Mining Association (GMA) miners' houses were soon surrounded by rows of detached and semi-detached cottages erected by the new coal companies to house a larger work-force that included many unskilled workers from rural Cape Breton. Neighbourhoods in Glace Bay took on the names of the new mine shafts - Dominion No. 2, Dominion No. 4, Caledonia Mines, Reserve - and the company penetration of community can be sensed in a 1908 description of Sydney Mines: 604 men and boys; underground 284 men and 162 boys; surface 132 men, 26 boys (no boys under 12). There is a company store, and the men are free 10 deal where they like {half dont [«c]). The men get paid monthly. The company owns 290 houses, which cost them $450 each. They rent from $0.50 to 12.50 a month. Some of the large ones, 2 stories with 7 rooms, fetch $2.75; the old houses have only lofts upstairs. l;)
The seeming generosity of a fifty-cent-a-month rent must be put into context with the typical average wage packet, most of which went to cancel debts at the company store."' Not surprisingly, the company stores were a focus for discontent in the frequent strikes that beset the Nova Scotia coalfield through the first quarter of the twentieth century, and they eventually were torched during the bitter strike of 1925.17 The radical Catholic priest Moses Coady described the company town landscape thus: 'The company was all-powerful. They owned the houses in which the miners lived - rows upon rows of double houses painted a dark red which grew blacker with the years and the dust that rained down on them from the smoke stacks. These houses lacked all the amenities of modern living - no bathroom or toilets, no running water.
9.1 Cape Breton coal mining company housing. Increasingly, stand-alone single family dwellings on larger lots became common.
218 The Era of Industrial Capitalism Behind the rows there was a privy, which was an unspeakable horror in a community.'18 The new houses in the Nova Scotia coalfields were detached cottages (figure 9.1) or semi-detached, two-storey structures. The latter, known as 'doubles,' had a cross-gable giving a more 'Gothic' silhouette to the front facade. Floor plans suggest that the old 'folk' kitchen remained an important multi-purpose room. The heyday of these dwellings was from the 1870s to about 1904.1 Housing for Asians - who made up 60 per cent of the coalfield labour
220 The Era of Industrial Capitalism
9.3 Chinatown tenements and shanties, Cumberland, British Columbia. The unregulated environment of the resource 'boom town' produced chaotic and often very transient townscapes.
force in some years - was rudimentary. Most cabins were of frame construction with vertical plank siding. Archaeological evidence from the Wellington Chinatown suggests that some had an open fire in the centre of an earth floor. It has been argued that their housing did not stray from the utilitarian Western form to include traditional Chinese or Japanese detail because the occupants regarded themselves as migratory workers temporary residents while they accumulated enough to return home with the wealth. An even more powerful reason was the position of Asians within British Columbia's society. The Chinese had been gradually excluded from underground work, by pressure from white miners who blamed the Chinese for causing disastrous explosions and deaths; whites also resented the Chinese willingness to work for lower wage rates, and their use as scab labour when union workers went on strike. Immigration was controlled by increasingly expensive head taxes, and then, in 1923, the flow of Chinese was stemmed by total exclusion. Chinatowns housed between several hundred and a thousand men, on the fringes of the mining camps (figure 9.3). In Cumberland, store-fronted boarding-houses lined Shanghai Alley and SingChong Street. Behind them was a set of narrow courts and alleys, where a bachelor Chinese society ate, slept, and
Housing the Industrial Worker 221 gambled, thinking of journeys home to China that few managed to achieve.27 In other coal-mining towns in the Canadian west, a similar mixture of rows of standardized wooden frame houses was present. Some of the starkest examples can be found in the camps associated with the Crow's Nest field deep in the British Columbia Rockies. Across the divide in Alberta, especially in some of the Jasper camps and camps in the foothills, rows of 'pioneer' log cabins were evident, while the Lethbridge and Drumheller mines were skirted by shacks and hovels as well as some company rows of brick cottages.28 The hard-rock mining industry was also present in the Kootenay region of British Columbia but did not seem to have any of the same regimented housing landscapes. Bunkhouses and boarding-houses were there along with individual houses, but rarely were there examples of rows of company-provided dwellings that were so much a part of the cultural norm of coal mining. Factory standardized houses built in repetitive rows, and shanty towns for both Asian and white labour, suggest the overwhelming dominance of economic forces in the twentieth-century coalfield landscape. Miners who struck against the companies were removed from houses, and different ethnic groups were in conflict both in strikes and in normal situations. In many ways these are universal elements in North American mining camps of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The relation between capital and labour was as raw on Vancouver Island as it was in the Pennsylvania coal-patch towns, in Colorado as much as in Cape Breton. Yet some cultural traits percolated through: skilled British miners moving into these western camps seemed to expect the company housing and found it both familiar and normal. 29 Whether the housing was provided by the company or by property interests associated with the company, it is clear from most of the social geographies that emerged in steel or coal towns that ethnic enclaves reinforced the status hierarchies of the workplace. In Sudbury, skilled workers who were western European immigrants occupied a different quarter from French Canadians, southern Europeans a different quarter from central Europeans. The gradient in housing stock or housing quality might reflect distance from or proximity to the mill or mine; it might be reflected in degrees of overcrowding, often produced by kin boarding with families by mutual necessity to cover rent for the wages available at that skill level. Distinctive manifestations of ethnic roots, in churches, social clubs, taverns, and restaurants, were often encouraged to keep a
222 The Era oflndustrial Capitalism working class divided against itself. Common experiences in the workplace or living conditions rarely translated into solidarity in community. The landscapes of working-class neighbourhood, standardized and devoid of the folk roots evident in their rural counterparts, reflect capitalism and the hand of ownership, not the hand of occupants. Mobile Lumber Camps
When gold rushes on both sides of the Pacific opened a demand for British Columbia wood, the technology for harvesting the product was still primitive and largely at a hand scale. The coming of the Canadian Pacific Railway opened up a far more diversified sawn lumber market on the treeless prairies and further to the east, and the innovations of the Michigan forest industry could be applied to the giant west coast trees.M In contrast to the earlier eastern forest activity, the industry was more capitalized and mechanized; axes and oxen were replaced by steam-driven donkey-engines, cross-cut saws, and logging railroads running well away from the coast into the once inaccessible valleys. Two variants of logging camp seem to have emerged at the same time. Small operators stayed close to the shoreline, felling trees directly into the water and rarely cutting further inland than the one thousand feet of hauling wire could reach. Camps were plank houses, made from twelvefoot cedar logs split vertically. Many times the 'shake shack' was built on a floating log base; a bunkhouse for the men on one float, the steam donkey for hauling timber on a second, and the office and bedroom of the jobber on the third. 81 As such they were somewhat similar in configuration to some of the short-term fur-trading posts described earlier. With increased demand for sawn lumber, and generous terms on timber leases - a factor that attracted considerable American capital to the British Columbia woods - larger companies organized camps for their sizeable work crews, utilizing massive, prefabricated bunkhouses. These structures, often two storeys high, were brought into a site on railroad flatcars, and then were slid to the side of the track. The open fire of the log shanty was no more, and bunk-beds had spring mattresses; for some workers the critical measure of a camp's quality was a white cook.ss Further stressing the degree to which housing was changing in these camps is the case of the British Columbia Mills, Timber, and Trading Company, the largest forest company in British Columbia before the First World War, which utilized some of its own production of prefabricated, or 'ready-made,' houses for its camps. 81 For example, at Rock Bay on Van-
Housing the Industrial Worker 223 couver Island, the company's hospital, cookhouse, and loggers' huts were all prefabricated, and moved elsewhere once the valley had been logged. In the Pacific northwest, on both sides of the border, many of the twentieth century west coast camps had a more regimented and organized appearance.30 Equally, from the 1920s on, there was also a greater standardization of operations in the eastern pulp camps, sometimes utilizing smaller railway cars as accommodation and more and more using pre-made sash windows in the log structures. Women were also employed as cooks in some camps, a further testimony to the changing context of the logging camp. In time accessible roads meant that loggers could commute daily in their pick-up trucks from 'conventional' housing, often in company towns built near a pulp mill. Prefabrication of entire camps brought an end to the folk quality of much shanty building, a process that had been gradually eroding as frontier and metropolis came into closer proximity. In the early west coast logging industry, only the cedar shacks of the independent handloggers were reminiscent of the folk traditions that had found expression in the eastern woods.3fi These shacks used large cedar shakes and planks, somewhat in the fashion of traditional Native housing in the region, but typically were built on rafts and floated around the inlets as the loggers cruised for shore-accessible timbers. The loggers of the western woods would develop their own distinctive vocabulary to describe the new technology and work environment of the rain forest, but the camboose and the dingle shanties were not among them. 3 Economics undoubtedly influenced the transition from the singleroom camboose to a camp layout of separate structures. The lumber industry became increasingly complex as the methods of the nineteenth century gave way to those of the twentieth. In the earlier days, considerable value was added in the woods, as fallen trees were skilfully transformed into sticks of squared timber; these were exported or turned into planks and boards at major milling centres. By the end of the nineteenth century, the needs of a more capitalized downstream sawmill or pulpmill industry, with all their concerns for inventory and supply, led to a more managed approach to the woods. More paperwork was needed to keep track of quantity and quality of wood supply. A camp boss, a clerk, a sealer, visiting professional foresters, and a woods walker might keep an eye on six or more camps in a region, as part of a more concerted operation. 38 The associated organization of the pulpwood industry on an international scale, with firms organizing an integrated operation from timber leases and railroad lines to pulp mills and marketing agencies, brought
224 The Era of Industrial Capitalism scientific: management techniques of corporate capitalism to the resource frontier. 39 Somewhat later, but as part of the same corporate forces, union agitation for better working and living conditions also played a part in improving the camp configuration. Some of these transitions were clearly associated with technological shifts. Open fires became stoves only after such stoves were proven reliable in houses and transportable on a wide scale. Cast-iron stoves certainly needed strong transport methods, and the costs of both the stove and transport were more likely to be borne by enterprises involved in a sustained wood harvest than in the cut and run approach of lumbering parties before the mid-nineteenth century. Once successfully harnessed for the logging shanty, the stove probably added at least one cook's helper (or cookee) to the labour force, specifically to feed the stove with various sizes and types of split wood. It is interesting to speculate that this successful adoption of the mobile stove paralleled its adoption by the railroads. The word 'caboose' is of course now associated with the last car on a freight train, where a stove warms the quarters of brakeman and conductor. This usage dates back to 1864 in America.'10 A third source of change was associated with the decline of 'folk memory.' As the nineteenth century progressed, more and more people were alienated from the traditional skills of an earlier rural society, including the subconscious talents that people drew on to shape and make housing for themselves. By mid-century, the increasing use of pattern books for ideas of style and construction influenced the ways that people consumed housing, and in the face of convenience and efficiency, old ways died out. It may well be that the persistence of the camboose shanty was one example of a conservatism in building tradition that had disappeared decades earlier in more normal shelter.41 Certainly people retained fewer and fewer of their earlier skills and relied instead on pre-cut house parts assembled into rooms that reflected new social and spatial arrangements. Pattern-book guides were even available for the layout and operation of logging camps.42 The camboose, cook room, and shanty were names and forms of the nineteenth century, moving along with capital and labour on both sides of the border in pursuit of seasonal wages for farmers or fortunes for merchants and industrialists. Their temporary landscapes, now only present in archival photos and a few museum reconstructions, were testimony to an important phase in the economic and social history of the continent, and to the ongoing refinement, refraction, and redevelopment of forms from the other side of the Atlantic. Over a century or
Housing the Industrial Worker
225
more, shanties were built largely from logs felled on site and mainly by the people who lived in them through the winter. Yet clearly there were forces at work that transformed their morphology. Local practice might roof a shanty with hollowed logs, or planks, or shingles, and the idiosyncrasies of particular contractors or particular ethnic groups might be revealed both at the individual level and across regions. Yet beyond that, the changing form of logging camps reveals that there were important economic forces at work influencing the social production of the built environment. Further investigation of broader regions, other periods of building, and other resource sectors is needed to see if the generalizations offered here continue to hold up. Whether they do or not will shed light on whether the understanding of cultural artifacts associated with this industry is broadly related to factors of human agency or more basically related to economic changes within the logging industry and the industrial system within which it was located. Loggers differed from shantymen in important ways. The eastern logger was as likely to be a part-time farmer, going off into the woods for the winter season and then returning to his farm in time for spring planting. The western logger was a member of a large mobile labour force in an emphatically industrial world. The Canadian poet Earle Birney, who worked as a teenager in the logging camps, remembered: 'It was the first time I had come close to living in a community of industrial workers. Though they looked not so different from farmhands, I began to reali/e these were a breed apart, a skilled fraternity labouring in a dangerous craft, as isolated and womanless and exploited as sailors, and yet retaining, each of them, his own uniqueness.' ' The connection between the sailor and the logger clearly goes beyond the fact that they once shared the lexicon of caboose. Land shelter for sailors, and increasingly urban residence for the seasonal logger and fishermen, brought specific accommodation types to cities on both coasts. In Vancouver, some boarding-houses along Hastings Street were known as 'coolie cabins."44 The type was associated in Vancouver especially with the tenements that housed Japanese sawmill workers. Sometimes up to seventy men would share such a structure, their bunks little bigger than coffins. 1:> Other mill workers occupied cabins and cottages up to eight miles from the mill in Vancouver, but, less than twenty miles to the east, company towns such as the Canadian Western Lumber Company's Fraser Mills laid out a range of residences between mill and valley side that defined several skill and status levels within the company.'11' The appearance of housing was much the same as that in the Vancouver Island coal
226 The Era of Industrial Capitalism towns; the critical distinction for mill workers in the Vancouver area was the possibility of ownership and a sense of space and garden around the similar cottage or cabin. In British Columbia and elsewhere, the resource town, whether for mining, smelting, fishing, canning, or lumber processing, became a solid element of the Canadian settlement system in the twentieth century. As new minerals, for a changing industrial economy, brought new mine sites to the Canadian Shield, many of the patterns described above multiplied. The remote town of Flin Flon, established by the Hudson Bay Mining and Smelting Company in 1927, was a bunkhouse landscape with a vengeance.'17 At the same time, efforts were made to diversify such towns by attracting a more stable, family-based population. Segregation of mill or plant from residential areas, the inclusion of a shopping area, other community infrastructure, and a range of housing types and designs were part of an attempt, through town planning, to bridge the gap between metropolitan and frontier society.'18 The same process occurred in the forest sector, where pulp towns took on the trappings of suburban subdivisions. The image, or pretence, of an established suburban society in which workers attained significant levels of property and material well-being is perhaps the equivalent of the simplification of social gradients that occurred through the agrarian frontier in the last century. 49 Basic divisions in society remained, yet without the blatant reminders of the division of wealth; and with the 'embourgeoisernent' of blue-collar workers, the liberal society continues. Couched in slightly different terms, these suburban, family-oriented settings for labour reflect a conscious attempt at rebalancing gender ratios. The circumstances of women in these isolated communities had been far from rosy, even if for men they had improved. This analysis of the nature of accommodation for staple resource industries has not considered agriculture, yet the pioneer wheat farmer on the prairies can be viewed alongside workers in other staples industries. Although much of the housing associated with agriculture links inevitably to the family farm and the folk and vernacular forces described in earlier chapters, there was nevertheless a significant migrant labour force connected to farming. Each year for several decades of this century, some fifty to sixty thousand migrant workers travelled on harvest trains to western Canadian wheat farms; there they were often accommodated in mobile bunkhouses in the field next to the threshers and harvesters/' 0
Housing the Industrial Worker 227 Housing for Railroad Workers Perhaps the most dramatic transition in the Canadian economy between the mercantile and industrial age was the shift from water to steam, both for power and as a transport medium. Economies and societies that had been small patches along an ocean, lake, or river edge, exploiting a particular resource for local consumption or export, could now share in a broader consumer society and a broader field for employment. The railroad was central to the confederation of colonies into a nation, and much has been written about its impact. For our purposes here, it is worth considering whether the railroad itself, as an employer of people, contributed a distinctive element in the matrix of housing that workers and others occupied. We can divide the outcome into housing for construction and line maintenance workers; for those involved in the running trades - engineer, firemen, conductor, and the like; for those in the roundhouses and freight yards; and for management. The construction phase brought bunkhouses similar to those discussed above for the lumber industry, except that these mobile bunkhouses were even larger. They were ephemeral, no longer needed once the line was built. Distinctions were made between the shelter provided for Chinese or Japanese gangs and that for other workers. Once operational, railroads needed periodic divisional points where blacksmiths, wheelwrights, and other maintenance crews could work on engines and cars. Housing that used to be at Yale, a divisional point at the end of the Eraser Canyon, was moved to Vancouver when the railhead moved west in 1886; that housing became the nucleus of a working-class district called Yaletown. These houses were one-storey gable cottages, some with trim. Soon they were overshadowed by contractor-built rental housing in the streets beyond. On some branch lines in less settled areas in British Columbia, prefabs were used for station-masters' housing. More distinctively recognized as railroad housing were earlier rows built by the Grand Trunk in Montreal, and copies that are found in Mimico, the railroad suburb in western Toronto. These two-storey rows in Montreal date from the 1850s, and according to David Hanna reflect the styling used by the London and North Eastern Railway in Newcastle, England, that were designed by Stephenson. :>1 Here then is an instance of the replication of industrial culture, when the aristocracy of labour, likely brought over from England, were given housing commensurate with their importance. Their location in Montreal was in Point St Charles,
228 The Era of Industrial Capitalism
9.4 Railroad workers' housing, Point St Charles, Montreal. Sebastopol Row, constructed in 1857 and located near the workshops of the Grand Trunk Railroad, provided housing for families of employees. This complex is said to have introduced the quadruplex housing form to Montreal.
