‘I don’t think people will ever stop coming’

Visitors still delight in Maude Lewis replica house

The magical world of Maude Lewis has always brought visitors from off the beaten track, and it continues to attract visitors to Digby Neck.

Murray Ross started building a replica of Maude Lewis’s house on his Rossway property in the late 1990s, long before the movie of Lewis’ life was captured on the big screen.

This house is located about six to eight kilometers from Lewis’s memorial site in Marshalltown and displays copies of her paintings and framed photographs on the walls. Almost as soon as the paint was dry on the little replica, people started signing the guest book, and they have been coming every summer since.

“I don’t think people will ever stop coming,” he said. “I don’t know how many guest books have been filled over the years. People come from all over and share stories of the times they met her, or someone they knew may have bought a painting.”

He was a 10-year-old boy when he first visited Lewis and was captivated by her brightly-painted home. He remembers how happy she was when she painted and how she painted everything.

“I wanted it to look exactly the way her place did,” he said. “My uncle’s place was across the road. We would drive by and I would see her outside sometimes.”

Ross was still fishing years later, when he decided to recreate her little home. He started reading and researching her home to carefully recreate it to its closest details, using wood cut from his property and clapboard shingles that he recycled from another building.

“When I looked inside her house, she had painted everything,” he said. “I started gathering artifacts that people had picked up over the years, and then older people would tell me stories. I learned a lot.”

The little house even has a bed similar to the original. Ross also built a copy of Everett’s shop in the back and a mailbox. Ross said Everett used the shop to store firewood and to keep scallop shells and stones for Maud to paint.

Ross added that he was impressed with the number of people who knew Maude and would travel to visit her little home in Marshalltown, how her paintings brought a much bigger world to her doorstep.

The replica home is open to visitors most days from dawn until dusk, he says. There is no charge for admission, but a donation box has been set up.