Transcript: Foreword Crossover: Preserving History 

at The Brown Homestead

Season 4, Episode 3

June 12, 2024

Episode Citation:

Humeniuk, Andrew and Nixon, Sara. "Foreword Crossover: Preserving History at The Brown Homestead." Produced by Sara Nixon. Presented by The Brown Homestead. The Open Door. June 12th, 2024. Podcast, MP3 audio, length: 1:27:34.

https://thebrownhomestead.ca/open-door/s4e3-preserving-the-brown-homestead. 

[INTRODUCTION]

[0:00:08] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Open Door, brought to you by the Brown Homestead in the heart of the beautiful Niagara Peninsula.

[0:00:16] SN: Hi, folks. Sara Nixon here from The Open Door. We've got a very special crossover episode for you. We've teamed up with Foreword, a delightfully insightful podcast produced by our friends in Brock University's Humanities Department, and The Tattooed Historian, YouTuber and podcaster, John R. Heckman, to offer an immersive audio tour of The Brown Homestead. For listeners new to the podcast, The Brown Homestead is the site of the oldest home in St. Catharines, Ontario, with over two centuries of stories embedded in its walls and floorboards. Put on your walking shoes and let's get to it.

[0:01:07] AI: Welcome to a very special episode of Foreword. I'm your host, Alison Innes. But today, I am passing the microphone over to two very talented guest hosts, Jessica Linzel and John R. Heckman. Jess Linzel is a graduate of both the BA and MA programs in Brock's Department of History. She has unrivalled passion for Niagara history and has been recognized with scholarships and awards both locally and provincially. She's now the director of community engagement at the Brown Homestead in St. Catharines, where she supervises a team of seven staff, produces heritage restoration video content and leads research initiatives at the Heritage Home.

John R. Heckman is a talented podcaster and a PhD candidate in the interdisciplinary humanities PhD program. Known to thousands online as The Tattooed Historian, John's mission is to make history inclusive and accessible to the public. John channels his passion for history into YouTube videos, podcasts, live streaming and social media content. You can find links to both John's and Jess's work in the show notes, as always.

In today's crossover episode between Foreword, The Tattooed Historian and The Brown Homestead, John and Jess take us on an audio tour of St. Catharines' oldest house and explore what it means to preserve and study local history.

[EPISODE]

JH: Okay, Jess. We are standing in front of The Brown Homestead. This is a tremendous building. I really love the facade of this house. Can you tell us more about what we're looking at here in the front yard.

[0:02:52] JL: Yeah. This is actually the John Brown House. It's the oldest house in St. Catharines. What we're looking at right now is the front facade of this beautiful Georgian home. The house was built in 1796, and that's the oldest part of the house and it's actually the summer kitchen and the loft, which we can't really see from where we're standing right now, because it's on the back of the house. From 1802 to 1804, the Brown family actually built what we're looking at right now here, the symmetrical five-bay façade. You've got two stories with a low-pitched roof. You can see the double-hung windows with the red trim and we just put the storm windows on there just a couple of weeks ago to protect the nice glass from the elements.

We can also see the green door here in the very front and a small portico, which is actually put on by the house's previous owner. That's not original, but it is a replica of what would have been on here originally.

[0:03:51] JH: Yes. As Jess has already said, we have traffic going behind us, because we're so close to a historical road as well. Obviously, that's probably why this house is here, because of the historical road behind us, right?

[0:04:03] JL: Yeah, exactly. Pelham Road actually at one point was called the Niagara-Dundas Stagecoach Line. It ran all the way from, basically, the Niagara River into the Dundas Hamilton area. This was during the early colonial period. But even before that, this was an indigenous trail that was marked out by indigenous peoples that were living here, because of its root along the escarpment. It was called the Mohawk Trail. There was the Mohawk Trail that ran along the top of the escarpment. Then they had what they called the Iroquois Trail, which is below the base of the escarpment and then the Lake Shore Trail, which runs along the southern shore of Lake Ontario. Those are your three main east-west routes that people would take as they traveled through Niagara. Prior to colonial settlement, but also in this period that we're talking about here, the Brown family loyalist era. It was a busy road, so it was smart of them to build the house right here along that road.

[0:05:01] JH: It probably helped with the construction of it as well, getting all the material here and just having that so close to the road. When everyone visits this location right off the road, if you're looking at the front facade of the building, off to the right is a small parking area, so you can park your vehicle here for access into the property itself. Jess, as we begin to make our way towards the building itself, what was your initial reaction when you first came here and saw this building a few years ago?

[0:05:33] JL: Well, I actually grew up down the street. I have seen this house many times throughout my life, but it wasn't a historic house museum non-profit organization like it is now. It was someone's private residence when I was a kid. I never really saw it as a place that I could go to. Only more recently, since 2015, when the house was purchased by its current owners, Andrew Humeniuk and his wife, Jennifer, who have now turned it into a non-profit community-run organization, only since then, has it really become more prominent in my mind. I've heard about it through Grapevine, having worked in different historic house museums and local history in Niagara.