adjacent to the railroad yards (figure 9.4). In Mimico, somewhat later, a single row of eight houses at right angles to the lake but next to the freight yards of the Grand Trunk similarly underline the importance of engineers' housing. Housing for Factory Workers
Another related labour force is that centred in factory towns and metropolitan areas. With but a few exceptions such as Paris, Ontario, Sherbrooke, Quebec, and Marysville, New Brunswick, Canada did not develop the kind of concentrated textile towns like Lawrence, Lowell, or Manchester in New England or the towns of Lancashire in England/' 2 But whereas the American pattern was for the textile companies to produce hundreds of company houses for their workers, perhaps only Marysville - an isolated mill town across the Saint John River from Fredericton, New Brunswick - approximates this aspect of the industry in Canada. In New England, textile workers' housing around the fall line sites well away from urban Boston initially housed young girls from Ver-
Housing the Industrial Worker 229
9.5 Marysville, New Brunswick. The cotton mill and accompanying workers' housing created by Alexander 'Boss' Gibson beginning in 1882 produced a landscape similar to the New England mill towns; indeed, he employed Boston architects to design his buildings. Workers paid two dollars per month lo rent housing in his double tenements.
mont who lived in corporation boarding-houses, their parents assured of the paterfamilias role that the employer played in caring for health and moral well-being. The same corporation form was continued when Irish immigrants and later French Canadians came to dominate the labour force of towns such as Lowell, Lawrence, and Manchester. Marysville conjures up an immediate comparison with those towns (figure 9.5). Blocks of two-storey brick apartments line both sides of a twelveblock subdivision across from the mill. Nearby, a line of wooden cot-
230 The Era of Industrial Capitalism tages along the river bank, associated with Gibson's sawmill, extend the paternal landscape. The more typical experience in Canada was for smaller factory operations, intermixed, for example, with rural housing in small-town Ontario. According to county atlas sketches, Barber's Toronto Woollen Mills, established on the Credit River near Streetsville in 1843, eventually provided some forty-three company houses alongside concession roads near the mill. Rows of small cottages are also found elsewhere in rural Ontario, attached to once bustling sawmills. These houses warrant more attention than they have received, and many of them have already been obliterated in the advancing tide of suburban sprawl that has engulfed Metropolitan Toronto. Canadian industrialism did not spawn many paternal owners such as the British examples of Cadbury, Rowntree, or Salt, who established model workers' towns outside cities.''3 Yet attempts to define a more co-operative way of providing shelter came first in Canada through the resource communities - Port Union in Newfoundland for fishermen (1916) and Tompkinsville in Cape Breton's Reserve Mines for coal miners (1935). Ironically in both instances, the house forms are almost identical to those of the resource landscapes they sought to redefine/'' For the most part, housing in cities was far more the consequence of property interests than of benign or harsh employers. And yet here, ironically, was found the best opportunity for workers to build to their own scale and design, in the informal housing sector on the urban fringe/" A recent study of female workers recruited to the textile mills of Paris, Ontario, sheds some fascinating light on the nature of house acquisition in this context/'1' Parr notes that in Paris, during the inter-war years but also before that, women from the mills found lodging in boardinghouses, often living three to a room. Most of these houses were operated by women, often widows who themselves had selected the town as a place to move the entire family. Many in this number had been recruited in the West Midlands of England, where they had developed factory skills before leaving for Canada. In this way housing and the occupation of it took on a female dominance in places like Paris and no doubt other textile towns where women formed a significant part of the work-force. In this sense the decision making, financing, and physical management of the house fell squarely into the hands of females who exhibited considerable knowledge and shrewdness in these matters. Much more needs to be known about the role of women in the determination and economic manipulation of urban housing markets, especially given the free-market nature of so much of Canada's city housing.
Housing the Industrial Worker 231 The Canadian subcontinent is a vast region in which successive combinations of capital and labour have ventured deep into the wilderness for temporary pursuit of particular resources. Given the centrality of staple exports to the Canadian economy, housing associated with these endeavours is one of the most basic of Canadian dwelling types. In the early mercantile phase, the juxtaposition of masters and men extended an economy still tied to a land-based society into an area where resources were more important than land. Some new dwelling forms appeared, to house concentrations of labour that before did not need to be treated that way, but other housing exhibited continuities. In coal mining, where there was already established a particularly industrial culture of house form and tenure relations, replication occurred most readily; and for the fishery, a family-based labour pool could re-create familiar folk and vernacular structures. In the later phase, the decapitation of the range of social class and the amplification and intensification of a mean landscape are associated with an extension of the factory system deep into the Canadian wilderness. Efficient provision, for a season or a decade, was possible through more mobile, prefabricated house forms that gave no room for the regional identity of their occupants. In the end, the impetus and expedients in the provision of housing for resource workers are the outcome of much the same equations in the isolated valleys of the British Columbia mountains in the early twentieth century as in the isolated coves on the shores of Newfoundland in the seventeenth century.3 The balance has always been tipped towards the primacy of economy, but never to the total denial of culture, of tradition, and of distinctive responses in specific places. As long as people are involved in the exploitation of resources, both economic and cultural factors will shape the resource environment in ways that are distinctively adjusted to the often remote and demanding harshness of frontier Canada.
CHAPTER TEN
Conclusion
By the end of the nineteenth century, several generations of design manuals had succeeded in providing a set of national, even international, house designs. The new primacy of vernacular housing was a reflection of broader transformations in North American society and economy. In very few parts of the continent were people living in isolation from metropolitan ideas. Broad increases in literacy, a secularization of values, the mobility of people, and the integration of activities into a market economy exposed most people to a more egalitarian and yet complex world. Gone were the hierarchical, simple relationships of enclosed community and limited travel. For a society that was newly mobile, and faced with 'place-making' on a scale rarely seen before, different backgrounds and experiences gave people little in common to forge a continuity with past practices. Whereas the seventeenth-century Quebec habitant or eighteenth-century German farmer in early Pennsylvania had been restricted by local materials and available technology, and thus produced houses distinctive to those places though perhaps with connections back to an earlier European hearth, their descendants contemplating building in Kansas or Manitoba in the 1880s were likely to build, or have built for them, housing that was indistinguishable from that being built in hundreds of other communities. Rarely did the structure reflect any ethnic or regional identity. A critical factor in this outcome was the increasing standardization of the building process and the appearance of the house. An innovative climate for technological change was cultivated by the necessity of coping with the new geographical spaces and the building demands of a growing population. New transportation systems could move externally produced
Conclusion
233
materials into new areas; sawmills produced dimensioned lumber and factories produced pre-made sashes, doors, mouldings, stair newels, porch pillars, trim, and the like; and assembly came through expedient forms of construction, most especially 'balloon framing.' Carpenters, masons, and bricklayers worked to the instructions of pattern-book specifications that assumed the availability of materials and familiarity with standardized construction practices. If the production system was changing, so too was the consumer. Settlers on the rural frontier included people who had little tradition of selfsufficiency on the land. More likely they were already somewhat urban, part of a market economy, or with some financial resources, and perhaps returning to the land with a nostalgic sense of the possibilities of farming life or the acquisition of property. A home for such people had to be more than just a simple abode. Modern notions of space, decorum, and image needed satisfaction, and a new generation of taste makers serviced those desires. For every farmer, there were several more people who were part of the urban system that served and exploited farming and resource areas. Dwelling on the edges of'Main Street' in countless small towns and larger centres alike, they sought to mark a sense of arrival and accomplishment in forms that were not crude, humble shacks. The design possibilities presented through the pattern book became the norm for many. As the grand designs changed from Georgian to Gothic, Second Empire, Queen Anne, and Revivalist styles, their vernacular cousins borrowed, adapted, corrupted, or diluted the facade and plan. People may or may not have lived in the rooms the way that they were laid out (for example, old habits sought out the kitchen rather than the parlour as the centre for social intercourse), but as consumers of shelter rather than creators of shelter, they were certainly more and more separated from folk environments. Vernacular expressions of housing with their clearly identifiable link to conscious style or architectural detail found an audience. Farmers who sought to transcend their pioneer experience with a form that expressed prosperity, stability, and sophistication turned to the images and models that were becoming familiar through the printed word; in towns or cities, urban workers similarly sought to express family identity and material achievement in forms deemed appropriate by their betters and peers. Lacking the wealth to commission a custom-designed structure from an architect, both groups turned to builders who drew on pattern-book designs for more or less elaborate versions of facade detail, room arrangement, and, in some cases, designs modified to the climatic neces-
234 The Era of Industrial Capitalism sides of their particular region. High-style architectural fashion was thus translated down to the mass of vernacular housing, where it often became a more conservative and enduring element of the landscape, being reinterpreted long after the self-conscious house was attracting attention in another style. This volume has stressed the experiences of men and women who were involved in three centuries of house building for what might be seen as a succession of land-based economies and societies. By the 1920s, most of that 'new' encounter with land had come to an end, save perhaps for a few homesteaders in the Peace River country of Alberta and British Columbia, and colonization schemes in the clay-belt Abitibi region of Quebec during the Depression of the 1930s.a Thereafter, and thus for much of the twentieth century, the land/house nexus is mediated through the subdivision process for several generations of suburbia. Today developers can carve out of several former farms a wide array of house sizes and styles for a spectrum of occupants all the way from skilled labour to technical, professional, and managerial groups. Square footage and number of bathrooms help differentiate status when facade materials on all these tract streets are from the same palate of revivalist styles. Over several generations of practice and profit, developers have learnt to massproduce a sophisticated array of ready-to-occupy houses, fitted with the latest conveniences of refrigerator, dishwasher, washer and dryer, air conditioner, etc.4 For the post-industrial service economy, new fractions of labour markets and consumption trends are beginning to generate new house types and residential landscapes. The most revealing example of this is the retirement community, where subdivisions of 'no-step ranchers' hide behind high-walled compounds guarded by security gates; inside the wall, curbless streets enable golf-carts to pass between links and garage that much more easily. These commodificalions of the aging process in British Columbia and Ontario stand in stark contrast to the nineteenth-century contracts made between farmers and their sons as they passed on the farm with guaranteed revenue from two cows to go with the promise of one room in the farmhouse.' Another fundamental watershed between what we have examined and housing in the twentieth century is the role of the state. Early attempts at involvement in the provision of shelter were both rural and urban, often around homes and farms for heroes after both world wars,1' but later they were increasingly urban as various levels of government became involved in slum clearance schemes and subsequent social housing programs.7
Conclusion 235 The government's role grew more pervasive with the support to private mortgage firms under National Housing Act programs and the role of CMHC in approval of subdivision and house-plan designs. This too is in stark contrast to the often 'seat of the pants' financing by carpenterbuilders involved in earlier speculative construction, and of course, before that, the era of building only on demand and only for necessity. Even though it may seem that the twentieth century is a time when all Canadians live under a social contract orchestrated by big bureaucracy, big business, and big developers, it would be a mistake to see the end of the role of the individual. Do we in fact have evidence of individual and group identities? The efforts by Portuguese and Italians in Toronto, or Greeks and Chinese in Vancouver, among others, to develop variants on the norm that better reflect their prior folk and vernacular knowledge and preference or their now-realizable ambitions point to a pluralistic housing template. And if Canadians are tempted to see the historical folk house as a relic of the socially and culturally marginal, then what role do we ascribe to the mobile homes that are scattered throughout the national landscape? Perhaps these are the modern artifacts of a society whose culture is now inextricably bound up with technology and transience. Though it is hardly possible to call the mobile home a folk house, it must surely be seen as a device that fulfils many of the same needs for this generation that the folk house performed for our ancestors. Inexpensive, expedient, and familiar, this dwelling form separates its inmates from much of the complexity and competitiveness that is implicit in the standard housing forms of the broader society. Within these walls, residents still find refuge against the depths of winter in a literal sense on the frigid reaches of the Canadian Shield, the Atlantic margins, or the interior of the west, or figuratively in the retirement parks of Florida.
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Notes
Preface 1 Ennals, 'The Development of Farm Barn Types in Southern Ontario during the Nineteenth Century.' Also see 'Nineteenth Century Barns in Southern Ontario.' 2 Holdsworth, 'House and Home in Vancouver: The Emergence of a West Coast Urban Landscape, 1886-1929,' and 'House and Home in Vancouver: Images of West Coast Urbanism, 1886-1929.' 3 Ennals and Holdsworth, 'Vernacular Architecture and the Cultural Landscape of the Maritime Provinces - a Reconnaissance.' 4 See Buckner and Frank, eds., Atlantic Canada before Confederation, 335-55, and Wynn, ed., People, Places, Patterns, Processes, 177-95. 5 Ennals, 'The Vernacular Revolution in Architecture.' 6 Some of our dissatisfaction with these tendencies is found in Ennals, 'Of Data Sets and Mind Sets - a Critical Review of Recent Writings on Canadian Architectural History.' Chapter One 1 2 3 4
Ivan Illich, Gender, 68. Brunskill, Illustrated Handbook of Vernacular Architecture, 28-9. Brunskill, Vernacular Architecture of the Lakes Counties, 15. Classic, Pattern in the Material Folk Culture of the Eastern United States, Evans, Irish Folk Ways', and Gram, Highland Folk Ways. 5 Ennals and Holdsworth, 'Vernacular Architecture and the Cultural Landscape of the Maritime Provinces - a Reconnaissance.' 6 This is not to ignore the consequences of colonial, provincial, and federal gov-
238
7
S
9
10
11 12 13 14
15 16 17
18
Notes to pages 5-16
ernments as well as missionaries and industrialists in shaping post-contact aboriginal shelter. For a recent case study, see Harris, The Resettlement of British Columbia. Classic works include those by Innis, The Cod Fisheries and The Fur Trade in Canada. See also Watkins, 'A Staple Theory of Economic Growth,' and Careless, 'Frontierism, Melropolitanism and Canadian History.' For a survey of Canadian housing stock since 1945, see Deryck W. Holdsworth and Joan Simon, 'Housing Form and Use of Domestic Space,' in Miron, ed., House, Home, and Community, 188-202. Recent reinlerpretations by historical geographers (and others) are to be found in Harris and Matthews, eds., Historical Atlas of Canada, vol. 1: From the Beginning to 1800; Gentilcore and Matthews, eds., Historical Atlas of Canada, vol 2: The Nineteenth Century: The Land Transformed; and Kerr, Holdsworth, and Matthews, eds., Historical Atlas of Canada, vol. 3: Addressing the Twentieth Century. See, for example, the interpretive publications generated by the researchers centred in Parks Canada's National Historic Parks and Sites Branch: Clerk, Palladian Style in Canadian Architecture, Maitland, Neoclassical Architecture in Canada; and Wright, Architecture of the Picturesque in Canada. Kalman, A History of Canadian Architecture. See, for example, Classic, Passing the Time in Ballymenone; Pocius, A Place to Belong. Lord Raglan, 'The House,' Bachelard, The Poetics of Space. For a representative sampling of work in this vein by American geographers, see Kniffen, 'Folk Housing'; Lewis, 'Common Houses, Cultural Spoor'; Noble, Wood, Brick, and Stone, 2 vols.; Jakle, Bastian, and Meyer, Common Houses in America's Small Towns. For a critique of the tradition, see Holdsworlh, 'Revaluing the House.' Cagan, Hopeful Travellers; Katz, The People of Hamilton, Canada West. Tabb and Sawyers, eds., Marxism and the Metropolis; Burnett, A Social History of Housing 1815-1970; Daunton, House and Home in the Victorian City; King, Buildings and Society and The Bungalow. Bradbury, Working Families.
19 Kay, 'The Future of Historical Geography in the United States.' 20 Rose, Feminism and Geography, esp. 86-112; Norwood and Monk, eds., The Desert Is No Lady. 21 See, for example, McMurray, Families and Farmhouses in Nineteenth Century America; Spain, Gendered Spaces; Parr, The Gender of Breadwinners. 22 An excellent critical statement is provided by Kwolek-Folland, 'Gender as a Category of Analysis in Vernacular Architecture Studies.'
