The Big Reveal
Part of the old stencil motif that once decorated the dining room of the John Brown House. This was the previous owner’s modern interpretation of what the room may have looked like in the 1800s.
Well, we’ve gone and done it… we’ve updated the interior of the oldest house in St. Catharines…
We heard your sharp inhale from here! We get it. It follows many of our own. Making substantial changes to a significant heritage property should not be undertaken lightly. This step has been years in the making and comes after much discussion and debate, consultation, creative brainstorming and thoughtful contemplation.
If you follow our work, you knew this was coming and you have seen some of the changes in progress, and there are more examples in this article. We will be sharing extensive photos of the end result soon on our website and social media (look for #TBHNewLook). For now we want to share an overview of the changes we have made and share our decision making process.
In the Beginning…
The John Brown House has been many things over its 227 years, but it has primarily and consistently been a family home. We deeply appreciate the rich history of the lives lived here — history stored within its walls — and we want others to experience the same warmth and intimacy that we feel each time we step foot through the front door.
The John Brown House lit up at night thanks to our new state-of-the-art smart home wiring system.
When we purchased The Brown Homestead in 2015, we took on just that - someone’s home. We also assumed the responsibility for the preservation of this special place on behalf of past, present and future generations.
Since Day One, we have taken the approach that for a building to be protected it has to have a purpose. It has to mean something to the people who use it. If we want the house to last for another 200 years, we need to give people a reason to come here and something to do when they get here.
Our extensive outreach, surveys, feasibility study, and ongoing conversations with partner organizations over the years have shown us what this place can offer the community. This led to our Road Ahead Plan, which we presented in 2021.
The plan recognizes that in order to properly care for the John Brown House, it can no longer serve primarily as a family home. One of the remarkable features of the house is how much of the original interior construction and features remain. Those elements have been rightly recognized and protected by heritage designation, but it meant that when the house was on the market for several years before we purchased it, there were no prospective buyers willing to live in such rustic conditions. All interest was conditional on the ability to undertake extensive renovations that would have deeply compromised heritage attributes in favour of modern amenities.
Removing the reproduction floorcloth in the dining room
Our plan calls for site development, specifically the construction of a new building that we’re calling the “Open Door Centre”, which will take the burden of providing necessary services off of the house. This allows us to focus on a preservation-friendly adaptive restoration to offer flexible, multi-purpose spaces where we can offer not just our own programming and events based on the site’s history, but also to support those of other outstanding local cultural and educational organizations.
Still, carrying out this plan to highlight and learn from the past and serve the needs of the current communities in a way that ensures the longevity of the site is an act of balancing our two responsibilities of preservation and purpose.
Preservation
or How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Ontario Heritage Act
Adaptive restoration work includes inherently subjective judgment calls. As you will see, we have had to make many of them. However, it is also subject to specific rules and guidelines that are set out in the Ontario Heritage Act (OHA), the law by which properties receive heritage designations in Ontario. Passed in 1975 and strengthened in 2005, the OHA has resulted in the protection of several thousand properties, including the John Brown House.
A heritage designation is established by the passing of a municipal by-law that confirms that a property meets the OHA criteria to be considered of cultural heritage value. In the case of the John Brown House, the heritage designation was outlined in two separate by-laws passed in 1982 (protecting the exterior of the house) and 1991 (protecting the interior of the house), along with a third by-law (1992) that reinforced them.
When we turned to these by-laws for guidance, we were challenged by the lack of clarity in these early designations that did not conform to the requirements of the updated OHA. In addition, there were significant features that we felt had not received adequate protection.
In 2019, we consulted with the heritage planner for the City of St. Catharines, Chloe Richer, and the City’s Heritage Advisory Committee to review and update the designation by-laws to provide better protection for the house and clearer guidelines for our work. Together, we put forward a proposal that was supported by the City’s planning department and approved by City Council as By-Law 2019-317.
Unlike the earlier designations, the current one conforms to current OHA standards by providing a Statement of Significance that outlines cultural heritage value of the house in three areas: design or physical value, historical or associative value and contextual value. The Statement also lists character defining elements, features that reflect the cultural heritage value, which are protected from removal or modification.
This step was critical, because the clarity allows us to observe our duty to protect and preserve the heritage value of the house. To that end, we can proudly state that we have been able to undertake our adaptive restoration without compromising these character defining elements.
But we also wanted to go further. We wanted to make interpretive choices that celebrated and showcased these features within the context of an adaptive restoration that supports the contemporary purpose outlined in the Road Ahead Plan that will sustain the house.
Purpose
or Finding our Place in History’s Continuum
Applying the new stencil motifs in the dining room of the John Brown House
A key part of our outreach and planning involved studying comparative examples of other heritage house museums, especially here in Niagara.
For example, Nelles Manor in Grimsby, ON is another wonderful example of a very early Niagara home built (ca. 1788-1798) and inhabited by the Nelles family for four generations. Much like the John Brown House, the home was inevitably updated over time to suit the needs of new families and fit with new time periods. Victorian colours and features appeared, as well as more recent adaptations like the 1950s addition and the modern kitchen.
When Barry & Linda Coutts purchased the home in 1971, they slowly took away the modern changes. They undertook a “single-date restoration” meaning to restore it to what it would have looked like in the Georgian era in which it was built, offering the opportunity to explore what the house might have looked like in earlier times.
Similarly, McFarland House in Niagara-on-the-Lake, ON was built at the turn of the 19th century by Scotsman John McFarland. It housed the McFarland family and was also used as a military hospital during the War of 1812 by both the Americans and the British. Today, the house is owned by Niagara Parks and costumed interpreters provide guided tours of this historic home with several special events hosted throughout the year. When you visit McFarland House, you once again see a “single-date restoration” that allows visitors to feel as if they are stepping back in time into what once might have been.