I don't know. It's beautiful. I love the fact that it's brown. I know that it's pretty basic, but a lot of the stone homes you see are, for example, I'm thinking Nelles Manor in Grimsby, it's made up of more of a gray stone. The stone here on the Brown Homestead, it's Rockway, Reynales, Dolomite limestone, which is a stone that's very local to this area. I can't imagine how they would have been able to put it on the carts and pull it up here and construct this home. It's really incredible. I just think it's beautiful. I love it.

[0:06:51] JH: I do, too. It's a fantastic looking home. It's a great museum as we will begin our walkthrough of it here. Just like travellers and families of your going through the front door and enjoying the inside. As we go through, Jess will lead us on a virtual tour of the space. While we head on inside and get out the cold for a little bit. It's a little chilly.

[0:07:14] JL: Sounds good.

[0:07:19] JH: You'll be able to hear some of our footsteps as well. We like the ambient noise that goes along with walking through these historic homes. Just getting the feel for the space is what we're trying to go for today as we go through this area. As we walk in the front door, Jess, what are we seeing?

[0:07:42] JL: This is the main hallway. It's a typical entrance for every Georgian home you'd see an entrance like this. You've got your big staircase here on the left, and it's pretty grand for the time, but that's again, it's typical of Georgian architecture to have your grand staircase right as you walk through the front door. It's symmetrical, so you can see the parlour on our right and the dining room on our left. The rooms are all the same size, and you can see all the windows in the other rooms as well. This is pretty common for this time period. One of the things that stands out quite a bit when you walk in is the stencilling on the floor. I don't know, John, what did you think when you first saw those stencils?

[0:08:25] JH: I really enjoyed the stencil floor, because it's eye-catching. As soon as you come in, it's not one colour, as far as like a grey, or a blue, or something. It is a pattern that just catches your eye right away when you walk in. To me, it's just wild enough to be inviting, if you know what I mean. It's like, “Oh, I want to see where this goes to. I want to traverse over it and see all the areas around it.” Because as you say, it's symmetrical in its own way and this whole building is symmetrical, because of the Georgian architecture, but even the pattern on the floor has the symmetry to it. It's just inviting for me and making me want to explore more of the space.

[0:09:10] JL: Yeah, that's great. The pattern that you're looking at, it's – so, it's more of a beigey white colour on the floor with this crimson red kind of a checkerboard pattern, which it really, it's quite bold when you first walk in. We actually painted this earlier this year, probably about a year ago. It was done based off of what the home’s previous owner actually did. You can see at the end of the hallway there, there's a yellow and brown pattern. It's the exact same pattern, but just a bit of a different colour. The reason why he did that was because he actually discovered an original one underneath when he was living here from 1979 until 2015. He preserved that original stencil underneath and then he just recreated what it might have looked like over top. The reason why we picked a bit of a different colour is because we wanted to be a little bit closer to the original. We think the original has a bit more red in it. That's why we did this.

[0:10:16] JH: Yeah. You can really see the difference between the two eras of painting on the floor. I really appreciate the brighter colour. I think that's probably more like what that would have looked like than the orange and brown as we see in the back of the of the room. As a historian, and as you as a historian as well, we know that they loved a lot of bright colours and having different patterns on the wall and such, which we'll go over later. It is more appealing to someone like me from not only the visual sense, but from an historical sense to see the brighter colour, the more flashy pattern, because that's really an eye-catching reality of the 18th century and early 19th century, sometimes the mid-19th century as well, where they want to get your attention as soon as you come in the house and want to be warm and inviting.

[0:11:07] JL: Actually, talking about the history of this room, if we walk over here down the hallway a little bit. I just want to show you this picture we have up on the wall. There were four families that lived here at the Brown Homestead before we came here in 2015. There were the Browns who were here from the late 18th century up until 1858, and then the Chellews, who were an English immigrant family with 11 children, they lived here until 1902. Then the Powers family were here from 1902 until 1979, which is when Jon Jouppien and his family lived here. The Powers era, that's what we're looking at here in this picture. It's a photo of Lafontaine Powers around 1924-25, and it's depicting this hallway. You can see Lafontaine sitting in this hallway that we're standing in right now, in the exact place where we're standing, because there used to be a wall here. 

Over time in these historic homes, as you know, a lot of renovations were done. They put a new modern kitchen in the dining room and they made this like a throughway into this next room. As you see in this picture, there's a wall that doesn't exist here anymore, because it was taken out. I just wanted to show it, because I think it's so fascinating. You see him sitting there with his rifle on his lap. Five deer heads mounted on the wall behind him. A bunch of deer hides draped over chairs, made as rugs on the floor. It's a great way of showing us what this room looked like at one time, because if you look, you can see on the floor, I don't see any of that crisscross stencilling, which indicates to me that at some point, they painted over it, or they covered over it with new wood. It's hard to tell because it's such a grainy black and white picture, but it definitely would not have looked that originally, but that's what it looked like a 100 years ago.