Notes to pages 16-26
239
23 Hornsby, 'Reply to Jeanne Kay.' An example of the careful, place-specific analysis that is needed is suggested by the work of Wurtele, 'Assimilation through Domestic Transformation.' Although only tangentially addressing housing as a designed space, it treats some of the Canadian social norms concerned domestic spaces that were suggested for immigrant women. A second example would be: Cynthia R. Comacchio, Nations Are Built of Babies which explores changing attitudes to nursing, public health, and advertising in the creation of the modern home. Work of this type, multiplied dozens of times by focused research on issues such as Women's Institute outreach programs, on the impact of changing fertility regimes on housing needs, on the role of gender divisions of labour in dual economies, among many others, constitutes a rich vein of insight and understanding to be mined. 24 Two excellent collections of representative work are St George, ed., Material Life in America 1600-1860; and Upton and Vlach, eds., Common Places - Readings in American Vernacular Architecture. See also Herman, Architecture and Rural Life in Central Delaware, 1700-1900 and The Stolen House. 25 See Wells, ed., Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture, I & II; Carter and Herman, eds., Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture, III & IV; Cromley and Hudgins, eds., Gender and Shelter - Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture, V. 26 For a useful overview of this tradition, see Wynn, Introduction, in Wynn, ed., People Places Patterns Processes, 1-37. 27 An excellent volume that provides a synthetic approach to European origins of American ways much like the one we propose for Canada is Fischer, Albion's Seed. Chapter Two 1 Arthur, Small Houses of the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries in Ontario and Toronto: No Mean City; Clerk, Palladian Style in Canadian Architecture; Gauthier, Les manoires du Quebec; Gowans, Building Canada; MacRae, The Ancestral Roof; Maitland, Neoclassical Architecture in Canada; Richardson, 'Guide to the Architecturally and Historically Most Significant Buildings of the Old City of Quebec with a Biographical Dictionary of Architects and Builders'; Roy, Old Manors, Old Houses; Traquair, The Old Architecture of Quebec; Wallace, An Album of Drawings of Early Buildings in Nova Scotia; Wright, Architecture of the Picturesque in Canada. 2 Gowans, Building Canada, 25. 3 Moogk, Building a House in New France. 4 R.C. Harris, The Seigneurial System in Early Canada. Also see Moogk, Building a House in New France, 13-14.
240 Notes to pages 26-44 5 Moogk, Building a House, 22. 6 Gowans, Building Canada, 24; also see Richardson, Bastien, Dube, and Lacombe, Quebec City. 7 R.C. Harris, The Extension of France into Rural Canada.' 8 Clerk, Palladian Style, 117-18. 9 For a discussion of intramural and extramural building cycles, see the morphological research exemplified by M.R.G. Conzen, whose writings are collected in a volume edited by Whitehand, The Urban Landscape. 10 Clerk, Palladian Style, 118. 11 Ibid., 119. 12 Ibid., 93. 13 Ibid.,89. 14 Rogers, Charlottetotvn Buildings, 33-4. 15 Clerk, Palladian Style, 131, 138-9. 16 Gowans, Building Canada, plate 91. 17 J.M. Bumsled, Land Settlement and Politics on Eighteenth Century Prince Edward Island. 18 For an excellent treatment of this phase of settlement see: Wynn, 'A Region of Scattered Settlements and Bounded Possibilities.' 19 See: Wallace, An Album of Drawings, plate 36. 20 Ibid., plates 39-43. 21 For a description of Crane's activities, see Wynn, 'William Crane.' 22 South Shore, Seasoned Timbers, 102-3; also Wright, Architecture of the Picturesque, 141. 23 J.H. Cameron, ThePiclonian Colliers. 24 For an analysis of Uniacke see Cuthbertson, The Old Attorney General, 25 Gowans, Building Canada, 78, plate 95; also see Wallace, An Album of Drawings, plates 57-60, 64. 26 R.C. Harris, 'The Simplification of Europe Overseas,' 468-82. 27 MacRae, Ancestral Roof, 14. 28 A fascinating set of documents pertaining to housing which has as yet not been exploited to its potential are the claims for damage and reparations from the War of 1812-14. Among the individual submissions are drawings and descriptions of the buildings lost, and these provide some indication of the earliest buildings constructed in Ontario. See PAC RG 19 E5(a) War of 1812 Losses Claims, vols. 3738-59. 29 Edith G. Firth, The Town of York, 1815-1834. 30 Ibid., 306. 31 Ganton, 'The Subdivision Process in Toronto, 1851-1883.' 32 Rempel, Building with Wood and Other Aspects of Nineteenth Century Building in Ontario, 25, 67-85.
Notes to pages 45-51
241
33 For an assessment of Talbot's activities, see Brunger, 'Thomas Talbot.' 34 MacRae, Ancestral Roof, 71, describes the H-plan as a Tudor survival. It is certainly possible that people like Talbot, Steele, and Dunsford may have been trying to replicate houses reminiscent of the Elizabethan era. It seems more likely, however, that the plan owed more to the logic and technique of log construction, which require the builder to work with simple rectangular 'modules.' The structural techniques of log building constrain the implementation of long or multiplaned walls. 35 Wright, Architecture of the Picturesque, 12-20. 36 The Prince, whose unconventional habits and extravagant lifestyle animated British life at the beginning of the nineteenth century, served in the place of George III during the latter's periods of so-called madness, 1788-9 and 1811-20. Later he occupied the throne in his own right as George IV until his death in 1830. He was known for his patronage of the arts and he commissioned the architect John Nash to create the celebrated Royal Pavilion at Brighton, which incorporated a variety of whimsical elements such as colourful 'onion domes.' 37 Wright asserts that more than sixty architectural pattern books delineating the Picturesque taste in housing were published between 1790 and 1835. Wright, Architecture of the Picturesque, 25. Books that offered guidance in the Picturesque included Robert Lugar, Architectural Sketches fort Cottages, Rural Dwellings and Villas in Grecian, Gothic and Fancy Styles, etc. (London, 1805); John B. Papworth, Rural Residences, etc. (London, 1818); William Fuller Pocock, Architectural Designs for Rustic Cottages, etc. (London, 1807). 38 See, for example: Arthur, Toronto: No Mean City; Hanna, The Layered City; Seasoned Timbers, vol. 1. Among the best urban surveys are those prepared for Kingston, Ontario: Angus, The Old Stones of Kingston; Buildings of Historical and Architectural Significance, 6 vols. Chapter Three 1 Deetz, Flowerdew Hundred. 2 A large and somewhat disconnected literature on European 'folk' housing exists. Unfortunately there are differences in terminology, and the English, for example, tend to use the term 'vernacular' to refer to the types of houses that North American's call 'folk' dwellings. Among the important accessible works to see pertaining to Britain are Barley, The English Farmhouse and Cottage; Brunskill, Illustrated Handbook of Vernacular Architecture; Mercer, English Vernacular Houses; Peate, The Welsh House; Grant, Highland Folk Ways; Fenton, The Northern Isles; Estyn Evans, The Ulster Farmhouse,' and 'The Irish Peasant
242
Notes to pages 51-6
House'; Campbell, 'Irish Fields and Houses'; Classic, Passing the Time in Ballymenone; Gailey, Rural Houses of the North of Ireland. 3 It is now generally accepted that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a process of rebuilding' was occurring across the face of rural England and in some of the other parts of the British Isles. The rebuilding involved replacing older building materials with more permanent ones and generally adding or improving interior spaces. This process coincided with enclosure and the formalization of freehold tenure for the yeoman farm class, who were ihence better able to enjoy a new measure of prosperity which was reflected in stable and more elaborate housing. See Hoskins, 'The Re-Building of Rural England, 1570-1640.' This process trickled down in part to smaller holders in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and led to such actions as placing ceilings between first and second floors and separation of human and animal spaces within the dwelling, and later housing animals outside of the building altogether. 4 Brunskill, Illustrated Handbook, 27. 5 A number of regional studies of nineteenth-century North America suggest that half the population resident in a community would be likely to have moved on within a decade. This apparently was a true for rural areas as for urban locations; the seeming stability of a life tied to the land did not exist in most locations until late in the nineteenth century. See for example, Curti, The Making of an American Community, Katz, The People of Hamilton, Canada West, Knights, The Plain People of Boston, 1830-1860; Gagan, Hopeful Travellers. 6 Bell, The Foreign Protestants and the Settlement of Nova Scotia. 1 Candee, 'Wooden Buildings in Early Maine and New Hampshire.' To some degree this process also occurred through certain quasi-governmental agencies, as in the case of the fur trade outposts, especially the Hudson Bay Company, which perpetuated a company style across the old northwest. 8 Mannion, Irish Settlements in Eastern Canada. 9 Harris and Warkentin. Canada before Confederation. Also see Harris and Matthews, eds., Historical Atlas oj Canada, vol. 1, 48-51, 84-9, 113-17, and plates 24, 29, 30, 41, 45, and 46. 10 Much more is know of the geographic origins in France of the Quebec population than of the Acadian. Almost all of the immigrants came from western France. More than that, they seem to have been from two small sectors of this region. The first sector was a triangle formed by the cities of Nantes, Poitiers, and Bordeaux, centring on the port of La Rochelle. Indeed, the heaviest concentration of immigrants seems to have come from within a radius of a hundred kilometres of this port, which was the principal staging area for the settlement of the colony. The other source area was the triangle formed by the
Notes to pages 57-66
243
cities of Dieppe, Paris, and St-Malo. See Hubert Charoniieau and Normand Robert, 'The French Origins of the Canadian Population, 1608-1759,' Harris and Matthews, eds., Historical Atlas of Canada, vol. 1, plate 45. 11 Modern-day western France has comparatively generous supplies of timber, especially in the Gironde region (the southern most part of the source area for immigrants to New France) where there are extensive pineries. However, il must be remembered that these 'plantations' are the product of efforts begun in the second half of the eighteenth century, and timber for construction prior to that time must have been relatively scarce. 12 See, for example, Musee de Madre, Mayenne, Pays and Gens de Loire. 13 The Adams-Ritchie House, recently restored in Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia, is believed to have been built about 1720 using Acadian labourers. This house while built in the territory known as Acadra was built by New England merchants following the housing ideals and fashions of that region. It hardly qualifies then as Acadian architecture, though it may well have served to provide a model for Acadians of another culture's house-building methods. For an interesting hint of what Acadian houses might have been like, see David Christianson, 'Acadian Archaeological Research at Belleisle, Nova Scotia.' 14 It is important to appreciate that a good deal of conjecture has gone into the details of the reconstruction of individual buildings. Archaeological evidence provides clues as to dimensions and placement offireplac.es; documentary evidence of exterior elevations or of notarial contracts may reveal much about building technique, materials and plan. But restoration architects still had to make many assumptions about the interior of these houses. See 'Yvon Le Blanc, Architect Fortess Louisbourg.' 15 Clark, Acadia - the Geography of Early Nova Scotia to 1760, ] 38. Clark's remarks are translations of the accounts of Meneval, Dierville, and Lahontan. 16 Moody, 'Acadian Material Culture.' 17 There are still hints of the French colonial presence in middle Mississippi River Valley at towns like Sle Genevieve, Illinois. Houses here have been greatly reworked and interpreted by well-meaning preservationist. Unfortunately, the earliest of these efforts, which were instigated as part of the Chicago World Exposition, drew more from imagination than historical fact, and the surviving buildings are not useful artefacts of the French practices in the region. 18 Leonidoff, 'Origine et evolution des principaux types d'architec.tiire rurale au Quebec et le cas de Charlevoix.' These and other data are graphically summarized in Harris and Matthews, eds., Historical Atlas of Canada, vol. 1, plates 55 and 56. 19 Moogk, Building a House in New France, 61.
244 Notes to pages 66-73 20 A recent sludy indicates that the availability of specialized carpenter and joiners, masons, and olher building trades in the colony of Quebec was particularly focused on Quebec City, where, under the patronage of the governing ecclesiastical, military, and commercial elite, there was ample work. More remarkably, there is evidence that many of these people formed a cohesive residential bloc within the city and that many of the families practising these trades persisted over many generations. No doubt this corps of skilled people did much to articulate the French building tradition in Quebec and perhaps helped lo maintain a flow of French architectural idioms and traditions even after the break with the homeland. See Richardson, Bastien, Dube, and Lar.ombe, Quebec City. 21 For an excellent treatment of the connections between the evolution of housing form and regulations in New France, see Moogk, Building a House in New France, chapters 1-3. 22 For a discussion of the structural details of early Quebec buildings, see Lessard and Marquis, Encyclopedic de la Maison Quebecoise; Lessard and Vilandre, La Maison Traditionelle au Quebec. 23 Fischer, Albion's Seed. 24 Shurleff, The Log Cabin Myth. 25 See Powell, Puritan Village. 26 Cummings, The Framed Houses of Massachusetts Bay, 1625-1725. 27 Those responsible for re-creating the outdoor museum at 'Plimouth Colonie' (Plymouth, Massachusetts) have built a number of small houses that probably come close to capturing the size and detail of these earliest of colonial dwellings. They are, however, conjectural reconstructions based on knowledge of British practice and contemporary descriptions and illustrations of the colony. 28 Cummings notes that in some cases estate inventories indicate that one of the upstairs chambers contained the best bedding, and he suggests that this mayreveal the different practices of settlers from the southwest of England. Cummings, Framed Houses of Massachusetts Bay, 28. 29 Ibid., 146-7; 158-201. 30 For an excellent analysis of this evolutionary process as it occurred in nineteenth-century New England, see Hubka, Big House, LittleHou.se, Back House Barn. 31 The term 'bay' crops up in many building contexts. It is an almost standard dimension in barn construction, being about sixteen feet - said to be the width needed to house a yoke of oxen. 32 See Connolly, 'The Cape Cod House.' Evidently some confusion exists in the descriptive terminology pertaining lo the expansion of these houses. Some writers reverse t h e logic by calling the double house 'a house,' and the smaller
Notes to pages 73-87 245
33
34
35 36 37 38
39 40 41 42 43
44 45
46 47 48 49 50
versions, a 'half house' and 'three-quarter house.' If one accepts the genesis described here the logic of the former system of terminology makes more sense. For a depiction of the movement of people into British North America, see Wynn, Tre-Loyalist Nova Scotia,' in Harris and Matthews, eds., Historical Atlas of Canada, vol. 1, plate 31; and R. Louis Gentilcore, Don Measner, and David Doherty, 'The Coming the Loyalists,' in Gentilcore and Matthews, eds., Historical Atlas of Canada, vol. 2, plate 7. Examples of these houses are revealed in South Shore: Seasoned Timbers, vol. 2. Unfortunately the volume does not provide floor plans; rather it concentrates on reconstructing the history of occupation. Ibid., 16, 18,26. Ennals, 'The Yankee Origins of "Bluenose" Vernacular Architecture.' Grant, Highland Folk Ways, 141. Classic, Passing the Time, 327. For example, Classic notes how the directions within the house are determined in relation to the hearth; 'You are going "down" when the hearth's open mouth is behind you, and "up" when it is toward you.' Ibid., 149-50. Fenton and Walker, The Rural Architecture of Scotland, 76-90. O'Dea, The Tilt.' Pocius, 'Architecture on Newfoundland's Southern Shore.' See Classic, 'The Types of the Southern Mountain Cabin'; Kniffen and Classic, 'Building in Wood in the Eastern United States'; Wilhelm, 'Folk Settlement Types in the Blue Ridge Mountains'; Wilson, 'The Single-Pen Log House in the South'; Zelinsky, 'The Log House in Georgia.' See Classic, Pattern in the Material Folk Culture of the Eastern United States, 50. See Rempel, Building with Wood and Other Aspects of Nineteenth Century Building in Ontario, 17-21; for a discussion of barn building, see Ennals, 'NineteenthCentury Barns in Southern Ontario.' Wightman, 'Construction Materials in Colonial Ontario, 1831-61.' Letter written by Joseph Carrothers, 23 October 1848, as cited in Houston and Smyth, Irish Emigration and Canadian Settlement, 271. Ibid., 141, letter from Nathaniel Carrothers, 5 December 1853. See Rempel, Building with Wood, 11-95. See, for example, Catermole, Emigration: The Advantages of Emigration to the Canadas (London, 1831); Jameson, Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (Toronto, 1823); Rolph, A brief account, together with observations made during a visit to the West Indies, and a tour through the United States of America in part of the year 1832-3; together with a statistical account of Upper Canada (London, 1836).
