Postcards help bring a farmhouse back to life
‘Serendipity’ returns heart and history to an abandoned farmhouse
Dane Simon was only 23 on the autumn day when he first spied the long-abandoned farmhouse near Vankleek Hill, nearly hidden by a tangle of scrub so dense he could only walk down its long laneway. It felt forlorn. But there was a wraparound veranda held up by gingerbread brackets, rare pressed-tin siding and his feeling that the house simply belonged on its 50 hectares of fallow fields and stands of trees. A suburban Montrealer who’d long dreamed of living in the country, he walked down to the woods and saw massive maple trees.
Contractors told the young man with no construction experience that the Borris Road house — which came with an outhouse, no working electricity and squatting raccoons — wasn’t worth saving. But for $70,000, it was his.
“I imagined who might have lived there and the lives they might have led,” Simon said. “I wasn’t going to be the one to bring that history to an end.”
That was 1993. It would be eight years — during which time Simon still lived and worked in an art gallery an hour away — before the project was advanced enough that he could move in. A bid to find something to hang on his bare walls sparked a search for period postcards of Vankleek Hill scenes.
Nearly 25 years later, Simon has not only turned a derelict house into a comfortable home that will be open to the public at the annual Vankleek Hill Christmas Home Tour on Nov. 4, he’s reclaimed its history. Its walls are lined with framed postcards of scenes from the village’s past that were sent to loved ones.
They talk of plowing the fields, bringing in the harvest, readying for Sunday visitors, going to the local fair, maple sugar time and a son being conscripted into the Great War. When he got home, he planted the Manitoba maple that now towers over the veranda.
To Simon, the postcards offer a window into the daily lives of an eastern Ontario farm family at the dawn of the 20th century. During the turn-of-the-century craze for sending postcards, they cost just a penny.
“While unpretentious, they are also priceless because of the glimpse they provide into the history of the house and because, after all these years, they managed to find their way home,” Simon said.
Now boasting three bedrooms and two bathrooms, the house began as a simple log structure of about 16 feet by 20 feet that first appears on the land registry in 1869. It was expanded in the 1890s.
A tour reveals original features restored, recent additions designed to blend seamlessly with the old and salvaged materials given new life.
“The intent was to make it look like it’s always been here,” said Simon, who, with his decades-long project complete, plans to put the house on the market.
Original wide-plank pine floors are matched in a recent addition, a sunny yellow dining room lined with framed postcards and traditional wooden windows overlooking autumn-tinged trees. On the harvest table is a huge 1862 map of the area’s five counties, fresh from a complete restoration and ready for framing.
In the kitchen, outfitted with white Shaker cabinets and brass hardware, Simon stripped and waxed the original ceiling beams until they gleamed and used salvaged stamped tin as a backsplash.
The sitting room, dubbed the brick room, is where Simon spends most of his time, savouring the view or simply the silence of a windless night. There are more exposed beams, an old cast-iron wood stove and walls lined with bricks — some of them stamped by a wandering cat’s paws — that may have been made on the property. Historical records reveal there was a short-lived brickworks on the site and Simon has found piles of “klinkers,” as misfired bricks are known, in the woods.
Up a new staircase with ornate trim are the bedrooms — the largest has a pitched ceiling with exposed beams — and a bathroom with an antique claw-foot tub.
The project, which included installing all-new mechanical systems including a geothermal heat pump, didn’t just reveal the house’s bones, it revealed history — like an 1870s letter to the home’s then-owner, Alex McRae, found inside a wall.
When Simon pulled off each panel of pressed-tin siding — a material commonly used to cover Victorian ceilings — to scrub off the rust and add insulation, he found pictures of Queen Victoria on the back.
His hunt for postcards at collector shows and online turned up a card sent to a member of the Curran family of Hawkesbury, which caught his eye because his registry office research revealed someone by that name once owned his house. The card was addressed to “Hattie” and some genealogical research revealed an amazing fact — the card was written and sent from his farmhouse.
Now he has about two dozen such cards in a collection of hundreds.
“It feels like serendipity,” Simon said. “It was meant to be. I was meant to buy the place, to fix it up, to buy the postcards and to bring them back home.”