[0:13:07] JH: Yeah, you could really tell from this image of this gentleman that the house itself is a lot like historical memory. It changes over time and certain things change and spaces change. The way that each family was involved in that change is a really interesting story. It really makes the home a home, when they make it the way they want to make it and add things in, or take things out. It really is a fingerprint to that family when you look at the home itself. You're absolutely right about the floor, too. I cannot see the pattern on the floor. It was covered over with something else, or something at that time. This is one of those things where if you study a historical home, you almost have to study it from each family's perspective and how they interpreted it. Then us as historians, how we interpret it.

[0:14:00] JL: Exactly. I think when you come to Niagara and you immerse yourself in the history and you go to historic places, other historic house museums, historic sites, they do a really good job of showing that early Georgian period, that early colonial period, the people that built these impressive structures. We love to share those stories and talk about that time period. What we're trying to do here is also show all of the lives that were lived here. Not just the Browns, but also the Chellews and the Victorian era. We want to talk about the Powers family and the work that they did here. This was a rural farmstead for over 200 years. It was very much a working class agricultural farmscape. We really want to share those stories of everyone that have lived in this house, the men that owned the property, but also the women, their wives. 

So many children lived here over time. There's so many interesting stories that we think are important to share. That's what we're trying to do here in our restoration. By doing that, we're trying to show all of the layers of history and thereby, showing all of the lives that have lived here over time.

[0:15:16] JH: One of the things that really stood out to me when I first came here with Alison Innes and met you were the blue doors. It was just one of those things where I was like, “Wow, these doors are really impressive.” It really accentuates the floor. These beautiful, I don't know if you call it royal blue, or dark blue doors. I'm not an artist, so I don't want to attach a color to it, because someone's going to come here and be like, “He's absolutely wrong. That's not what this is.” These blue doors really stand out to me as well. There's four or five in this hallway itself. It really accentuates the floor. You have this beautiful pattern on the floor and then these dark blue doors.

Above us, inlaid LED lights. When we first came here, I really took an interest in the LED lights and how that really lights up the space. For you as a historian, but also someone who's doing history in the 21st century, when we add things like that, how does that help your efforts here to make it more welcoming and make the environment more welcoming, or just to light up the space in a new way? What is that like for you as a historian to be able to help with additions, like what colour door goes here, or what lighting should we put in here to make this efficient? What is that like for you working as a public historian?

[0:16:45] JL: It feels like a lot of responsibility to be making those sorts of choices with something that a lot of people have a stake in. It's not just a place where I work, but it's a place where the community comes together now at this point. We like to say that the Brown Homestead is Niagara's Homestead. Therefore, any of the choices we make are going to be met with potentially, some criticism. It's a little bit, I wouldn't say scary, but it definitely requires a lot of conversation and forethought, which is what we do as a staff every time we make these choices.

Talking about the blue, this is actually a Prussian blue, which is really interesting. There's evidence of Prussian blue throughout the house. That's a really typical colour used in the Georgian era in these early homes. There is some debate as to what is Prussian blue, what is the exact shade? Because obviously, over time, the colour fades, so it's hard to tell what originally it would have looked like. Different historic homes and museums have different interpretations of the exact shade, but we've gone with this colour. I like it. It's a very royal blue. Colonial Williamsburg actually has a book where they have paint pallet colours for all of these Georgian era early colonial homes and buildings and sites and stuff. That's a really good resource.

[0:18:07] JH: I'm a terrible historian. I should have picked out Prussian blue. But thank you for throwing royal blue in there to make me feel better about my choice.

[0:18:14] JL: This is stuff that I'm just learning. I only learned this very recently, so don't worry.

[0:18:19] JH: Yeah, I'm pretty sure Prussian blue came up multiple times in our last visit when we came here and I'm like, “I should have known. It's Prussian blue.” Where would you like to go to next and tell us a story? We have three doors in front of us and we are in the back of the hallway, and I would love to know where you would like to progress to. Which door shall we go through?

[0:18:39] JL: Let's go through the door on the left.

[0:18:41] JH: Okay. Let's go to the left. All right. This is one of the rooms that I really enjoyed as well, because this one is a nice expansive room with a beautiful fireplace and a nice hearth in it, and very light and inviting. I have the light from the outside, but you also have the beautiful inlaid LED lights to help bring some people in here and make them feel welcome. What room of the home are we standing in now, Jess?

[0:19:13] JL: We are in the dining room now. This is the room where if you immediately come through the front doors, it is on the left-hand side, and this is where the families would have eaten their meals for generations. All of the different families that I was talking about that have lived here would have eaten their meals in this very room. On the other side through this door in front of us, that's the summer kitchens, where they would have cooked meals. This is where they would have eaten them.

I just want to go back to your point about the LED lights. It's a good point you make, because there is a clear distinction between the history and the heritage of the house with all of the construction materials; the flooring, the mantles, the fireplace. You see all of this really old, old material in here, and then all of a sudden, you look up and there's LED lights inlaid into the ceiling. That was a deliberate choice, because we want to be able to use these rooms for events and programming. The lighting that was in here previously, it was not doing a good enough job of illuminating the room. It really needed updating when we bought the place, the electrical, the HVAC, all of this stuff, it needed to be updated in order for us to do the work that we want to do, in order to bring the community in, to have events here, to have people be able to cook in here, to have multiple computers upstairs in our offices with Wi-Fi so we can run this business.