246
Notes to pages 91-104
Chapter Four 1 SenneU, The Fall of Public Man; Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism. 2 Classic, Folk Housing in Middle Virginia; also Passing the Time in Ballymenone. 3 For a summary of the impact of enclosure in the English landscape, see Robert I. Hodgson, 'Agricultural Improvement and Changing Regional Economies in the Eighteenth Century,' in Baker and Harley, eds., Man Made the Land, 140-52; also Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape. 4 Park. 'A List of Architectural Books Available in America Before the Revolution.' 5 Nason, 'Si. Andrews.' 6 Merrill was the son of a Loyalist from Rye, New York. His house, which survives as a civic museum, is known as 'the Loyalist House,' and its association and style underscore both the popular association of Georgian housing with Loyalists and the fact that many of these houses were being built long after the Loyalist removal and (more important) long after the house styles had progressed to newer vernacular idioms. 7 Cunningham and Prince, Tamped Clay and Salt Marsh Hay, 1-6. 8 Flemish bond is a method of laying brick in double rows, with alternate bricks placed long side (stretcher) and short end (header). It provided an extremely durable wall, was very decorative, and because of the number of bricks used, was a surrogate for wealth. English bond was a row of stretchers and a row of headers; American bond was five courses of stretchers to one of headers. 9 Wallace, An Album, of Drawings of Early Buildings in Nova Scotia, plate 50. 10 Seasoned Timbers, vol. 1. 11 David Mills, 'The Development of Folk Housing in Trinity Bay, Newfoundland.' 12 Examples on the Maritime side of the strait are often regarded as being brought by Newfoundland migrants; however, alternate arguments would suggest thai the functional efficiency of new light roof rafters and asphalt tiles enabled the development of a lighter and shallower roof. See Ennals and Holdsworth, 'Vernacular Architecture and the Cultural Landscape of the Maritime Provinces - a Reconnaissance.' 13 Pocius, 'Raised Roofs and High Hopes.' 14 On the Greek Revival, see Whiffen, American Architecture since 1780; Kimball, Domestic Architecture of the American Colonies and, of the Early Republic. 15 On the Barnum House, see MacRae, The Ancestral Roof, 44-5; and McBurney and Byers, Homesteads, 168. 16 Humphreys. The Architectural Heritage of the Rideau Corridor, 16; MacRae, Ancestral Roof, 75.
Notes to pages 104-12 247 17 MacRae, The Ancestral Roof, 141; Blake and Greenhill, Rural Ontario. 18 Wright properly challenges the use of this label by architectural historians of the high-art tradition, arguing that there was no cohesive architectural prototype which would justify this term. Rather, she suggests that many of the houses built during the Regency periodwere expressions of the Picturesque architectural and landscape ideal and that this should be the term use to designate these houses. The matter is clouded further by the tradition in Quebec of labelling these same houses as 'Anglo-Norman,' a term which seems to be anything but helpful. Wright, Architecture of the Picturesque, 156. 19 Prospect Cottage is featured in McBurney and Byers, Homesteads, 170-1. For an exploration of the social and economic world that Mallery occupied, including references to the family's settlement and farming activities, see Ennals, 'Land and Society in Hamilton Township, 1792-1861.' 20 The Covert family are representative of this local gentry, though perhaps more financially successful than many. For an analysis of their affairs, see Ennals, 'John Covert,' Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 7:213-15. 21 Wightman, 'Construction Materials in Colonial Ontario 1831-61.' 22 Fallis, 'The Idea of Progress in the Province of Canada: 1841-1867.' 23 See Woodford, The Truth about Cottages, for an overview of the twin rationales of reform and picturesque design presented to property owners in the late eighteenth century. Nathaniel Kent, Hints to Gentlemen of Landed Property (1775), was the first to contain plans for model cottages; John Wood, Series of Plans for Cottage or Habitations of the Labourer (1781), offered privies and more space, and Richard Elsom's Hints for Improving the Condition of the Peasantry (1816), coming after the French Revolution, sought ways of reducing potential rural discontent through a better-housed population. 24 On Downing, see Scully, 'American Houses.' 25 J. Stewart Johnson, Introduction to the Dover Edition in A.J. Downing, The Architecture of Country Houses, v-xv. 26 A.J. Downing, Cottage Residences (1842), 11. 27 Ibid. 28 For A.J. Downing, Cottage Residences, the range is as follows: I, $1,800; II, $4,500; III, $3,500; IV, $1,700; V, $5,000; VI, $6,800; VII, $7,600; VIII, $7,600; IX (byNotman) $3,000; X, (by Davis) $12-15,000; XI, $1,000; XII, (Brown) $7-900; XIII, np; XIV, $4,800. 29 Ibid., 79. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 32 These farm journals can be found in the Baldwin Room, Toronto Public Library.
248 Notes to pages 112-22 33 Ennals, 'Land and Society in Hamilton Township,' 234. 34 Conzen, 'North American County Maps and Atlases,' 186-211, provides excellent analysis of this genre throughout the midwest. 35 Lessard and Marquis, Encyclopedic de la maison Quebecois, chapter 5. 36 Gagnon-Pratte, L'architecture et la nature a Quebec au dix-neuvieme siecle. 37 MacRae, The Ancestral Roof, 76-94; Boyd, Australia's Home; and King, 'The Bungalow in India.' 38 King, The Bungalow. 39 On Lunenburg, see Balcom, The History oj the LunenburgFishing Industry. 40 Plaskeu, Lunenburg- an Inventory of Historic Buildings. 41 Butterfield and Ledohowski, Architectural Heritage and the Brandon and Area Planning District. 42 Sandilands, The Architecture oj the Fraser Valley. 43 On the Berding Collage in Ferndale, see Gebhard, Montgomery, Winter, Woodbridge, and Woodbridge, Architecture of San Francisco and Northern California, 329. 44 Weniworth Villa was a house built in Victoria from California redwood in 1862 for Captain H.B. Ella; see Segger and Franklin, Victoria, 256-7; a similar house was built for a Captain Irving in New Westminster, a town serving a similar capital function for the mainland colonyChapter Five 1 The best work on this distinction in terms of the built environment is by King: see his Introduction, in King, ed., Buildings and Society, 1-36, and 'Culture and the Political Economy of Building Form.' For the discussion of culture arid economy in social history, see Kealey, 'Labour and Working Class History in Canada,' and Johnson, 'Three Problematics.' In human geography, see Duncan and Ley, 'Structural Marxism and Human Geography,' and Cosgrove, 'Place, Landscape and the Dialectics of Cultural Geography-' 2 Kniffen, 'Folk Housing: Key to Diffusion,' Classic, Pattern in the Material Folk Culture of the Eastern United States; Lewis, 'Common Houses, Cultural Spoor,' Glassie, Folk Housing in Middle Virginia; Pocius, 'English Styles and Irish Adaptations'; see also David Mills, 'The Development of Folk Architecture in Trinity Bay.' 3 Most cultural geographies of Canadian housing have been specific to one region or to one ethnic group, such as Mannion, Irish Settlements in Eastern Canada, or Lehr, 'The Log Buildings of Ukrainian Settlers in Western Canada.' 4 Brunskill gives the type passing attention in his Handbook of Vernacular Archi-
Notes to pages 122-7
5 6 7 8 9
10 11 12 13 14
15
16
249
lecture, 164-79. On recent British developments, see Muter, The Buildings of a Industrial Community, and Trinder, The Making of the Industrial Landscape. Good examples of recent Canadian interest include MacKinnon, 'Workers' Housing in Wabana, Bell Island, Newfoundland,' and L.atremouille, The Pride of Home. Harvey, 'Labour, Capital and Class Struggle around the Built Environment in Advanced Capitalist Societies.' Daunton, 'Miners' Houses'; Gregory, Regional Transformation and Industrial Revolution:, and Williamson, Class, Culture, and Community. King, The Bungalow. Lowe, Welsh Industrial Workers'Housing, 1775-1875; Caffyn, Workers'Housing in West Yorkshire, 1750-1920; Leech, Early Industrial Housing. Pentland, 'The Development of a Capitalist Labour Market in Canada.' At a broader level, see Hobsbavvm, Industry and Empire, 13-55. For the American case, see Gordon, 'Capitalist Development and the History of American Cities.' Harris and Warkentin, Canada before Confederation, 3-18; Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada. Wayne Moodie and Victor Lytwyn, 'Fur Trading Settlements,' in Harris and Matthews, eds., Historical Atlas of Canada, vol. 1, plate 64. Innis, The Cod Fisheries; Head, Eighteenth Century Newfoundland. Story, Kirwin, and Widdowson, eds., Dictionary of Newfoundland English, 113. Ibid., especially descriptions by Prowse, A History of Newfoundland from the English, Colonial, and Foreign Records, 450: 'On every mercantile large establishment the cook room was a necessary institution. All the planters and servants were boarded and lodged on the premises during their stay in the capital; the men slept in bunks ranged around the conk room like the berths in a ship'; also by an anonymous writer in the Trade Review, Christmas 1893: 'The size of the ancient cookrooms depended entirely on the planter's fishery business, but in general they were about fifty feet long and thirty wide. Along the sides, a few feet away from the floor, were the sleeping berths for the men, and a place underneath for each man's chest. The open space in the middle was devoted to the use of the tables where sometimes Fifty men sat down together at meal time.' Map and description of the Holdsworth premises, c. 1790. MG 66: S.C. Windsor Collection, Provincial Archives of Newfoundland and Labrador, St John's, Newfoundland. Mannion, The Waterford Merchants and the Irish-Newfoundland Provisions Trade, 1770-1820'; for the West Country roots, see W. Gordon Handcock,
250 Notes to pages 127-32 'English Migration lo Newfoundland,' in Mannion, ed., The Peopling of Newfoundland, 15-48. 17 Tibbets, The Newfoundland Tilt'; also O'Dea, The Tilt.' The function of the lilts during the hectic fishing season is described for one outport in Mannion, Point Lance in Transition, 37. 18 John ]. Mannion and C. Gram Head, The Migratory Fisheries,' in Harris and Matthews, eds., Historical Atlas of Canada, vol. 1, plate 21. 19 For the piquet house, see Ennals, 'Acadian Housing in Maritime Canada,' and Moogk, Building a House in New France, 30-1. 20 Belanger, Desjardins, and Frenette, Histoire de la Gaspesie, 191-257. 21 Men worked twelve-hour days under either four- or twelve-month contracts: Martell, 'Early Coal Mining in Nova Scotia.' The term 'barrack' might be a hold-over from the military occupation of Louisbourg, but the term also applies to a single-storey house characteristic of the northern part of the Shropshire coalfield in the second half of the eighteenth-century. Sec Muter, The Buildings of an Industrial Community, 68. 22 J.H. Cameron, ThePictonian Colliery, 21-33; and Martell, 'Early Coal Mining in Nova Scotia,' 47. 23 Ibid., 52. 24 Muthesius, The English Terraced House, 103-6. 25 McCord, North East England, the Region's Development, 1780-1960; see also Seeley, The Coal Mining Villages of Northumberland and Durham'; see also many of the plates in Hair, A Series of Views of the Collieries in the Counties of Northumberland and Durham. 26 Whyte, The Emergence of the New Estate Structure.' 27 Oaunton, 'Miners' Houses,' 162. 28 Martin, Barrington Collier Village (Bar'n'ton). 29 North of England Institute of Civil Engineers, Proceedings (1870), 19. 30 Vickers, 'George Robinson.' 31 Admiralty Chart of North America: West Coast, Vancouver Island, surveyed by Capt. Richards and the officers of the HMS Hecate, 1862. 32 Keith Ralston notes in his history of the Hudson's Bay mining activities on Vancouver Island that miners from Ayrshire, Scotland hired for Fort Rupert in 1848 were unable to build houses: 'a clause in their contracts ... stipulated the miners would build their own dwellings with material supplied by the company. But, as had been predicted to the company by people who knew Scottish miners, their skills were unequal to the task. The building had lo be done by other company servants, already hard-pressed with the new establishment under construction. The miners more or less looked on, to the accompani-
Notes to pages 132-5 251 ment of complaints from the fort management in the Foil Journal, kept by ihe clerks.' Ralston, 'Miners and Managers,' 45. 33 Lower, Settlement and the Forested Frontier in Eastern Canada, The North American Assault on the Canadian Forest, 'Great Britain's Woodyard'; Wynn, Timber Colony, 55-60; Head, 'An Introduction to Forest Exploitation in Nineteenth Century Ontario.' 34 Such houses are noted in Stuart Smith, 'Architecture in New Brunswick.' 35 The dimensions of this movement are summarized in David C. Smith, 'The Logging Frontier.' 36 MacKay, The Lumberjacks, 13-34. 37 For an excellent overview of the continental logging industry, see Williams, Americans and Their Forests. 38 Ives, Larry Gorman; Fowke, Lumbering Songs from the Nor them Woods. 39 David C. Smith, The Logging Frontier,' 101. 40 Mackay, The Lumberjacks, 25-7; 199-201. 41 Ibid., 25. 42 Note: 'the cook-room or kitchen of merchantmen on deck; a diminutive substitute for the galley of a man-of-war.' The Concise Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 312. See also Story, Kirwin, and Widdowson, eds., Dictionary of Newfoundland English, 113. 43 We are grateful to Professor Cecil Houston, University of Toronto, for providing this information, from his work on the Irish migration to Canada. 44 Webster's Dictionary (Springfield, Mass.: Mcrriam, 1942); see also Mannion, Irish Settlements, 144-5, for a description of the shanty as a stage between the initial 'tilt 1 and the more substantial log house in Ontario. 45 Other French words for such mean or temporary structures include abri, cabane, baraque, bicoque, hutte, and masure. 46 For the Pennines, see Trinder, Making of the Industrial Landscape, 189-90; Sopwith, An Account of the Mining District of Alston Moor, Weardale and Teesdale (Newcastle, 1833). 47 For Cape Breton, see Martell, 'Early Coal Mining in Nova Scotia,' 50. 48 For example, see Hardy and Seguin, Foret societe en Mauricie, 115-19; and, for Ontario, Tozer and Strickland, A Pictorial History of Algonquin Provincial Park. 49 Keith Matson, Forest Archaeologist, Chippewa National Forest, Minnesota (personal communication). 50 Blegcn, 'With Axe and Saw,' 11. 51 J.E. MacDonald, Shantymen and Sodbusters, 42-3. 52 Kephart, 'The Pulpwood Camps.' 53 Lynn, 'Reconstructing a Maine Lumber Camp of 1900.'
252
Notes to pages 137-43
54 In Northern English dialect, a snickei is a passageway between walls or fences; and a ginnel is a narrow passageway between buildings. It is a long way from the alleyways of medieval towns and cities to the dingle shanties of the New World, but the fences of a burgage plot and a field boundary may well be the roots of the word's usage. See Jones, A Walk around the Snickelways of York. 55 Monlell and Morse, Kentucky Folk Architecture. 56 Mercer, English Vernacular Houses. 57 Rohe, 'Place Names - Relics of the Great Lakes Lumber Era,' includes a photo of a camp near Parrish, Wisconsin, in the 1880s in which a roofed dingle links the two parts of the camp; Dyche, 'Tongue River Experience,' describes a Wyoming camp at seven thousand feet in the Big Horn National Forest in 1906: 'we pul the buildings in line with each other, 20 feet apart, roofed the space in between, walled one side with hewn poles to make a space for men to leave tools or to wash up, and keep out a lot of cold' (7). 58 Leonidoff, 'Architecture traditionelle de camps forestiers.' 59 Belanger el al., Hisloire de la Gaspesie, 368. 60 Ibid., 329. 61 Seguin, Lesgranges du Quebec, and Dupont, ed., Habitation rurale au Quebec. 62 Zelinsky, 'The New England Connecting Barn'; see also Konrad, 'Against the Tide.' 63 For example, the Northeast Archives of Folklore and Oral History, University of Maine at Orono, photos 421 and 422 of the Hitchborn and Sawyer Camp, 1905; and photo 930 of a camp (with dingle) on the edge of Little Musquash Lake. On New England houses, see Hubka, Big House, Little House, Back House Barn, 64 Belanger et al., Histoire de la Gaspesie, 329, includes an illustration of a 'camp de bois rond sur la riviere Tartigan vers 1870.' 65 For Maine, see Northeast Archives, photo 135, of a camp on ihe Wassalaquoick Stream, 1895; for Pukaskwa, see Mackay, The Lumberjacks, 286-300. 66 Suke, Les Forges Saint-Maurice; Boucher, Maurice d'autrefois. 67 Trottier, 'Les Forges du Si. Maurice.' 68 Vermette, 'Domestic Life al Les Forges du Saint-Maurice.' 69 Bining, Pennsylvania Inn Manufacture in the Eighteenth Century. 70 Vermette ciles Frederic LePlay's study of European workers, Les ouvners europeens (1879). 71 Field-work in Boutellier's Cove, St Margaret's Bay, Nova Scotia. 72 Harper, 'St Marlins' Men Build a Ship in 1814.' 73 Moran to Ward, 4 September 1814, quoted in ibid., 281. 74 Moran to Ward, 22 October 1814, ibid., 282. 75 Moran to Ward, 13 November 1814, ibid., 283.