Both are fine examples of a traditional approach to historic home preservation in Ontario and elsewhere. These places allow us to experience history in a way that seeks to transport us back to a certain era. However, we have taken a different approach. It’s not that we think this earlier style of interpretation is wrong. We love these places and encourage you to continue visiting them. We certainly will!
To understand our restoration design choices, it’s important that you understand our mission and values. We are not trying to be a house museum akin to Nelles Manor, McFarland House, the Laura Secord Homestead, the Fry House, etc.
Like the operators of the above examples, we love history. For any historic site, history is the main attraction, but here at the homestead, we see history as a continuum rather than a static point frozen in time. A single date restoration emphasizes one year or era at the expense of all the others. Our goal is to find ways to represent the layers of history and celebrate all the lives lived here. This includes not just John and Magdalena Brown, who built the home, but also the families and generations that came after… and those that came before. The Brown Homestead exists on what was an important pre-settlement transportation route used by the Indigenous peoples on whose traditional lands the John Brown House was built.
By recognizing our place in history’s continuum, our goal changes from trying to seize one elusive moment from the past to finding a meaningful continuity for its ever changing history. Because change is inevitable. We can’t accurately represent the complex history of the John Brown House without reflecting that change.
Every family that inhabited the home made adaptations to suit their needs. Adam Brown turned his parents’ home into a tavern and stagecoach stop, adding a birdcage bar. The Chellew family converted Adam’s tap room into a Victorian parlour with decorative plaster moulding in the 1800s. The Powers family converted the summer kitchen to a fruit sorting room to take the produce from their orchards to market in the early 1900’s. The Jouppien family added a modern kitchen and washroom in the 1980s.
Acknowledging these changes brings attention to one of the other great challenges of the “single-date restoration” approach. Trying to replicate a specific historic period relies heavily on interpretation or educated guesswork — and history can be elusive. The job of historians should be to document and preserve, not to speculate and create. Acknowledging uncertainty, or better yet, embracing it in our restoration choices will make for a more authentic experience. It makes the conversations more interesting too.
Interpretation
or Embracing Uncertainty in Design Choices
Cutting into the ceiling to add new LED lighting
While our adaptive restoration preserves and features the attributes of all of these eras, it also includes changes that suit the next era of The Brown Homestead — the 2020s and beyond. This house has been a gathering place for over two centuries, once used for early church services, a tavern from 1809 into the 1830s, hosting Canadian military officers during World War I training exercises and a comfy living room where young Don Jessome and his grandfather Charlie Powers watched the Toronto Maple Leafs win the Stanley Cup in 1967. These stories spill over into the present, as we have come to find out. Its role as a gathering place will continue into the future.
Some of the changes we needed to make were very practical. Collapsing stonework required careful repair by qualified heritage masons. The tired heating and cooling system and failing ductwork did not regulate the temperature and airflow properly through the house. The outdated electrical system was unable to support modern devices and activities. In order to make the John Brown House a practical space for meetings, workshops and other social gatherings, all of those elements needed to be upgraded.
Similarly, interior design choices made in the 1980s as part of an attempt at a “single-date restoration” served to limit the house’s potential. We revisited those choices with the goal of preserving original material, referencing interpreted elements in ways that do not imply authenticity, and utilizing contemporary technology and colour schemes to showcase the historic attributes rather than hide them in plain sight by surrounding them with reproduction and simulation.
For example, the dining room contains preserved original Georgian-era stenciling alongside samples of the 1980s interpretation and carefully researched contemporary interpretive examples. The room is painted with a palette of traditional Georgian era Prussian Blue (examples of which have been found on woodwork in various parts of the house) alongside contemporary colours that make it an attractive, accessible space. It also includes a feature wall of exposed lath that demonstrates the unique early construction of the interior walls.
Is this what the room would have looked like? No. But no one knows what it looked like two hundred years ago. We need to explore tangible truths where these facts are missing. Rather than rigidly adhering to a single perspective or interpretation or era, we have explored ideas that turned limitations into opportunities for discussion and learning.
Heritage colour samples we contemplated in the re-design of the dining room
All of the primary rooms in the house are undergoing the same thoughtful process. We will showcase the remaining original heritage characteristics of each space, represent the different historic layers that have come since, and offer a feature demonstrating the construction of the house.
All of this will make the John Brown House a place for people with a wider variety of interests. While we do intend on using our magnificent open hearth fireplace in the c.1796 summer kitchen as a teaching tool, our hope is that if we can also invite folks to come use this space for a yoga class, a musical performance, or a staff holiday party, it will attract a broader range of people that might not have visited otherwise. Once here, they can learn about the history of the house, the families that lived here, and its place within Niagara’s history.
Home Again
or Our Door is Open at Niagara’s Homestead
We wrote above that early in our process, we realized that the John Brown House could no longer serve primarily as a family home. We regarded it as having been home to four different families between 1796 and 2015: the Browns, Chellews, Powers and Jouppiens. But that’s not quite true. Having found our place in the historic continuum of this special house, it has become more of a home to us than a workplace and we realize that we are the fifth family, The Brown Homestead team, our staff, board, members and volunteers. And the Niagara community is our extended family.
The Brown Homestead is Niagara’s Homestead. It is part of your history and heritage as much as ours. So, while we look forward to sharing photos and videos of our work in the coming weeks, months and years, we moreso look forward to welcoming you here to see and experience it for yourself. Because The Brown Homestead is Niagara’s Homestead.