The LED, I think, we've gotten pretty good reviews from people so far. It fits with the room. It's hard to explain if you can't see it, but it's nice because we have a smart home system upstairs and you can actually change the colours. We've got a bright white on right now, but we can change it to a softer tone if we wanted. We can dim them. We've got different colours in different parts of the house in different rooms, so we can actually preset the lighting depending on what kind of an event we want to run.

We've got some night-time workshops, where we teach people about land registry and how to research land registry records. I think that's the thing where you would dim the lights, have it a little less harsh and bright, because we've got a PowerPoint going. Yes, if you wanted to have a wedding shower right here, a baby shower, host a group of ladies for a luncheon, what have you, the room is a lot more inviting at this point than it was when we first purchased. That's why we chose to do this.

[0:21:46] JH: Behind us, we're facing the fireplace right now. Behind us is an interesting wall space. What is this wall behind us with this pattern of, I called it lattice work when I first came, but I was quickly told that's not what that's called. I would love to hear some input on this, because this definitely stands out from the rest of the room, and it's also framed in a way that's really intriguing. I would love to hear more about this wall that does not look like another wall.

[0:22:14] JL: Yeah. It became an accidental feature wall. When we were doing our electrical upgrades, the electricians were putting some wiring down on the edge there, you can see by the doorway. As they were doing that, you could see the plaster moving. It was clearly, had become unkeyed from the last. We were worried as the work was being done that it was just going to start crumbling. We ended up having a little chunk of it taken out and we realized very quickly that this entire wall, the plaster was very fragile. We ended up just taking the plaster off.

Underneath, you can see the original construction. You can see the accordion lath is what this is called, where you would – heritage carpenters actually have explained this to us, but they would actually stretch the wood. They would take a mallet and they would make little marks in it and they would pull the wood apart. This is original to the house. This is the original accordion lath and horsehair plaster in between. You can see the little pieces of horsehair in there. Again, it's not what the house would have looked like originally. Obviously, they wouldn't have kept the wall open. They would have plastered over it.

We are doing this, because we want to show people this. We want to have an educational portion as people come to the house, we want to show them the history of the place, we want to talk about how these houses were built, we want to talk about who built the materials they use and help people become familiar with the fact that these were people like you and I that built their own homes, and just trying to show them the construction in a more visual way, I guess. Upstairs, we actually just rebuilt a wall using the same traditional methods. We've got an old accordion lath wall down here and a new one upstairs in the ballroom.

[0:24:11] JH: It's so cool, because it does help in its own way to signify the different layers of history, which this house has a lot of. It's really a neat way to showcase the construction of the home in various ways throughout. I really appreciated that. I appreciate how it's also framed around, so it's almost like, you're showcasing it as a piece of art in a way, because the house is a piece of art. This nice little framing of it is really neat. I really enjoyed that.

Also, we have a lot of stencilling in this room. Would that have been something that would have been a thing when the home was built, or added later? Or, can you tell us a little bit more about the stencilling?

[0:24:53] JL: Yeah. The historic wall stencilling, it's common in homes of this time period in this area. I know there's a lot in western New York state. I mean, in Niagara, I don't know of too many, but I do know the Gage house in in Stony Creek has it as well. Stony Creek or Hamilton. Historic stencilling, it's the precursor to wallpaper. It was just a way of painting a decorative feature onto a wall, when either you couldn't afford, or didn't have access to wallpaper. Stencilling wasn't just done on walls. It was also done on floors. You could, for example, in the hallway, we have that checkerboard stencil, and it replicates what more expensive floor tiles would have looked like.

In the dining room here, there actually was a floor cloth at one point, which is again, another method of replicating a more expensive rug, or carpet, but they just did stencils instead. We do have some examples of original stencilling in this room, which is why we chose to do this. We've got one on the north wall there. We've got one on the east wall there, right next to the fireplace. Then we've got one on the west wall as well. If we walk over to this one, this is my favourite, it's the biggest example of the stenciling. But you can see the pattern going all the way down the wall. It's really neat. It's faded now at this point, but it's a green leaf and it's all been connected by one straight line.

The previous owner of the house, Jon Jouppien, who is actually a heritage consultant, he found these original wall stencils. He preserved them and we also are making sure we preserve them as best we can, because they're part of our heritage designation and they are one of the most valuable features, unique features in this house, so we're definitely very proud to have them here. We ended up replicating the stencils throughout the room just to show – just as a bit of a display of historic stenciling, to show people that this is what these rooms might have looked like at one point.

Of course, we don't know what the rooms look like back then. That was over 200 years ago and there's no pictures, there's no real evidence of how many stencils there would have been throughout this room. What you see here is not what it would have looked like 200 years ago, but we're never going to pretend that we know that. That's the thing about historic house museums and historic sites.

Anyway, we don't know everything. We have to embrace the uncertainty of the situation, the fact that we don't have all the answers, and we just need to be clear about that and do our best with what we have. At this point, it's more of an educational component of this room. When people come in, they can see all the different stencils and imagine what it might have looked like at one point.