Notes to pages 143-54
253
76 Moran to Ward, 3 March 1815, ibid., 287. 77 Fingard,/ar& in Port. Chapter Six 1 On Frank Lloyd Wright, see Eaton, Two Chicago Architects and Their Clients; on R. Norman Shaw, see N. Pevsner, 'Richard Norman Shaw,' in P. Ferriday ed., Victorian Architecture, 237-46; and on C.F.A. Voysey, see John Brandon-Jones, also in Ferriday 269-83. See also Gradidge, Dream Houses. 2 For a broad overview of Canada's changing economic and settlement geography in the post-Confederation era, see Cook and Brown, Canada, 1896-1921, and Kerr, Holdsworth, and Matthews, eds., Historical Atlas of Canada, vol. 3. 3 'Who Owns Canada?' drain Growers' Guide (June 1913): 11-34. 4 MacKay, The Square Mile, 8. 5 It is worth noting that in 1871, there were only nine places in Canada that had a population larger than 10,000, and only one of these had a population in excess of 100,000 (Montreal at 115,000). By 1891, there were nineteen places over 10,000 and now Toronto at 181,000 had joined Montreal (219,000) as the only two places over 100,000. By 1911, there were still only forty-three places larger than 10,000, two-thirds of which were in Quebec and Ontario, and only Montreal (490,000), Toronto (381,000), Winnipeg (136,000) and Vancouver (100,400) were truly metropolitan. Even by 1921, there would only be fifty-five places above 10,000 and only six above 100,000, Ottawa and Hamilton having joined the metropolitan group dominated by Montreal (618,000) and Toronto (521,000). Source: Canada Year Book 1930, section 10, Urban and Rural Population, table 25, 'Population of Cities and Towns Having over 5,000 Inhabitants in 1921, compared with 1871-81-91-1901-1911' (Ottawa: King's Printer, 1930), 118-20. 6 Lynes, The Tastemakers. 1 Arthur, Toronto: No Mean City, 201. 8 MacKay, The Square Mile, 71. 9 Ibid., 157. 10 Austin Seton Thompson, Jarvis Street, chapter 7. 11 Austin typified the new class of Toronto's wealthy. Son of an Irish farmer, he had been apprenticed to William Lyon Mackenzie soon after the family emigrated to Upper Canada in 1829. Austin later became one of the leading wholesale grocery merchants, a director of the Consumer's Gas Company and by the early 1870s was presiding over the Imperial Bank. See Austin Scton Thompson, Spadina. 12 Dendy and Kilbourn, Toronto Observed, 116.
254
Notes to pages 154-62
13 See Austin Seton Thompson, Jarvis Street, 152-5, for the competition between the Gooderhams, the Masseys, and the Cawthra Mulock clans for prominence on the street. 14 Gooderham died in 1905 and the house became the York Club. 15 Toronto's dominance came slowly in the twentieth century, first as it gathered a lot offederal bond business during the Great War, then with the opening up the hard-rock mining resources of the Canadian Shield in the 1920s and 1930s that were run by Toronto-based American companies. See Kerr, 'Metropolitan Dominance in Canada.' For another perspective on the Methodist hold on Toronto, see Armstrong and Nelles, The Revenge of the Methodist Bicyclf Company. 16 McCann, 'Metropolitanism and Branch Bank Business, 1881-1931'; G. Gad, W. Code, and N. Quigley, 'Financial Institutions,' in Kerr, Holdsworth, and Matthews, eds., Historical Atlas of Canada, vol. 3, plate 9; Schull and Gibson, The Scotiabank Story. 17 Manitoba Free Press, 20 June 1903, quoted in Artibise, Winnipeg, 167. 18 Ibid., 28-9. 19 Foran, Calgary, An Illustrated History, 98. 20 Robertson, 'The Pursuit of Profit, Power, and Privacy.' See Ethel Wilson's novel The Innocent Traveller for details on life in the West End in the 1890s. 21 Segger and Franklin, Victoria, 29. 22 Ibid., 311. 23 Tye, 'The Housing of a Workforce.' 24 See Davidoff, The Best Circles. 25 See, for example, Spain, Gendered Spaces, 109-40. 26 Stearns, Be a Man. Parr alludes to this crisis in interpreting the Knechtels, a family of factory owners in Hanover, Ontario, in The Gender of Breadwinners. 27 Spain draws on an 1871 volume by architect Robert Kerr, The Gentleman's House; or How to Plan English Residences, which included twenty-seven necessary rooms, only three of which were identified as female; Spain, Gendered Spaces, 112-22. 28 On spatial layout, see Girouard, Life in the Victorian Country House. 29 See Tausky and DiStefano, Victorian Architecture in London and Southwestern Ontario, 57-108. 30 Ibid., 229. 31 Barrett and Liscombe, Francis Rattenbury and British Columbia. 32 Bingham, Samuel Maclure. 33 Gowans, Building Canada, caption to plate 188. 34 Ibid., 140. 35 It is a peculiarly Canadian yardstick that looks to agents of the British Crown
Notes to pages 162-6
255
to affirm position in the social order. An interesting example in the emerging west can be traced in Manitoba's transition from territory to province, and the capital from fur trading Fort Garry to Winnipeg. The early governor's residences at Red River and Fort Garry were squarely inside the fort, but Manitoba's first lieutenant-governor (Archibald) chose to live at Silver Heights, a Quebec-styled log cottage built by prominent fur trader Rowland on the old Portage Trail near the Assiniboine River. Even though the old Government House at the fort was updated (a third story added to the five-bay Georgian-styled house in 1873), a new Government House was begun in 1881 next to the new legislative building in the new city of Winnipeg. Designed by Thomas Scott, the chief architect of the federal Public Works department, 10 Kennedy Street was a three-storey, mansard-roof mansion in the Second Empire style; already an unpopular style when built, this 'understated and dignified' building stood in stark contrast to the ostentatious homes soon built nearby by the likes of grain merchant Nicholas Bawlf or builder W.H. Rourke. As the setting for the representatives of royalty in the new prairie society, its ample grounds, used for spring and summer garden parties, as well as its interior space for slate dinners, receptions and balls, provided the social tone far in excess of any architectural statement. See Government House. 36 Voisey, 'In Search of Wealth and Status.' 37 Jack and Daisy Phillips moved from England to the Windermere Valley in southeastern British Columbia in 1912 and built a bungalow named Heston along Toby Creek in the ill-fated Columbia Valley Irrigated Fruit Lands scheme. The gulf between polite English life and the rugged frontier, as stark as those that Susanna Moodie conveyed for an earlier Canadian frontier, is poignantly spelled out in letters that Daisy wrote home to her family. See Harris and Phillips eds., Letters from Winder-mere, 1912-1914. 38 Gagnon-Pratte, Country Houses for Montrealers 1892-1924. 39 Dube, Charlevoix. 40 For a full discussion of the colonial origins of the style, and iis reimerprelalion for 1880s leisure settings, see Scully, The Shingle Style and the Stick Style. 41 Tuck, Gothic Dreams. See his discussion of Beaconsfield, 1877 (37-8), Queen Anne styles (71), and the Borden house (139-44). 42 For a wonderful account of life in one of those West End houses in the late nineteenth century, see Wilson, Innocent Traveller, 129-30. 43 Makinson, 'Greene and Greene.' 44 The Reifel House Rio Vista along Vancouver's South West Marine Drive, built 1930-1, is perhaps the best example. See Kalman, Exploring Vancouver, 209. 45 The English satirist and architectural critic Osberl Lancaster coined the
256 Notes to pages 166-8 phrase 'Stockbroker Tudor' to summarize the association, in upper-middleclass suburbs around London, England, between men who worked in the City's financial district and overly ostentatious Tudor-trimmed family houses. See From Pillar to Post. 46 Stan Hywet I lall was built in 1911-15. A sixty-five-room mansion, its exterior styling and several of its interior rooms were derived from several Elizabethan manors. 47 For example, the Newhall house in Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania, by Wilson Eyre, 1881; see plates 95 and 96 in Scully, The Shingle Style and the Stick Style. 48 See Palmer, 'The Development of Domestic Architecture in British Columbia.' 49 Emily Carr, in recalling her childhood Victoria home, noted 'everything about [around] it was extremely English. It was as though Father had buried a tremendous homesickness in this new soil and it had rooted and sprung up English. There were hawthorn hedges, primrose banks, and cow pastures and shrubberies.' The Book of Small, 76. 50 The quotation is from historian Martin Robin, The Rush for Spoils, 42. Earlier on that page he notes 'Victoria was ... a decorous Little England, housing a colonial bourgeoisie who spoke in delicate British tones, tended their gardens, trailed ivy over their fences, attended chrysanthemum shows, and took their tea oblivious of the craze of expansion which soon seized the Interior.' 51 See Robert M. Galois, 'British Columbia Resources' and and 'Resource Communities in British Columbia,' in Kerr, Holdsworth, and Matthews, eds., Historical Atlas of Canada, vol. 3, plates 21, 22. 52 Holdsworth, 'House and Home in Vancouver.' in The Canadian City, 186-211, and 'Castles and Cabins for Vancouver Homeseekers.' 53 Leonard K. Eaton, Introduction to Scgger and Franklin, Victoria, 9. Detailed treatments of Maclure can be found in Eaton, The Architecture of Samuel Maclure; Bingham, Samuel Maclure, Architect, and Segger, The Buildings of Samuel Maclure. 54 See the Shaughnessy walking tour in Kalinan, Exploring Vancouver, 146—64, which contains illustrations and discussion of five houses designed by Maclure and Fox. 55 Duncan and Duncan, 'A Cultural Analysis of Urban Residential Landscapes in North America.' 56 These three houses receive treatment in Bingham, Samuel Maclure, Architect, 79-82. 57 Not all were mansions. Maclure designed some small Tudor Revival cottages (see his 'A Charming Western House') and also a very distinctive AngloIndian bungalow silhouette, noted in Eaton, The Architecture of Samuel Maclure, 8-9.
Notes to pages 168-75 257 58 Patterson, 'The Development of an Interwar Suburb.' 59 Adams, 'Eden Smith and the Canadian Domestic Revival,' 60 Ibid. Adams argues that this conscious appeal to British gentry images was a last gasp of the hold of British authority in matters cultural, since artists in these spaces began to probe what was Canadian - the brutal, windswept landscapes of the Canadian Shield that the Group of Seven tried to capture rather than Constable-inspired views of southern Ontario landscape. Ironically, these more nationalistic images still hung on walls of houses for the most part still British in their appearance for another generation of suburban development. 61 Dendy and Kilbourn, Toronto Observed, 173. 62 Ibid. 63 Melnyk, Calgary Builds, 50-1. 64 The house gained further notoriety when purchased by former Prime Minister Trudeau in 1980. See MacKay, The Square Mile, 10-11. 65 For example the Garden Court Apartments on Bayview in Toronto, 1939-42; Dendy and Kilbourn, Toronto Observed, 246-48. 66 R.C. Harris, 'The Simplification of Europe Overseas.' Chapter Seven 1 W.L. Morton, The West and the Nation, 1870-1970,' in Rasporich and Klassen, eds., Prairie Perspectives 2, 8. 2 For an analysis of Mennonite settlement and architectural practice in Manitoba, see Warkentin, 'Mennonite Agricultural Settlements of Southern Manitoba' and 'Manitoba Settlement Patterns'; Epp, Mennonites in Canada, 17861920; Butterfield and Ledohowski, Architectural Heritage - the MSTWPlanning District; Lehr, 'Folk Architecture in Manitoba.' 3 Jans, Landelijke bouwkunst in Oost-Nederland; Atlas der Sweizaben-Bern. 4 Some have argued thai colonial Pennsylvania, with its rich mix of German, English, and Scots-Irish people, became a kind of cultural crucible in which some of the major aspects of a northern mixed-farming economic system and culture were worked out through an amalgamation of different Old World practices. See, for example, the work of Classic, Pattern in the Material Folk Culture of Eastern North America, 36-64; Lemon, The Best Poor Man's Country. 5 Some scholars have argued that the house-barn dates to Neolithic times, and archaeological evidence in portions of Scandinavia and Jutland verify that a 'long' dwelling form combining human and animal quarters existed at that time. Other examples of this practice can be found, including in parts of Britain, namely southwest England, Wales, and Ireland. This type of arrangement seems to have lost favour in lowland Britain after the fifteenth century but
258 Notes to pages 175-88 continued in the upland areas of the north and west. For a discussion of these issues, see Peate, 'Welsh Long-Houses'; Baumgarten, 'Some Notes on the History of the German Hall House,' Tishler and Witmer, 'The Housebarns of East-Central Wisconsin.' 6 Butterfield and Ledohowski, Architectural Heritage - the MSTW Planning District, 86-7; also see Dowsett, 'The Vernacular Architecture of Two Ethnic Groups in Manitoba a Comparative Study.' 7 Butterfield and Ledohowski, Architectural Heritage - the MSTW Planning District, 86-7. 8 Ibid., 87. 9 Ibid., 89-90; Dowsett, 'The Vernacular Architecture of Two Ethnic Groups,' 89. 10 Butterfield and Ledohowski, Architectural Heritage - the MSTW Planning District, 90-1. 11 See Dowsett, 'The Vernacular Architecture of Two Ethnic Groups,' 9 for a construction diagram of a brick heater [Tajel Owe]. Mennonite took considerable pains to provide a ready and inexpensive fuel for these heaters. Because wood and coal were expensive and not easily available, the method involved producing a brick of dried cow dung mixed with straw [called mest sooden]. This method was transferred from Europe and remained culturally viable for some time in western Canada. 12 Butterfield and Ledohowski, Architectural Heritage - the MSTW Planning District, 95-101. 13 John Lehr, 'Ukrainian Vernacular Architecture in Alberta.' 14 Burke, The Ukrainian Canadians. 15 Ledohowski and Butterfield, Architectural Heritage - the Eastern Interlake Planning District, 55. Also see Dowsett, 'The Vernacular Architecture of Two Ethnic Groups,' 9-13. 16 Ledohowski and Butterfield, Tnterlake District,' Architectural Heritage - the Eastern Interlake Planning District, 58. 17 See Lehr 'Ukrainian Vernacular Architecture in Alberta,' and Ledohowshi and Butterfield, Architectural Heritage - the Eastern Interlake Planning District, 5575; also see Lehr, 'The Log Buildings of Ukrainian Settlers in Western Canada,' Dennis, Alberta Built, 27-30. 18 Ledohowski and Butterfield, Architectural Heritage - the Eastern Interlake Planning District, 68-9. 19 Ennals, 'Acadians in Maritime Canada.' 20 See, for example, the Joseph a Hilaire Boudreau house at Bimet circa 1795 as discussed in Brun, LeBlanc, and Robichaud, Les Bailments anciens de la Mer Rouge, 99-114.
Notes to pages 192-8 259 Chapter Eight 1 Sennett, The Fall of Public Man. 2 Lynes, The Tastemakers. 3 See Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution, and Wright, Building the Suburban Dream. 4 Laura C. Holloway, The Hearthstone: or, Life at Home, A Household Manual containing hints and helps for home making: home furnishing: decoration and amusements: health directions: the sick-room: the nursery: the library: the laundry: etc., together with a complete cookery book (Chicago: Smith and Miller, 1885). 5 In American Cottage Houses, twelve designs were for cottages under $1,000, seventeen between $1,000 and $2,000, ten between $2,000 and $3,000, and eleven over $3,000. 6 Tuck notes that one Richard Weeks advertised in the local Charlottetown newspaper in 1876, and aj. Humphries advertised himself as an architect, based on thirteen years' experience in building construction 'in Brick, Wood and Stone.' Tuck, Gothic Dreams, 40-2. 7 Pocius, 'Raised Roofs and High Hopes,' 74. 8 Latremouille, Pride of Home, 45-51. 9 See the portrayal of the range of house types (a scale of living space) presented by Sherry Olson and David Hanna, 'Social Change in Montreal, 18471901,' in Gentilcore and Matthews eds., Historical Atlas of Canada, vol. 2, plate 49; also 'The Social Landscape of Montreal, 1901,' in Kerr, Holdsworth, and Matthews, eds., Historical Atlas of Canada, vol. 3, plate 30. 10 See Marsan, Montreal in Evolution, 289-93. 11 Copp, The Anatomy of Poverty, 71. 12 Annual Report of the Montreal Board of Health, 1925, quoted in ibid., 77. 13 Linteau, The Promoters'City, 130. 14 Kalman and Roaf, Exploring Ottawa, 36, contains examples from Bruyere Street. 15 Newton, 'The Search for Heritage in Ottawa's Lower Town.' 16 Kalman and Roaf, Exploring Ottawa, 58. 17 Careless, Toronto to 1918, an Illustrated History; Spelt, Toronto; Kealey, Toronto Workers Respond to Industrial Capitalism, 1867-1892. 18 McHugh, Toronto Architecture, 51. 19 Ibid., 16. 20 Ibid., 211. 21 McHugh argues that these 'pleasing rhythmic compositions are virtually Toronto's architectural trademark.' Ibid., 16. 22 Jackson, American Space; see also Cronon, Nature's Metropolis.
