Historic home embraces modern times
Cranewood on Main in Sackville offers rich history, local business
The legacy of Cranewood on Main remains alive in Sackville with the help of a local business.
Since 2013, the Cranewood on Main Café and Bakery, owned by Malcolm and Debbie Fisher, has been ensuring a future for the nearly 200-year-old home.
The business has preserved the building, located at 113 Main St., and provided the public a means to interact with this rich piece of Sackville history.
Malcolm Campbell, manager at the business, believes it’s important work given the uniqueness of the house.
“It’s an incredibly well-preserved and fairly unique example of the Georgian house,” he tells Cumberland Wire. “There just aren’t very many.”
The Chandler House in Dorchester, built in 1831, is done in the same style, but those are the only two in the province.
“It’s (Cranewood) been a prominent part of Sackville for about 200 years,” Campbell adds. “There’s not many houses that look like this in this country and there never were.”
Campbell believes the café and bakery benefits from the atmosphere and inherent beauty of the building.
“Our logo is the front façade of the building, the name of the business is named after the building, the branding surrounding the business has always been all about the building and the history of the building,” he says.
That history traces back to the Georgian period that lasted from the early 1700s to the 1830s.
The historic three-storey home was built in the 1830s as a residence for politician and businessman William Crane.
According to Campbell, colonists at the time were trying to replicate the architecture of the classic English country house typical of the Georgian period.
“It has a proportioned, yet simple façade,” Campbell explains. “It’s not over elaborate or baroque. It’s just incredibly well proportioned with the five windows and two rows all aligned and evenly spaced.”
Crane and his second wife Eliza lived there until he died in 1853. The home was vacant for several years until Josiah Wood, a future lieutenant governor of Nova Scotia, purchased it in 1867.
Wood, as one of the first two graduates of Mount Allison University, also established a relationship to the home with the institution that would last for more than a century.
He added a mansard roof in 1888 to create more space.
“It has a proportioned, yet simple façade. It’s not over elaborate or baroque. It’s just incredibly well proportioned with the five windows and two rows all aligned and evenly spaced.”
Malcolm Campbell Manager at the Cranewood on Main Cafe and Bakery
Wood’s son Herbert inherited the home and bestowed upon it the name Cranewood, a portmanteau of the family surnames who had owned the home until then.
In 1939, a fire destroyed the mansard roof and the original style from the 1830s was restored.
The family lived there until 1966 when it was purchased by Dr. William S.H. Crawford, the president of Mount Allison University.
After he left, the university purchased the home in 1975, making it the permanent dwelling for university presidents going forward. That is, until 2013, when it was purchased by the Fishers.
THE BUSINESS, THE BUILDING
Campbell explains the building has four-room layouts on the first and second floor.
In the back, a two-floor stone addition was constructed some point early in its history.
The top floor is now used as an attic. Today, Campbell says the business takes up every part of the building in some way or another.
The café and retail space are located where the dining room was. Two other rooms have been merged into a single room and is used as dining space for customers.
In one of the rooms on the second floor, they have a jewellery and accessory store run by Debbie Fisher. On the second floor, there are two more dining rooms. According to Campbell, those rooms have proven to be excellent study space for university students.
Out back, the stone addition houses the kitchen, the bakery as well as storage and preparation spaces.
Since the purchase, restorations have been ongoing as part of an effort to ensure a future for the house.
The stonework, windows, heating system and moulding have all been revamped.
Fundy Stonecraft conducted the stonework, identifying 60 stone bricks that needed to be replaced, using stone from Nova Scotia, and re-doing the moulding.
The heating system had relied on oil, but the home is now fuelled by biomass wood pellets to reduce the business’ carbon footprint. The cast iron steam radiators are still in use but are now powered by the pellets.
“All of the rooms still have the beautiful, old radiators in them,” says Campbell.
The home also originally had six fireplaces that are no longer in use but are maintained by the current proprietors.
This past year, they replaced all the windows. The new windows, made by Norwood, replicate the appearance of the old windows. The only difference is the windows are double-paned, which was also done with care towards reducing their carbon footprint.
Even with all of that done, and more, the building requires ongoing upkeep and maintenance.
Just in recent weeks, more minor renovations were underway.
Campbell says the doorway needed to be re-done. However, they wanted to maintain the aesthetics of the moulding. So, they took a piece of their old mouldings to J.A. Richards and Sons, a woodworker in Amherst, who was able to reproduce exactly the mouldings in the rest of the house, so the door blends in.
All the work is being done to improve the efficiency of the building and maintain the rich aesthetics of the Georgian home.
To learn more about the café and bakery, visit cranewoodonmain.com.