[0:28:04] JH: As an inquisitive person who also wants to have a connection with the past, it's so hard for me not to put my hands on that original stencil and be like, “Oh, this is the 18th century, or early 19th century stenciling. I just want to feel where these people felt before.” But you know as a historian, you probably shouldn't do that that much. It's there for you to look at and enjoy and think about how – be curious to how much of the room may have looked similar, or where else it could have been is its own puzzle, and that really brings it to life in a new way. But yeah, I try not to get too close. I don't want to touch it, even though I really want to. I try not to.

[0:28:43] JL: Well, and that's another good point you bring up, because we talk about that here a lot. We don't want to be the museum where you have to come and stand behind a rope and you can't touch anything and you're not allowed to ask questions and interrupt the person that's lecturing. I love those kinds of things, because I just love to soak in all the knowledge, but I know a lot of people don't learn well that way. I think, we want to be as inviting as possible. If you want to come in, you want to touch the stencil, I'm not going to yell at you. I mean, maybe you shouldn't, but we do we do have definitely more of an opportunity to walk through the home like it is your home, basically.

[0:29:23] JH: I will say that it is a home museum, but it feels more like a home. That's not to knock it, is saying it's not a museum. It's definitely a museum. But when you walk in, it's so inviting. It is like walking into a home more than a place where you have the ropes and you have the things like, don't touch, don't get near. That's why to me, it's very inviting and it's a different experience than some other home museums that I personally have been in.

From the public historian standpoint, I love that you can fan the flames of curiosity and be like, “Okay, let's talk about this in a new way, or let's discuss this point about what this colour is.” No one is the end all be all. No one's the expert. We're all students. I appreciate how this place and everyone within it embraces the idea of being a forever student. I think it's very important. That's my 2 cents, but I really appreciate that.

[0:30:18] JL: Yeah. Well, that's great to hear. Thank you for saying that. I should mention that a lot of the principles that we are based on here have actually been found in the work of Franklin Vagnone, who co-wrote a book called an Anarchist’s Guide to Historic House Museums. He's from the states, and he just done a lot of work in reimagining historic sites for the modern day and trying to help places like this become publicly, not just accessible, but a place that the public wants to come to. We've been making sure that we try and apply a lot of what he has said in that book.

Actually, we did a podcast with him on our podcast, The Brown Homestead has one called The Open Door. Our Executive Director, Andrew Humeniuk, talked to Franklin about some of these things that we're talking about now. They do it far more eloquently, so that's something – yeah, if you're interested, it would be cool to listen to. It was a good episode.

[0:31:17] JH: Yeah. I'm definitely going to tune in to that one. I haven't heard that one yet, but I definitely will. Now that we've also plugged it on here, everyone can listen to it and get a feel for the space, and then and being able to teach things in new ways and embrace different ways of doing history, and there are different ways of doing history. That's fantastic. But this room is just a really, really cool room. I really enjoy the space and I could definitely see how it can be used as an event space and be very inviting and open. I know, I've used inviting a lot on this podcast. But honestly, it's a very, very cool spot. Where shall we go next, Jess?

[0:31:59] JL: Let's go in the summer kitchen.

[0:32:00] JH: All right. We're going on the north end of the room here, in through a nice hallway with one step down into the summer kitchen. This is one of the oldest parts of the building, isn't it? Or the oldest part of this particular structure, isn't it Jess?

[0:32:17] JL: Yes. This is the oldest part that I was mentioning when we were just starting. This summer kitchen and the loft above it were built in 1796, and they were the oldest part of the house. Then the rest of the house was added on later around 1802 to 1804. When you walk in here, this would have been that original one-room structure, where the Brown family would have lived. The Brown family ended up having 10 children. You can imagine, over time, they would have definitely needed a little bit more space.

[0:32:52] JH: Yeah. I can imagine the whole house with 10 or 11 children in, and they're in a smaller space originally, needing to add on. I can't even imagine having 11 in this entire building.

[0:33:07] JL: Yeah. No, that was pretty typical back then. But there's a lot of rooms. I mean, when you go through it, it's really big. As you go through, you realize, it's bigger than it seems from the outside. But there's a lot of space for kids, for visitors. You can see in front of us here, we've actually just been doing a little bit of work in here. You got to look around all the construction materials. But the hearth and the bake oven, we actually just completed restoring those, which is an interesting story.

We had a heritage mason come a couple weeks ago and he's done a lot of work for us with the masonry and the brick work and the stone work, because obviously, we've got so much old stone here that needs constant attention. This is just one of the many projects he's done here. But he repointed, well, they chipped well they chipped out all the old mortar in the hearth that was crumbling. They repointed it with the lime mortar. He actually rebuilt the bake oven over there as well, which wasn't functional before, but now it is.

What we plan on doing here is actually hosting culinary cooking programs, so that we'll actually be able to do a lot of what used to take place in this room. Cooking demonstrations. We're really looking forward to being able to bring that back to the space.