260 Notes to pages 198-205 23 The Radford American Homes, 100 House Plans; 70 per cent of these designs were between $1,000 and $2,500; only 10 per cent, were cottages, and a similarly small proportion were for elaborate expensive houses. See list of prices for plans (228-9). 24 [Vancouver! World, August 1889, 1. 25 In Holdsworth's personal library are copies of Hodgson's Low Cost American Homes (1906), inscribed as belonging to Ernest A. Collis, Lethbridge, Alberta, 4 October 1910; The Radford American Home, inscribed byJ.W. Brewer, Buckingham, Quebec; and Hodgson's Common Sense Stair Building and Handrailing (1903), inscribed by EdmundJ.M. Bourgeois, Tracadie, New Brunswick, 26 December 1905. 26 Practical Uses of the Steel. Square. In the preface Hodgson writes that the volume contains many things that 'have been culled from the best work of experts and which have appeared in some one or other of the great number of trade journals that have been published in this country, in England and Australia during the last twenty-five years.' 27 See, for example, the reprinted Universal Design Book Containing Official Price Lists (Chicago, 1904), now in The Victorian Design Book. 28 Brooks, The Prairie School, 58-9. 29 Bok, The Americanization of Edward Bok, 238-45. 30 T.W. Hanchett, 'The Four Square House Type in the United States,' in Wells, ed., Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture, 51-3. 31 R. Mackay Fripp, Minutes and Records, Vancouver Arts and Crafts Society, 1906 (Add. Mss. 142, Vancouver City Archives). 32 Winter, The California Bungalow; Holdsworth. 'Regional Identity in an Industrial Age.' 33 Makinson, 'Greene and Greene,' 103. 34 Stickley, Craftsman Homes; Mary Ann Smith, Gustav Stickley the Craftsman; Freeman, Gustav Stickley. 35 E.P. Thompson, William Morris, Romantic to Revolutionary; Boris, Art and Labor. 36 Vancouver Sun, 29 October 1911, 10. 37 The argument for Vancouver's distinctive built environment is made in Holdsworth, 'House and Home in Vancouver: Images of West Coast Urbanism, 1886-1929,' and in 'Cottages and Castles for Vancouver Homeseekers.' 38 Yoho, Craftsman Bungalows. 39 British Columbia Biographical, vol. 4, 1122-4. 40 Ibid., 1124. 41 Boam, British Columbia, 193. 42 Doucet and Weaver, 'Material Culture and the North American House.' 43 Winter, 'Southern California Arts and Crafts.'
Notes to pages 206-12 261 44 During the 1920s, the Maritime provinces experienced a substantial net outmigration; see Marvin Mclnnis, 'The Fertility Transition, 1851-1891,' in Gentilcore and Matthews, eds., Historical Atlas of Canada, vol. 2, plate 30. 45 Friesen, The Canadian Prairies; William J. Carlyle,John C. Lehr, and G.E. Mills, 'Peopling the Prairies,' and Philip D. Keddie, 'Prairie Agriculture,' in Kerr, Holdsworth, and Matthews, eds., Historical Atlas of Canada, vol. 3, plates 17, 18. 46 Mills, Buying Wood and Building Farms. 47 Western Lumberman 13 (September 1916): 16, quoted in ibid., 34. 48 Mills and Holdsworth, The B.C. Mills Prefabricated System, 127-69. 49 Local British Columbia folklore has it that Samuel Maclure was responsible for this design feature, a trademark of his Tudor Revival mansions, and that his work for the Clayburn Brick Company in the lower Fraser Valley provides evidence of that feature in 'ordinary housing.' 50 Holdsworth and Mills, 'Prefab Banks on the Prairies.' 51 G.E. Mills, Buying Wood and Building Farms, 54-61, 109-12. 52 Gowans, The Comfortable House. 53 For examples of these 'E for Eaton's' designs and actual built examples, see G.E. Mills, Buying Wood and Building Farms, 65, 117-18, 140-1, 150-1. 54 Marvin Mclnnis, 'Migration,' in Kerr, Holdsworth, and Matthews, eds., Historical Atlas of Canada, vol. 3, plate 27. 55 According to Gwendolyn Wright, Building the Suburban Dream, 199-201, the Architects' Small House Bureau was founded in Minneapolis in 1921. In British Columbia, it found expression in British Columbia Homes: 40 Plans prepared by the Architects' Small House Service Bureau of British Columbia (n.d.: c. 1928), copy in Library of the Royal Institute of British Architects, London, England. 56 Palmer, 'Development of Domestic Architecture in British Columbia,' 412. 57 See, for example, 'A Vancouver Home of Cheshire Design,' [Vancouver] Province, 28 June 1927; and, under the heading 'A Canadian Home of Charming Character,' [Vancouver] Province, 3 May 1927, it was asserted that 'the English styles are probably furnishing inspiration for more modern Canadian homes than any other form of architectural precedent.' 58 G.E. Mills, Buying Wood and Building Farms, 66. 59 Wade, The "Sting" of Vancouver's Better Housing "Spree," 1919-1949.' 60 Latremouille, Pride of Home, 85. 61 This was part of the first sentence of each of the four plan books. For a broad survey of Canadian post-war house appearance, see Deryck W. Holdsworth and Joan Simon, 'Housing Form and the Use of Domestic Space,' in Miron, ed., House, Home, and Community, 188-202.
262
Notes to pages 214-16
Chapter Nine 1 Usher, 'The Growth and Decay of the Trading and Trapping Frontiers in the Western Canadian Arctic.' For an exhaustive account of the modern era of fur trading, a period when the Hudson's Bay Company monopoly was challenged, its influence declined, and both resources and native peoples were impoverished, see Ray, The Canadian Fur Trade in the Industrial Age. 2 Innes, 'A Visit, to a Round-up.' 3 Alexander, 'Economic Growth in the Atlantic Region, 1880-1940.' 4 Ibid. 5 Balcom, 'Production and Marketing in Nova Scotia's Dried Fish Trade, 18501914.' 6 Coaker, Twenty Years of the Fishermen's Protective Union of Newfoundland. 7 Silver Donald Cameron, The Education of Elliott Richardson; see also Wynn, 'The Maritimes.' 8 'Oldest House on the Shore," 31. 9 Ralston, 'Patterns of Trade and Investment on the Pacific Coast, 1867-1892.' 10 Adachi, The Enemy That Never Was. 11 'The outside of the Minamt house is not much to look at but its inside is pleasing. It has grass floor mats, some low bamboo stools, a shiny black stove, a table, and a dwarf evergreen in a tub beside its door. The room is very, very clean.' H. Evans, 'Stevcston 1926.' See also Knight and Koizumi, A Man of Our Times. 12 See Robert Galois, 'Resource Communities in British Columbia,' in Kerr, Holdsworth, and Matthews, eds., Historical Atlas of Canada, vol. 3, plate 22. 13 The General Mining Association lost its Nova Scotia monopoly in 1858, in return for reduced royalties and extensions on several leases. By 1865 there were fourteen new mines, many of them financed by American capital; most of their output, higher than that of mines run by the GMA, went to the United States. On the Bostonian connection for the Dominion Coal Company, see MacGillivray, 'Henry Melville Whitney Comes to Cape Breton'; Brian Tennyson, 'Economic Nationalism and Confederation: A Case Study of Cape Breton,' in MacGillivray and Tennyson eds., Cape Breton Historical Essays, 55. On the west coast, the Vancouver Island Coal Mining and Land Company, another British firm, took over the Hudson's Bay Company land grant and coal interests in 1862. They sank a pit in Nanaimo in 1883 that lasted until 1950. Robert Dunsmuir, one of the miners brought over by (he Hudson's Bay Company, started a second company at Divers Lake in 1869. From his mines at Wellington, he developed an empire based on coal and on the huge land grant given as a reward for building the Esquimalt and
Notes to pages 216-21
263
Nanaimo Railway. His heirs sold out to Canadian Collieries in 1910. The other major Vancouver Island coal company was the Western Fuel Corporation. For the historical geography of Nanaimo in the 1880s, see Moffat, 'A Community of Working Men.' 14 C.O. MacDonald, The Coal and Iron Industries of Nova Scotia, 59. 15 Ibid. 16 Mellor, The Company Stores. Sarah M. Gold, working for the Canadian Brotherhood of Railroad Workers, published her account in Social Welfare (Aug.-Sept. 1925), reprinted as 'A Social Worker Visits Cape Breton, 1925.' An exhibit in the Glace Bay Miners' Memorial Museum revealed the following deductions from a monthly wage package of $35.13: $1.50 (rent); $0.23 (coal); $0.80 (oil); $3.24 (powder); $0.15 (school); $0.40 (doctor); $0.30 (tallow); $28.37 (company store). 17 Frank, 'Class Conflict in the Coal Industry' and 'Company Town/Labour Town.' 18 Laidlaw, ed., The Man from Margaree, 126. 19 J.H. Cameron, The Pictonian Colliers. 20 Latremouille, Pride of Home, 59-60; she cites the Maritime Mining Record, 3 August 1898, p. 8, as source for Springhill, and the 1925 Royal Commission on Coal Mines for the Cape Breton data. 21 Vernon, Cape Breton Canada at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century, 277. 22 MacKinnon, 'Workers' Housing in Wabana, Bell Island, Newfoundland.' 23 Seager, 'Minto, New Brunswick.' See also Akerman, Black around the Eyes and Del Muise, 'The Making of an Industrial Community: Cape Breton Coal Towns, 1867-1900,' in MacGillivray and Tennyson, eds., Cape Breton Historical Essays, 76-94. 24 Bowen, Boss Whistle, 89. 25 Ibid., 140-1; see also Jones, Hunt, Mallam, and Trinder, 'Holy Well Lane,' for evidence of the long roots of this alternate/squatting solution. 26 Kerr and Buslag, 'Some Basic Observations concerning the Architecture of the Chinese in British Columbia.' 27 The Chinatowns persisted when the mines closed down after the war, but have disappeared one by one, often from disastrous fires such as that which destroyed Nanaimo's Chinatown in 1960. Only the metropolitan Chinatowns in Vancouver and Victoria now survive as a partial record of the important contribution made by the Chinese to the British Columbia economy. For a broader history, see Wickberg, ed., From China to Canada; see also G.Johnson, 'Chinese Family and Community in Canada.' One of the more revealing volumes on British Columbia attitudes to Oriental immigration is Glynn-Ward, The Writing on the Wall.
264 Notes to pages 221-5 28 Den Otter, Civilizing the West, 161-98, 238-65; Darling, 'Drumheller Strike of 1925.' See also the Glenbow Archives, Calgary, photo collection for views of Cardaman, Hinton, and Mountain Park. 29 Johnstone, Coal Dust in My Blood, 112. 30 Neithercut, The White Pine Industry and the Transformation of Nineteenth Century Michigan,' and Geoffrey Taylor, Timber. 31 Grainger, Woodsmen of the West, 38, 52, 55, 73. 32 MacKay, Empire of Wood. 33 Grainger, Woodsmen of the West; White, The Bomb That Mooed, Memories of a Logging Camp Childhood'; Day, ed., 'Men of the Forest.' 34 Mills and Holdsworth, The B.C. Mills Prefabricated System, 147-81. 35 This was true of the Weyerhauser camps in Washington, and also the case in the exploitation of the southern pine forest, another region where there were few seasonal constraints on logging operations. According to one observer, the important distinction was by race, with rows of camp cars for Blacks and a separate row of shacks, known as 'millionaires' row,' for the white supervisory or skilled staff. Maunder, 'Go South Young Man.' 36 Grainger, Woodsman of the West, 38, 52, 55, 73. 37 Day, ed., 'Men of the Forest.' 38 David C. Smith, A History of Lumbering in Maine 1861-1960; also Warner, The Sealer,' and Kephart, The Pulpwood Camps.' 39 See, for example, Goltz, 'Espanola'; McClelland, R.A. Long's Planned City. 40 Botkin and Harlow, A Treasury of Railroad Folklore, 4 44-5.
41 Mackay, The Lumberjacks, 26, cites the May 1903 issue of the Canada Lumberman, which reported that there were still a few camboose shanties on the Ottawa River, although they had been largely replaced by 'stove shanties.' This old style has been abandoned on almost all other streams for the American style - the cooking range and the box stove, which is considered more upto-date and economical but there are still concerns who prefer to keep up the old style on account of its being more cheerful for the men and because they think it more cleanly and healthful.' It is interesting to note that the more modern form was referred to as the American style. 42 Hilton, Rough Pulpwood Operations in Northern Maine, 1935-40. 43 Earle Birney, 'Evergreen Summer, 1921,' in Day, ed., 'Men of the Forest,' 39. 44 Rolf Knight, Along the No. 20 Line, 50-9. 45 'Ascending a narrow stairway we enter what had apparently once been a large room, some 18' x 30'with a 10 foot ceiling, but which had an additional floor, occupying a position nearly midway between the floor and the ceiling, thus making two stories out of one. The lower floor was divided off into small rooms reached by a number of narrow hallways, each room containing three low bunks covered with a Chinese mat. In many cases a double tier of these
Notes to pages 225-34
265
bunks were observed. The second or upper floor was reached by a short stairway. Here no attempt seems to have been made at a division of space,' Young and Reid, The Japanese Canadians, 212. 46 These themes are discussed in Holdsworth, 'House and Home in Vancouver: The Emergence of a West Coast Urban Landscape, 1886-1929.' 47 Robson, 'Flin Flon.' 48 See Saarinen, 'The Influence of Thomas Adams and the British New Towns Movement in the Planning of Canadian Resource Communities.' 49 For an analysis of the social changes accompanying the broader agrarian settlement process, see R.C. Harris, 'The Simplification of Europe Overseas.' 50 John Herd Thompson, 'Bringing in the Sheaves.' 51 Hanna, The Layered City. 52 For the early stages of New England textile towns, and the importance of boarding-houses, see Vance, This Scene of Man, 332-40; for the mills at Manchester, New Hampshire, see Hareven and Langenbach, Amoskeag. 53 Reynolds, The Great Paternalist; Tarn, Five Per-Cent Philanthropy. 54 On Tompkinsville, see St Francis Xavier University Extension Department, Cooperative Housing in Nova Scotia, and Mackinnon, 'Tompkinsville, Cape Breton Island'; on Port Union, Newfoundland, see Coaker, Twenty Years of the Fisherman's Protective Union of Newfoundland. 55 For a discussion of this process on the fringes of Toronto, see Richard Harris, Unplanned Suburbs. 56 Parr, The Gender of Breadwinners. 57 R.C. Harris, 'Industry and the Good Life around Idaho Peak.' Chapter Ten 1 In the United States, see Kouwenhoven, The Arts in Modern American Civilization', Rosenberg, Technology and American Economic Growth', for Canada, see Ritchie, Canada Builds, 1867-1967. 2 Lynes, The Taslemakers. 3 Murdo MacPherson, Serge Courville, and Daniel Machines, 'Colonization and Co-operation,' in Kerr, Holdsworth, and Matthews, eels., Historical Atlas of Canada, vol. 3, plate 44. 4 Relph, The Modern Urban Landscape. 5 On 'maintenance mortgages,' see Lee-Whiting, Harvest oj Stone, 71-4. On more recent retirement landscapes, see Laws, 'The Land of Old Age'; Holdsworth and Laws, 'Landscapes of Old Age in Coastal British Columbia.' 6 Wade, 'The "Sting" of Vancouver's Better Housing "Spree," 1919-1949.' 7 Holdsworth and Simon, 'Housing Form and the Use of Domestic Space.'