[0:34:29] JH: That sounds really neat. It's going to turn into a small classroom when you do that, which is fantastic. The hearth takes up about oh, 85%, 90% of the back wall. It's going to be a nice stage area for someone to be an instructor and showcase all that. I’m really happy to see the bake oven and the – as you're standing, looking at the hearth off to the far right, because it's something that a lot of hearths when certain historical sites rebuild a hearth, they forget to put in the bake oven portion of it. It's really cool to see the bake oven on the side there and just makes me want to make a loaf of bread, or something in there.

[0:35:05] JL: That's the plan. We're going to do that here one day.

[0:35:07] JH: Yeah. I'll probably be involved, or I'll at least come here and eat it. One or the other. But the floor in here is a nice dark wood floor. Then as you get closer to the hearth, you obviously get into the stone area in front of the hearth. Again, the recessed LED lights really accentuate this space. You could tell, it's one of the oldest parts, or the oldest part of the home. You can tell that it's basically started from this location and moved out from here and spread out. But it is a really neat space, and again, line with the Prussian blues. See, I got the Prussian blue right this time.

[0:35:45] JL: Yay.

[0:35:46] JH: Yeah. And line with Prussian blue around the windows and the floorboards and such. It's a really, really great space to have an educational program. A lot of this home is a great space to have educational programming, but this one I really enjoy, because I love cooking. This is all about my thing.

[0:36:04] JL: Great. I'm glad you like it, too. I really like this space for the same reason. I should also mention, as we were talking about there's all these different stories in this home, it looks like this now and it may have looked like this 200 years ago. But 100 years ago, it didn't look like this at all. That when the Powers family lived here, they actually had covered up this entire hearth. This room was actually used for packing, packing fruit, because they had a fruit farm, like many people in Niagara, at that time, they had orchards. They had apple orchards and they would actually come through the door.

There used to be a door in the front there on the north façade of this room. I mean, you can imagine them coming through that doorway in there and coming in and packing and grading their fruits. This room was a room for making food at many points in time. But another point in time, it was used for organizing and grading and packing food, which they would then take to the markets.

[0:37:05] JH: That's a really interesting point. Because when you do a program in here and you do cook, you're making history as well, because it's been so long since something was cooked in here in that hearth. It’s like, it's bringing it back to life and bringing it – giving it a new life, which is just phenomenal as well. Where to next?

[0:37:27] JL: Let's go into the parlour.

[0:37:29] JH: All right. We'll head off to the parlour, back through the dining room and across the hall into the parlour room. Again, I love doing these kinds of podcasts in the home itself, because you get to hear the home and you get to hear the walking, or hear a heater kick on, or something like that, and it really allows everyone listening to get into the space and to think about being here with us in the moment. It's really a genuine experience, and something that we don't get on a lot of podcasts. I do want to give a special shout out to Alison Innes for allowing us to do this. She did one in Mackenzie Chown at Brock University. I've done a separate one at the at The Banting House in London. It's just good to be able to do this, because a lot of people don't get the chance to walk through and do an interview.

I definitely want to thank you, Jessica, for allowing us to do this as well. Because as I say, a lot of people would be like, that's weird. You don't want to do that. We want it to be a little bit more quiet. It's good to be able to get everyone in the moment, so they can go on this tour with us.

[0:38:35] JL: Yeah, I agree. Thank you for offering to do this. I like that idea as well. If someone maybe doesn't live around here and isn't able to come and visit personally, they could do this audio tour. I like that idea.

[0:38:48] JH: We are now in the parlor room of the home, which is directly across the hallway from the dining room. How has this space been changed, or what would have been going on in here? We have in our fireplace in here. I can imagine it with a nice fire stove, especially this time of year and a smoke rolling through the chimney. What would this space have looked like in the Victorian era, or even before?

[0:39:13] JL: This is another really interesting room with a lot of layers to it. Right now, it looks this way. We've got the Robin's egg blue on the walls, with the white crown moulding and plaster work. Originally, it would not have looked like that. This parlour was actually used as a – hmm, how to explain this? The house was actually a tavern from 1809 into the 1830s, when the Brown family lived here. The Brown era was late 1700s, up until 1858. That second generation of the Browns, Adam Brown and his family ran a tavern here. If you remember along the Niagara-Dundas Stagecoach Line, people would have been travelling. This is the perfect place for someone to stop and have a drink and have a place to stay while on their journey.

You can see in the corner there, the remnants of what used to be a birdcage bar, which is what's helped indicate to us and to the previous owners that have lived here that that is indeed what this room was used for. You can imagine weary travellers coming in, having a drink, their first drink all day, and then after they've relaxed a little bit, had something to eat, they could actually sleep here as well, because it was not just a tavern, but it was also an inn. You have that layer of history in this room.

Then later on, you can see above us here, there's this medallion, this plaster medallion. That is a mid-19th century addition to this room, as is the crown moulding along the edges of the room. That's something that was added a lot later, but it's still in really interesting historic part of this room and also part of our heritage designation. It is something that we are trying our best to do to preserve it and to showcase it as a really unique part of this home. You can imagine the people living here thinking, “Oh, this house is so old-fashioned. We want to liven it up. It's a Victorian era, so we want to pretty it up, fancy it up. Let's add some of this this new crown moulding.” This is what all the people were doing, what all the cool people were doing. They added all of these.

At that point, I picture more of a female space in here, women sitting in here maybe drinking tea, doing their knitting and they're sewing for the family. A very different time. The Chellews when they were here, again, we don't know for sure what would have been happening in this room, but it's a parallel stories, basically. You've got your tavern stories and then you've got your stories of women sipping tea in here, and now we've got us in here. Our staff likes to eat lunch in here, so that's a whole new story for this space.

[0:42:14] JH: It's almost coming full circle, where it was a tavern, where someone could get something to eat off the road and then the staff is now eating in here as well. It is coming full circle, and sometimes we see that in many historical sites, where you're doing something that you would normally be doing anywhere you would work. But in fact, you're doing it in this space. Someone did 200 years ago. The space is recycled in a way to allow us to have the same experience within the walls that they would have had. That's a really, really interesting facet of this.

Also, with the blending of the different eras as well, acknowledging the tavern era, acknowledging the mid-19th century era probably from when that medallion has come into play here, where all the cool people are doing it, we might as well put one up as well. Again, it's going back that layering of history, where this home doesn't tell just one story. It tells many stories over many generations, which I think is a very strong point, and I'm sure everyone here thinks it's a very strong point as well.

[0:43:15] JL: Yes, for sure. As a person who has studied history for years now, and this is my favourite part of the job is doing the research and hearing the stories and learning about what was really going on here, that's something that I really hope to be able to do more of as time goes on is to understand who these people were and what they were doing, because that can add to our programming and the stories that we tell to people when they visit.

Right now, we don't have a lot to go off of other than just the physical architectural components. We did do an archaeological dig here this past summer, so that's given us a little bit to talk about as well. But the physical, the records, the historical records and documentation, it's limited when it comes to the Chellew era especially. That's something, keep your fingers crossed for me that I can continue to get time to do some of that research work here, because I think it's going to be important and I'm hoping to find some new and interesting things.

[0:44:15] JH: That'd be awesome. Then the home has even more ambience to it, because more knowledge is based here. It really brings it to life in new and dramatic ways. Where to next? We have this massive staircase that's calling us to go up and check out some of the upper areas. Would you like to go upstairs now, or is in our space down here you would like to look at?

[0:44:39] JL: I think we should go upstairs and look at the ballroom next.

[0:44:42] JH: Okay. We'll go up to the ballroom. As we traverse through, like I said, if you're into the ambient noises, you're going to get a lot of footsteps right now, because we have a beautiful staircase to go up and you'll hear some of the creaking of the boards as we go through. Again, this brings that experience to life for you the listener and that you are following us through this historical home on a virtual tour with us and I think that's a fascinating journey. When you come upstairs to these spaces, you can definitely see that the world changes for you a little bit from your experience downstairs to up here, and it's still the symmetrical room like downstairs. It may not look it, but it is the same size as the one downstairs, and the ballroom is a tremendous looking place. Jess, tell us a little bit about this place that we're in and how it's different from downstairs. What would have gone on here, etc.?

[0:45:40] JL: Yeah. This was the ballroom. Historically, these rooms would have been another gathering space. During the tavern era, likely, it would have been used by travellers as a place to sleep. We know that there were a lot of children here, so you can also imagine them using this space as a place to sleep, along with the master bedroom that's on the other side of the hallway.

[0:46:00] JH: This is an interesting space, because you can still see some of the wallpaper on the walls that have been here for years. Again, we see the new addition of some – you had students come in and do some of the wall restructuring, didn't you?

[0:46:18] JL: Yes. Willowbank School of Restoration Arts in Queenston, Ontario, just about, I don't know, maybe about half an hour from here, their second-year students came with their carpentry teacher and they ended up helping rebuild this wall. When we started here in 2015, this wall was not here. But we know that originally, there was one here and it had just been changed over time as much of the house had changed over time. We wanted to reconstruct it and figured that this would be a good chance for those students to practice their hands-on skills in another setting. We've actually worked with Willowbank quite a bit and a lot of their students. A lot of our staff are graduates from Willowbank.

It was really cool to see them all learning and doing that process in this room. There was a lot of wood chips flying around and lots of students standing there and listening to their instructor, master carpenter, Doug Vickers, who's helped us out quite a bit over the past couple years. He's, yeah, taught them how to do this. But again, it's the same as downstairs. It's the accordion lath. They learned how to make the accordion lath. The next step now is to plaster it. We are going to be doing that early next year.

[0:47:40] JH: The students also signed the wall, which means they're a permanent part of the history of the building as well, which I think is awesome. Because when we go behind the walls themselves and look at what may have been there, we find names, or we find inscriptions and we're like, “Oh, we didn't know this person was attached to this building.” Well, now these students are forever attached to the building, because they've signed the wall, which I think is a great legacy for them and for the property itself.