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Index
dpoteau en coulisse 60-2, 68 Abitibi region 234 aboriginal housing 9, 125 Acadia, Acadians; origins in France 56, 242; expulsion 58 Acadian houses: Adams-Ritchie house 243; log buildings 62; Louisbourg 58; Melanson site 64; pre-expulsion housing 58; postexpulsion housing 64, 65, 70, 81, 186-91,211 AjckShtov 180 Albion Mines (Stellarton, NS) 37, 99-101, 128-30 Alt Times 177 America, Americans: architects 161, 164; building traditions 23, 36, 54, 61, 68, 71, 80, 81, 84, 88, 151, 164, 174, 186,200,211;culturein 31,85, 86, 87, 203, 232-4; economic practices 44,103,112,132,141,150, 155, 221, 222, 228; housing studies in 7, 13; Loyalists 38, 84; migration within 38, 49, 53, 70, 82, 84, 171, 174, 187, 198; settlement 50,51,53, 71, 77, 82, 84, 85, 87, 172, 208; society in 17, 24, 28, 34, 36, 38, 44, 50, 150, 151, 163, 164; War of 1812 41
American Architect and Builder 198
Amherst, NS 158, 159, 165, 218 Amish 174 Annapolis Valley 13, 164 Annex (Toronto) 150, 153, 154, 156, 168 Antigonish Movement 214 Antigonish, NS 75, 80, 214 Appalachian south 137 architects: carpenter architects 193; designs by 5, 26, 165; employment of 26, 49, 160, 161, 192, 206, 229, 233; in Canada 161, 165, 168, 201, 210, 212, 229, 255, 259, 261; in the USA 164, 198, 201, 256; patternbook 198, 199, 241, 261 architectural history, architectural historians 5, 14,25, 154, 160, 161, 167, 237, 247 architectural styles. See Baroque, Beaux-Arts, Georgian, Greek Revival, Prairie, Queen Anne, Regency, Revivalist, Second Empire, Shingle, Tudor Revival Armstrong's Point (Winnipeg, Man.) 157 art historians 14 aspen woodland zone 125,181
292
Index
attics 41,52, 127,139 Avalon Peninsula, Nfld 55 Australia 199 Austrians 181 Baie des Chaleurs 127 Banff, Alta 207 banks: Bank of Commerce 154; Bank of Montreal 152; Bank of Nova Scotia 48, 155 Bar Harbour, Maine 163 baroque 139 barge boards 196 bark: as a building material 133 barking houses 127 barns 71, 111, 138, 176,214 Baroque style 24 barracks 25, 29, 128, 135, 250 Barrington, England, Barrington Colliery 130 basements 37, 139, 141, 180, 190, 204 bathrooms 234 Bathurst, NB 29, 190 bay: as a module of house building 34, 72, 73, 244, 255 Bay City, Mich, 207 BayofFundy 57, 141, 142 Bay-N-Gables (Toronto) 196-8 BayofQuinte 75 B.C. Mills Timber and Trading Company (BCMT&T) 206,207 Beacon Hill Park (Victoria, BC) 158 Beaux-Arts style 162 Bedford Basin (Halifax) 31 Bedingfeld Ranch 162 bedrooms 37, 41, 57, 63, 70, 113, 124, 129,177, 180, 207 Beehive (Bobcaygeon, Ont.) 45 Bell Island, Nfld 218
Belle Vue 39, 40 Belleisle, NS 243 Bengali folk house 94, 123 Better Homfs and Living 211 Better Housing Scheme 211 Sevan, Wales 219 Beverley house (Toronto) 41 billiard rooms 159 Black Creek Pioneer Village 85 Black Sea 173 blacksmiths' shops 136 board and batten 202 boarding-houses 141,220,221,225, 230 Boards of Health 211 Bobcaygeon, Ont. 44, 45 boudoirs 160 bourgeois 17, 199 box frame 58, 61 Brady's Bend, Pa. 110,141 breezeways 137 Brewer, Maine 132 brick: bond systems, English and Flemish 246; brick makers 261; bricklayers and masons 32, 40-2, 57-60, 86, 89, 154, 165, 177, 179, 180, 193, 196, 197, 203, 205, 206, 221, 229, 233; heaters 258 Bridgeport, Conn. 193 British Admiralty charts 131, 250 British Columbia: architects 161, 167, 201; bungalows 202,205; canneries 215; Chinese in 220, 263; elite housing 166-8; housing style 193, 201; Hudson's Bay Co. 214; Japanese in 215,218; logging 132, 222; mining 150,221; prefabricated houses 206-10, 227; settlement in 43, 162, 173, 226, 234, 255; vernacular housing 198
Index British North America 24, 28, 42-4, 71,85,87,245 built environment 15,93,114,122, 143, 203, 225 Bukovynians 181; houses 183,184 Bungalow Finance and Construction Company 205 Bungalow Magazine 204 bungalows: Anglo-Indian 123, 256; California 165,166,201-6,210; pattern-book 204,205; suburban 3, 15, 205, 206 bunk-beds 127,222 bunkhouses 3, 92, 121, 135, 137, 214, 222, 227. See also cambooses cabannes des pecheurs ou des terriers 127 Cabbagetown (Toronto) 196 cabins 131, 139, 141, 167, 207, 218, 220,221,225 Cadbury 230 Caldwell Manor (Quebec City) 28 Caledonia Mines, NS 216 California bungalows 165, 201, 202, 204,206,210 cambooses, cambuses 132-5, 143, 223, 224, 264 Campbell House (Toronto) 40 Campobello Island 166 camps: cabannes des pecheurs ou des terriers \ 27; camp de bucheron 137; camp des hommes 137; logging 132-5, 137, 138, 220-5, 264; resource industries 121, 122, 132-5, 213, 215. See also bunkhouses, cambooses, cook rooms Canada Company 45 Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) 212,235 Canadian Architect and Builder 168, 201
293
Canadian Collieries 219, 263 Canadian Pacific Railway 152, 157, 207, 222 Canadian Shield: landscape 257; mining 226, 254; settlement 44, 172, 335 canneries 215, 216 Cape Breton: Acadian settlement 57; colony 80; Louisbourg 24, 62; mining 128, 130, 135, 216-18, 221 Cape Cod house 34, 73-5; double house 246; house and a half 73; terminology 244; three-quarter house 246; twentieth-century popularity 75,211,212 capitalism: agrarian and mercantile 10, 123, 149, 171; industrial and corporate 155, 161, 171, 196, 222, 224 capitalists 17, 123, 194; houses of 150-3, 158, 163 Cariboo 162 Carinthia 141 Carolinas 84, 174 carpenters: as contractors 190, 233; at Saint-Maurice 139; carpenter architects 193; government carpenters 55; in early Quebec 244; in early towns 58: in shipbuilding 141, 143 Carpentry and Builder 201 Gary Castle (Victoria, BC) 158 Casa Loma (Toronto) 162 cast iron 139, 195 cast-iron stoves 224 cattlemen 198 cedar shakes 223 Celtic: settlers 10; house form 71,76, 79-81; folk culture 85, 172, 188 census records 15
294 Index Charlottetown, PEI 29, 31, 164, 193; architects 259 Chatham, NB 132 Chesapeake 82 Cheticamp, NS 188 Chicago: elite housing 150, 151; pattern-book publishing 198, 199, 204; Sears and Roebuck 207; World Exposition 243 chimneys: danger of fire 66; decorative brick 203; ovens 70; placement 41, 69, 72-4, 78, 79, 82, 129, 131, 133, 174, 177; use as heaters 179 Chinatowns: Cumberland 220; Nanaimo 263; Vancouver 263; Victoria 263; Wellington 220 Chinese 64, 163, 215, 220, 227, 235 Citadel: at Halifax 30, 31; at Quebec City 28 clapboard 65, 71, 75, 81, 83, 187 Clarence Terrace (Toronto) 196 class: administrative 24, 28, 34, 39, 48, 165, 166; landed 31, 38, 45, 50, 90; levelling of 44; merchant 33, 47; middle class 73, 151, 154, 156, 158, 160, 192, 196, 202, 203, 210; structure 15, 26, 35, 37, 218; working class 194, 195, 197, 202, 203, 206, 214, 222, 227 classicism 46 Cleveland, Ohio 154 climate; adaptation to 3, 29, 51, 61, 66,93, 122, 186,202,204 Coady, Moses 216 coal mining 231; in British Columbia 131, 221; in Maritime Canada 128, 130, 135,217 Cobourg, Ont. 47 cod fishery 96, 125
colliers 94,99, 110, 123, 128, 139 Collingwood, Ont. 199 Colville Town (Nanaimo, BC) 131 Conkley house (New Glasgow, NS) 150 connoisseurship 16 conservatories 160 Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company 150 construction: cost of 29; frame 68, 79,186,187,190,220; industry 211, 212, 224; log 60, 61, 68, 71, 82, 85, 86, 88, 89, 95, 96, 98, 124, 125, 127, 177, 180, 181, 185, 187; plank wall 80, 195; roof 62, 70, 113, 184; stone 59, 66; timber 60, 61 cook rooms 125,127,128,133,135-7, 215 cookees 135, 224 conkerie 137
coolie cabins 225 Coon Town 218 Corinthian columns 169 Corner Brook, Nfld 169 corner notching 60. See also log construction Cornwall Furnace, Pa. 141 cottages: examples of 46, 75, 97, 98, 100, 196, 198, 215; descriptions 64, 86; terminology 46; workers 97, 98, 100-2,129-31,218,226 Craftsman 201-5 Craftsman aesthetic 203 Craigdarroch Castle (Victoria, BC) 158 Cranewood (Sackville, NB) 35, 36 Credit River 230 Cricket Row (Stellarton, NS) 129 crofts 78 crown corporations 211
Index Crow's Nest 221 crucks 79 cultural geographers 14, 122 cultural geography 14,17 Cumberland, BC 218-20 Cumberland Railway and Coal Company 218 Dalhousie and Cage Pits (Stellarton, NS) 129 Dalziel Log Barn 85 de Cannes house (Louisbourg, NS) 63 decorative brackets 183 Dedham, Mass. 72 demographic patterns 15 depression: Great Depression 12,186, 203, 209, 211, 214, 234; prior to First World War 158 Detroit 39,40 Devon, England 71, 98, 127 Devonia (Toronto) 155 Dieppe, NB 211 Digby, NS 188 dimensioned lumber 199, 206, 233 dingles, dingle shanties 132, 135-7, 137, 223 dining rooms 29, 37, 129, 137, 207 Dominion Coal Mines 216 Dominion Lands Act 175 Don River 196 Dorchester, NB 37, 141, 143 Dorset, England 71, 127 double house 196 Douglastown, NB 81,132 Downing Cottage 198 dovetail corners 61 Drake Publishing Company 199 drawing rooms 158 Drumheller, Aha 221
295
duplexes 197,206,212 Durango, Colo. 198 East India Company 43 East Reserve, Man. 179 Eastern Irrigation District, Alta 207 Eatoncourt 208 Eaton's mail-order houses 207-8, 210 eaves 57, 75, 183, 194, 201, 202 eclecticism 160, 161 ecurie 137
Edmonton, Alta 157, 185, 221 Edna-Star, Alta 181 Edwardian era, style 152, 154, 161, 169 emigrant ships 135 emigrants 72 Empress Hotel (Victoria, BC) 166 en colombage bousille 58 engages 56
England: building practices 23, 40, 59, 71, 72, 79, 166, 168, 201, 230; economic ties 28, 34, 142, 199, 227; housing studies 5, 7; emigration from 70, 71, 73, 80, 85, 99, 128, 130, 131; society 31, 32, 34, 36, 43, 50, 161 Esquimalt, BC 166, 216 Essex, England 71 estates 35, 43, 110, 130, 154, 155, 158, 167 Etchemin River, Que. 28 Euclid Hall (Toronto) 154 Europe: building practices 4, 38, 60, 95, 174, 181, 185; cultural transfer from 10, 13, 15, 17, 18, 31, 50, 51, 55, 70, 73, 94,110, 115, 123, 135, 174, 181, 185, 213; economic ties 3, 17, 35, 92, 94, 96, 99, 121; emigration from 3, 38, 50, 94,96, 172, 174,
296 Index 181, 208; folk housing in 9, 50-4, 57, 60, 174,181 facades 14, 24, 28, 47, 57, 77, 83, 84, 88,194,218,233 factories 109, 138, 158,162, 196, 233 factors 37 Fae T'hues 177 False Creek (Vancouver) 157 Family Compact 40, 42, 152, 154 farmers, farming: in Britain 37, 44, 77; in North America 44,63,88,91, 93,107,108,112,114,115,119,120, 141,151, 179, 181, 198, 208, 209, 224, 233, 234; publications 111, 112,115 farmhouses 52, 194 Ferryland, Nfld 32, 125-7 feudal 17,27 Fifth Avenue (New York) 170 fireplace 41, 51, 57, 72, 73, 76, 77, 79, 97, 98, 127, 133, 134, 167. See also hearth fish trade 27,32,214 fishery, fishermen: economic aspects 31, 125, 128, 214; canneries 215, 231; houses for 126, 127, 128, 134, 214; merchants' housing 128; settlement 56,80 Flin Flon, Man. 226 flooring 199 Florentine palaces 150 Florida 235 Flurkuchenkaus 174 folk culture: in Canada 9, 11, 32, 55, 63; in Europe 7; in the USA 7; process of transmission 11, 13, 53, 55, 80, 85; study of 14,16 folk housing: erosion of 12, 91, 97, 101, 102, 103, 108, 110, 115, 171,
212, 213, 215, 218, 223, 231; in Canada 34, 55, 56, 58, 63-5, 67, 68, 70, 71, 73, 76, 80, 81, 84, 86, 87, 89, 172,174,180,182,184,185,187-90, 214, 224, 235; in Europe 7, 50, 51, 52, 57, 71, 76, 77, 78, 81, 174, 181; in the USA 7, 34, 71, 73, 76, 82, 84 folklore, folklorists 14, 16, 93, 103, 122,132, 133,181,207,224 Foord Pit (Stellarton, NS) 129 Forest of Dean, England 141 forges 127, 138, 232; forgeman 112, 141 Fort George, PEI 29 Fort Langley, EC 124 Fort Rupert, BC 131 Fort St John, BC 214 Fort William, Ont. 124 foundations 190, 212, 218 France, French: approaches to housing 10, 58-61, 68, 95; economic ties 123, 125, 127; housing in Canada 32, 56, 57-63, 66, 68, 70, 80, 135, 138, 152, 188; settlement in North America 26-8, 55, 56, 64, 128, 229 Fraser Canyon, BC 227 Fraser Mills 169,225 Fraser Valley, BC 207 Fredericton, NB 29, 228 fur trade 56, 124, 125, 128, 214 furnaces 180, 186 furnace keepers 141 furniture 4, 51, 190 gable roofs 68, 75, 175, 183, 185 Gairbraid (Ont.) 45 galeries 195
galleys 125, 135 gang labour 10, 11, 143
Index gardens 41, 127, 158, 160, 166, 167 Garrison Reserve (Toronto) 196 Gaspe, Gaspcsie 32,127, 137 gender, gendered spaces 4, 15, 133-8, 159-60, 220-5, 226 gender ratios 226 General Electric 211 General Mining Association (GMA) 37, 128-30, 149, 216 gentry 28, 31, 38, 39, 43, 45-8, 50, 85, 162, 168 Georgia Street (Vancouver) 157 Georgian 5, 34, 36, 37, 39, 93, 94-6, 103,107,109,128, 132, 154,166, 169,210,233 Germans: approach to housing 82-5, 88, 173, 174; in Canada 83, 173, 174; in Europe 181; in the USA 82, 83, 84, 232 Gibson's sawmill (Marysville, NB) 230 gingerbread 197,201 Glace Bay, NS 216, 218 Glengarry, Ont. 135 Gothic Revival 36,164,196 Government House 29, 34, 166 governors (of colonies) 24,25, 28,29, 35,41,58, 158 Grand Alice (Quebec City) 28 Grand Forks, BC 198 Grand Forks, N.Dak, 205 Grange (Toronto) 40, 41 Granville Street (Vancouver) 157 great halls 29, 167 Greek Revival 37, 48 Greeks 235 Greene and Greene 166, 201 Groote Shtov 177 habitants 163,211,232 half-pay officers 45, 85
297
Halifax 24; administrative housing 29-31, 34, 38, 48; economic life 155; housing in 35, 37, 101, 194 hall-and-parlour houses 54, 63-5, 67, 72,89,101, 102,189 Halychyna 181 Hamilton, Ont. 15, 155 Hammond house (Sackville, NB) 164, 165 harvest trains 226 Hastings Street (Vancouver) 225 Hatley Park (Victoria, BC) 168 haylofts 127 hearths: in folk houses 4, 14, 51, 52, 57, 70, 73, 76, 78, 79, 84,91,98,190; in bunkhouses 135; in elite houses 160 High Park (Toronto) 47 high style (forms of architecture) 7, 23, 26, 34, 36, 39, 49, 234 Highland castles 150 hipped roofs 41, 58, 68, 201, 218 Holdsworth plantation (Ferryland, Xfld) 125, 126 Hopewell, Pa. 139 house-barns 175 Hudson Bay Mining and Smelting 226 Hudson Valley, NY 84, 164 Hudson's Bay Company 131, 214, 216 Hull house 169 Humber River, Ont. 168 Huron Tract, Ont. 45 immigrants, immigration 10, 32, 38, 43, 45, 53, 56, 70, 71, 85-9,167, 171-4, 176,181,215,221,229 India 43 Indoors and Out 204
298
Index
industrial, industrialists: culture 17, 43, 47, 122, 149, 154, 203, 227, 231; industrial housing 123, 130, 138, 140, 192, 195, 196,213,224; resource industries 214,215,218, 225, 226; technology and housing 194, 198, 207, 211, 230; housing for wealthy industrialists 157, 158, 159, 163, 165, 166, 169; vernacular 203,207,211 industrial capitalism, capitalists 94, 123, 151, 161, 171, 196 informal housing sector 230 inglenooks 160, 167 intendants 23 Irish: folk housing 55, 77, 80, 81, 86, 88, 89, 97; immigration 80, 86, 105, 128, 133, 134, 229 iromnaking 139-41 Island of Lewis, Scotland 78 Italy, Italians 151, 235 James Bay 124 James Bay (Victoria, BC) 158 Japanese women 215 Japtown (Vancouver) 218 Jarvis Street (Toronto) 150, 152-4, 196 Jasper, Alta 221 Jesuit College (Quebec City) 24 Jews 181 jobbfur 137 Jordan Station, Ont. 84 Kammer 174 Keillor House (Dorchester, NB) 37 Kenmare, N.Dak. 205 king-posts 57, 58, 68 Kingston, Ont. 24, 40, 155, 156, 163, 212,234
Kirkwood, Ont. 135 kitchens 37, 42, 72, 73, 84, 98, 101, 113, 129, 133, 136, 137, 167, 174, 177, 189, 190,207,218,233 Kootenay region, BC 221 Kouchibouguac, NB 37 La Rochelle, France 56,96, 125 labour: availability of 27, 38, 44, 108, 110, 121-3, 132, 143, 188, 203, 214, 215, 220, 225, 234; housing for 9-11,52, 110, 122, 131,132, 139, 141-3, 196,213,221,228,231; importation of 53, 56, 125, 128, 219,220,227,229 ladders 52, 129 Ladies Home Journal 199 Lake Iroquois 150 Lake Simcoe 155 Lake Superior 124, 138 landed aristocracy, landed class 17, 31,38 landlords 31,43,80 Lauzon, Que. 28 Leahy's Row (Stellarton, NS) 129 Les Forges du Saint-Maurice, Que. 139-41 Lethbridge, Alta 155,199,221 literacy 192, 232 Liverpool, NS 37, 75 lodging houses 139 lofts 57, 70, 73, 76
log construction: in Europe 60, 82, 181; in New France 60, 68; in Ontario 86, 89; in the USA 82; in western Canada 125, 177, 180, 185 loggers 121, 132, 214, 223, 225 logging railroads 132, 222 London, England 130, 132 London, Ont. 40, 86, 150, 155, 161
Index London and North Eastern Railway, England 227 London timber merchants 132 Los Angeles 202, 204, 205 Louisbourg, NS 24, 27, 58-60, 62-4, 128 Lowell, Mass. 71,228,229 Lower Canada 75, 76, 140 Lowther Avenue (Toronto) 154, 198 Loyalists 38, 39, 75, 84 Lunenburg, NS 117-19 Maine 57, 132, 133, 135-8, 163, 164, 223, 224 Maisonneuve (Montreal) 195, 196 malakhata 182 Malahide (Talbotville, Ont.) 45 Manchester, NH 229 Manitoba 157, 162, 173, 176-81, 232 manor houses 25 mansard roofs 164, 194, 196, 208 Marine Drive (Vancouver) 167 Maritimes, Maritime Canada 34, 35, 38,65,71,75, 101, 130, 150, 187, 189, 206, 214 Markham, Ont. 84 marsh grass 181 Martock, NS 37 Marxist scholarship 15 Marysville, NB 228, 229 Massachusetts 34, 71-3, 82 material culture 10, 11, 16, 26, 50, 133, 137, 194,205 material history 218 Melanson site, NS 64 Mennonites: Ajck Shtov 180; Alt T'hues 177; Fae T'hues 111; Ornate Shtov 177; in Manitoba 173-9; in Ontario 85; Sarai 176, 177; Semlin 175; Tjleene Shtov 177, 180
299
mercantile: economies 12, 31, 32, 64, 155, 213, 227, 231; houses of merchants 10, 24, 48, 161, 210 mercantile capitalism 10,171, 213 Merthyr Tydfil, Wales 139 Metis 125, 173, 179, 185 Michigan 132, 137, 199, 207, 222 migratory fishery 127,128 military officers 24, 39 Milwaukee, Wis. 198 Mimico (Toronto) 227, 228 mimicry: of stylish design 9 , 1 1 Minas Basin, NS 64 miners 121, 128, 131, 135,216, 218-21,230 Minneapolis, Minn. 198, 210 Minto, NB 218 Miramichi, NB 35,81, 132, 136 Mississippi pineries 132 Missouri 174, 175 mobile bunkhouses 227 mobile homes 235 mobility 15, 53, 132, 212, 232 model workers' towns 230 Moderne style 169 Moncton.NB 189, 190,211 Montreal: architects 161, 169; economy of 24, 28, 149, 150, 154, 155; houses at 26, 27, 68, 150-2, 154, 156, 169, 195, 196, 227, 228; settlement of 24, 26, 28 morning rooms 160 mortar 58, 66 mortgage i nsurance 212 mortgages 204,211,212 mothers and homemakers 192 moulder 139, 141 Mount Pleasant Terraces (Stellarton, NS) 129
300 Index iMount Royal (Montreal) 150-2, 157 Mount Rundell (Pictou, NS) 37 Mount Uniacke, NS 37 Murray Bay, Que. 163,166 Muskoka, Ont. 166 Nanaimo, BC 131,216 Nantucket, Mass. 73 Naosquiscaw, Ont. 124 Narragansett, RI 164 Mass River, BC 215 National Housing Act 212,235 National Policy 196 neoclassical style 36 neo-habitant Quebec style 211 Netherlands 173-5 New Aberdeen, NS 218 New Brunswick: economy 32, 35,132, 136, 141, 142, 218, 228; Acadian settlement 64, 75, 94, 95, 188, 190; houses in 29, 35, 75, 95, 135, 136, 137, 190, 199,211,218,228 New England: housing in 30, 71, 72, 138, 164, 195, 228; influence on Canada 34, 35, 75, 80, 128, 132, 187, 193, 229; settlement of 115, 188 New France 24-7, 55, 56, 64 New Glasgow, NS 50 New Hampshire 132 New Jersey 84 New Lodge (Cobourg, Ont.) 47 New World hearths 93, 122 Newcastle, England 130, 227 Newfoundland: economy 31, 32, 33, 80,118,125,126,128,214,215, 218; houses in 29, 32, 33, 80, 81, 101, 102, 126, 127, 128,194,215,218; settlement of 32, 34, 55, 80, 81, 230, 231
Newport, RI 162-4 Niagara, Ont. 39-41, 84, 162, 174 Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont. 40, 41 Nob Hill (San Francisco) 170 North West Company 39 Northumbrian dales, England 130 notarial contracts 25, 66 Nova Scotia: economy in 32, 34, 128, 155, 214, 215, 216; houses in 34,37, 75,96,98, 117, 119, 129, 164,218; settlement of 32, 34, 55, 75, 80, 94, 188 Oak Bay (Victoria) 158 Oaklands (Toronto) 153 Ogden, Utah 193 Ohio 154, 166 Okanagan, BC 162, 205 oligarchy 24, 39, 159 Ontario: economy of 38, 39,112, 115, 132, 135, 150, 152, 206, 228; housing in 38, 81, 84-7, 103-6, 108,109, 113, 114, 135, 156, 169, 205, 206, 230; settlement 38, 43, 45, 85, 86, 89, 109, 174. See also Upper Canada; Ottawa; Toronto Orangeburgh, SC 193 Ottawa: housing in 196, 212; settlement of 155 Ottawa River 106, 134, 222, 224 Pacific northwest 132 palaces 24, 162 Palladian style 28-30, 37, 41, 42, 46 Paris, France 27 Paris, Ont. 228,230 park lots (Toronto) 42 Pasadena, Calif. 166 pattern books 7, 47, 192, 193, 203, 204, 209, 212, 224
Index pavilion 68, 69 Peace River country, Alta 234 peech. See pick Peel County, Ont. 15 Pennsylvania 71, 82-5, 141, 174, 221, 232 Pennsylvania Germans 82, 83 pent roofs 184 Perkins House (Liverpool, NS) 75 Philadelphia, Pa. 161, 164, 166, 174, 204 pick 183 Pictou, NS 75, 80, 98, 128 picture brides 215 Picturesque style, the picturesque 14, 36, 47, 48, 157,163, 164, 207 piece surpiece 60-2, 68, 124 pieux 60 piquet 60-2, 80, 127, 187 Pittsburgh, Pa. 169 plank wall construction 80, 195 plantations 38, 54; in Newfoundland 125, 126 planters 123, 126 plaster 59, 179, 181, 184-6, 199 plate: as a structural element 61, 68 plutocrats 154 Point Grey (Vancouver) 157, 167 PointeauPic, Que. 163 Poland 173 Poole, England 32, 127 porch 201,204,218,233 Port Royal, NS 63, 64 Port Union, Nfld 230 portable shelter 96, 125 portico 28,30,37,41, 169 Portland, Maine 164 Portuguese 235 Powell Place (Quebec City) Prairie style 161
301
prairies 13, 43, 150, 172, 175, 179, 181,185, 205-8, 222, 226 prefabricated housing 160, 206, 207, 218 pre-industrial 139, 141 Presbyterian ethos 149 Prince Edward Island: economy 31, 32, 132, 214; housing in 29, 101, 164 Prince's Lodge (Bedford, NS) privacy 4, 51, 157 proto-industrial 139 Pukaskwa River, Ont. 138 pulpwood industry 223 Qu'Appelle Valley, Man. 207 quarrymen 139 Quebec: economy of 26, 27, 35, 132, 137, 139, 228; housing in 24,25,27, 28,55,67-9,115,116,128,135,137, 138, 163, 196; settlement of 24, 27, 71,75, 103, 109,234 Quebec City 24, 27, 28, 66, 68, 134, 155 Queen Anne style 157 Queen Street (Toronto) 152 Queen's Park (Toronto) 153, 154, 169 Radford Architectural Company 198 rafting of logs 133 railroad flatcars 222 railroads 103, 132, 150, 169, 216,222, 224, 227 ranching 162,214 Ravenscrag (Montreal) 151 Readi-cut Bungalows 207 Red Lake House, Ont. 124 Red River, Man. 157,162,179 Regency style 34, 36, 46 rental accommodation 196
302 Index Reserve Mines, NS 230 resource economy 123, 128, 132, 226 Restigouche, NB 199 Revelstoke, BC 207 Revivalist styles 165, 166, 233, 234 Rhodes and Curry 218 Rimouski, Que. 137 Robin house (Paspebiac, Que.) 128 Rock Bay (Vancouver Island) 222 Rockland district (Victoria, BC) 167 Rolland Manor (Quebec) 28 Romanians 181 Romanticism 44, 46, 47 roof's: forms 37, 41, 57, 68, 69, 72, 75, 78, 82, 92, 95, 101, 106, 115, 138, 141, 142, 152, 167, 175, 179, 183-6, 194-7, 201, 202, 207-9, 214, 218; materials 57, 62, 77, 78, 79, 81, 101, 133, 175-7, 179, 185, 185, 225; raising of 103, 190, 194 Rosedale (Toronto) 150, 153, 154, 168 row housing 92, 121, 196 Rowntree 230 Royal Bank 155 Royal City Planing Mill 207 Rupert's Land 173 Russia 173, 175, 177, 178 Rutherians 181 rye straw 181 Saanich peninsula, BC 167 Sackville, NB 35,36, 164, 165 saddle notching 61, 177, 181 sail lofts 98, 127 Saint John, NB 24, 31, 34, 94, 141, 155, 228 St John's, Nfld 32 St Martins, NB 141-3
salle commune 67, 190
salmon fishery 215 salons 29, 67 Salt, Titus 230 salt-box house type 34 sandstone 35, 139 Sandwich, Ont. 39 Sault Ste Marie, Ont. 135 Scarborough, Ont. 155 Schmidtville (Halifax) 194-5 Scotland, Scots, Scottish: economy 31, 79; houses in Scotland 31, 77, 78, 86, 130, 134, 135; houses in North America 32, 33, 36, 81, 97, 98, 101, 104, 152, 158, 162; immigration from 71,75,80,85, 105, 128, 131 Scots-Irish 82, 174 Sears, Roebuck and Company 207 Seattle, Wash. 198,204 Sebastopol Row (Montreal) 227-8 Second Empire style 162 seigneurs, seignruries 25, 27, 28
Semlin 175, 176 shake shacks 222 Shanghai Alley (Cumberland, BC) 220 shanties 35, 121, 134, 135, 138, 207, 213, 220, 222-5 shantymen 94, 123, 225 Shaughnessy (Vancouver) 150, 157, 167, 169,210 Shawinigan, Que. 169 Shelburne, NS 75 Sherbrooke Street (Montreal) 152 Shingle style 164, 165 shingles 62, 68, 75, 194, 199, 164, 167, 225 ship's knees 141 shipbuilding 138, 141, 143
Index shops 110, 114, 139, 143 siding 63, 86, 89, 199, 202, 220 Sing Chong Street (Cumberland, BC) 220 Siny 183 slabs 104, 133 slate 57, 62, 79 slum clearance 234 Small House Bureaus 210 smokehouses 179 smoking rooms 159 social gradient 93, 122 social history 14, 15, 157, 192, 216, 224 social housing 234 social spaces 4 sod houses 175 Somerset, England 37, 71 Southcott mansard 194 Southern Pacific Railroad 204 speculative housing 156 Spencer Wood (Quebec City) 28 Spokane, Wash. 198 squared timber 223 stables 160 Staffordshire, England 64, 102, 131 staples economy 11,35,226 state, role of 196, 211, 212, 234, 235 Stellarton, NS 37, 100, 129 Steveston.BC 215, 216 stilts 212 stockade walls 94, 123 stone: cobblestone 104, 203; properties of 59, 66, 69, 80, 86; stone houses 30, 32, 34-7, 41, 57, 58, 66, 67, 68, 77-9, 86, 89, 103, 104, 112, 118, 127, 130, 132, 139, 152, 165, 167, 196 Stone Row (Northumberland, England) 130
303
storey-and-a-half buildings 57 stove shanties 135-7, 224 stoves 107, 136, 186, 190, 224 streetcars 197, 198 Streetsville, Ont. 230 Strong house (Black Creek Pioneer Village) 85 Struthers-Ross house (Toronto) 196 stucco 166 subdivisions 153, 156,226,234 suburbanization 151, 200; suburban sprawl 230 Sudbury, Ont. 221 Summerside, PEI 164 Sunset Magazine 204 Susquehanna, Pa. 84 Sweetland house (Calvert, Nfld) 215 Switzerland 60, 173-5 Sydney Mines, NS 129, 130, 216 Sydney, NS 31, 128-30, 150, 216 tamped earth 61, 179 Tartigan River 137 technological change 190, 232 tenants 27, 78 tents 110, 139 terraced cottages 101,130 Texas 174, 193 textile towns 228, 230 thatch 54, 57, 62, 77-80, 179, 183, 185 tilts 127,250 timber frame 60, 61, 63, 86, 179, 187, 194 timber trade 32, 35, 103, 104, 132, 133, 223 TjlemeShtm 177, 180 Toronto: economy of 40,48, 149, 150, 154, 155, 196, 207; housing in 42, 47, 48, 150, 152-6, 166, 168, 169,
304
Index
196-8, 206; settlement of 24, 40. See also York tract houses 212 Trail, BC 150 trappers 92, 121 Trinity, Nfld 32, 98, 127 Trois Isles, Nfld 98,127 Trois Rivieres, Que. 109, 138 Tudor Revival style 157 Tuscan villas 150 Tuxedo (Philadelphia) 164 Ukrainians: housing 172, 181, 186; malakkata 182; pick or peech 183, 176; siny 183; velyka khata 182,183 Ulster 82, 85 Uplands (Victoria, BC) 150, 158, 167 Upper Canada 38, 40, 41, 43, 45, 47, 83-5, 87, 89, 154 urban housing markets 230 Ursuline Convent (Quebec City) 24 Vancouver: architects 167, 168; economy 132, 155, 157, 167, 203, 216; housing 150, 161, 167, 168, 202-5,207,210,216,218,221, 225-7, 235 Vancouver Island 13, 131, 158, 162, 163,225 Vaughan Township, Ont. 85 velyka khata 182, 183 verandas 47, 82, 166, 204 Verdun (Montreal) 195 vernacular: examples 74,95-109,116, 117,119, 128, 187, 196,202,218; industrial forms 194, 195, 198, 206, 207, 210; pattern-hook forms 110, 112, 114, 115, 117, 151, 179, 192, 199, 210, 211; rise of the form 12, 39, 55, 73, 92, 94, 95, 120, 171, 186,
188, 200, 231-3; use of term for housing 5, 7, 9, 10, 34, 39; Vernacular Architecture Forum 16 Vesting Act 196 Victoria, BC 157, 158, 161, 163, 166, 167 Victorian era 15, 149, 154, 162 villas 152 Virginia 39, 40, 54, 71, 82, 84 Wabana iron mine, Nfld 218 Wales 70,110, 139, 175 Walkerville, Ont. 169 Walmer Road (Toronto) 155 wangan 133, 135 War of 1812 41,84,85,174 war workers 211 warehouses 94,96, 123, 125 Wartime Housing Limited 211 Waterford, Ireland 32, 127 Waterloo, Ont. 84, 174 Wawa, Ont. 138 Wellington Chinatown, BC 220 West Country, England 96, 125 West Indies 218 West Midlands, England 230 West Reserve, Man. 176, 177 Western Lumberman 206 Western Retail Lumbermen's Association 206 Westinghouse 211 Westmount (Montreal) 156 Wexford, Ireland 98, 127 wharves 34, 101, 125-7, 130 whitewash 179 widows 230 Wiltshire, England 71 Windsor, Ont. 37, 39, 155, 162, 206 Winnipeg Exhibition 207 Winnipeg, Man. 155, 156, 164-6
Index Wisconsin 132, 137 Wood Row (Northumberland, England) 130 wrought iron 110, 139 Wyoming 108, 137
Yale,BC 227 Yaletown (Vancouver) 227 Yankees 104, 133 Yarmouth, NS 188 yeomen 50, 72 York, Ont. 40, 41. See also Toronto
305