There's also a mark on the floor that it looks like, there was a wall here in the middle of the ballroom, or about a quarter of the way across the ballroom, maybe a third of the way across the ballroom. Was there a wall here at one point that separated the room from one side to another?

[0:48:23] JL: Yes. There was a wall here. We don't know exactly what year it was built, but we think it was around the 1860s that it was added to this room. When you're looking right now, you can see the entire room. It's the exact same dimensions as the dining room below it. Originally, as a typical Georgian style, that's what this room would have looked like. To add that partition wall in here in the 1860s, that meant that they were – I mean, they're trying to do something, obviously. We don't know for sure. My guess is more bedrooms, just trying to split the areas so that you'd have some sleeping over here on this side and some on this side.

That wall was actually here for over 150 years. We decided to remove it very carefully. The reason why we took it out is because, again, we want to have more event spaces up here. We want to be able to have something for people to do when they come here. This is just one example, but we held a whiskey tasting here about a month ago in this very room, which is really exciting to be able to have it used as a space as a gathering space once again for the first time in over 150 years. Because yeah, because then, eventually, it was turned into bedrooms.

That's why we did that. We removed it, but we've carefully preserved it intact and are still going to be using it in future programming. We think that for a heritage site, or heritage building to be protected, it has to have a purpose, and people have to have something to do when they come here. Again, I just wanted to reiterate that's our philosophy behind why we're doing what we're doing.

[0:50:07] JH: Also, the idea of not only taking a wall down, but preserving it in a different way. I really appreciate that fact. The mission isn't too deconstruct. The mission is to preserve. I really appreciate that, because sometimes people hear that they've taken a wall down at a historical home, they're like, “Oh, my gosh. They got rid of a wall, or they got rid of a door, or something that was historical in and of itself.” Granted, a lot of places can't keep everything, but you're not in the mood of putting things into a dumpster. This is meant for the legacy of the entire home itself and maybe repurposing things in new ways, right?

[0:50:43] JL: Mm-hmm. Actually, what's really cool about that wall is that it has so many layers of wallpaper on it. In this room, you can see in the corner there, there are a couple layers of wallpaper that can still be seen. But on this wall, there was so many layers. I think we'd found up to 13 layers, and that doesn't even include all the headers on the top. I think there were another four or five layers on top. You can see there's a layer right there on the east wall, and that was actually found behind a coat rack. When we took the coat rack off, we found that layer of wallpaper. That's another really special part of this house. We've been conserving all of the different layers as best we can, because we're just really interested in what they are, where they came from, what the date is. Some of the oldest wallpaper we found is from the, I think – I got to look at the wall behind me here, but 1860s to 70s is some of the earliest stuff we've been able to find.

[0:51:45] JH: Yeah. That's an amazing point of this, and we often talk about how history isn't that far removed from us. Literally, you could take a coat rack down, you're uncovering something from the 1930s, or from something previous. It's right there for you to spot. It's just finding it. It's like finding something in the archive, where you just got to find the right primary source. Here's a piece of wallpaper that's a primary source to the past, if you will, and it's right there for all of us to see. Really, is history that far back, or not maybe on the chronological scale, but here's a way to get connected with it in a different way.

I’ve never heard of so many wallpapers being on top of each other. Kudos to them for making that literally stick. But that's really amazing for us as historians to see all these different patterns of wallpaper. I can honestly say, that the first time we came through here and you talked to me about wallpaper, I was never so excited about wallpaper. Because it's like, “Wow. It's 1860s wallpaper. This is tremendous.” But you never know until you get exposed to something, where you're like, “Wow, that's new. That's new to me.” So, that really brings it home for me, no pun intended. But what's next for this room, Jess? Because this room isn't as finished as the one downstairs. There’s work to be done in here. Other than events, what else is planned for this room overall?

[0:53:14] JL: In terms of the more specific restoration, that's in the works. As you can see, we've got the lighting all put in at this point, and we – it's about halfway finished. All the tracks are in. That's the next step is to finish the lighting. We've had a couple discussions as a staff about this, and we do something, it's called a charette, C-H-A-R-E-T-T-E, like a meeting to discuss all the potential possibilities of how we might be able to restore this room in a way that is respectful of the history of the room and the different elements within it, while also making it a place that people will want to come to and participate in events. It doesn't just have to be historical. We don't just have to have a land registry workshop in here. We could have a yoga class in here. That might anger some people, but I think why should it – why not? This is a beautiful space.

The sunlight comes in that window right there, around 4.00 in the afternoon and it's got a beautiful golden light in here, and it's my favourited room. There's a lot you could do here. I guess, to answer your question, I don't really know yet. That's still in the works. We've had a couple charettes to talk about what we want to do, how we want to restore it. I guess, I’ll have to say, come back later and you'll find out, because I still don't know yet. That's going to happen in 2024.

[0:54:51] JH: Okay. That sounds awesome. Because it's a work in progress. Just like a lot of us. This space has so much potential for a lot of different things to be done. I’m really looking forward to seeing what happens in here. As you say, it has its own ambiance and I like it the way it is, but I know it's going to change in some form or fashion the next few years. But I do like seeing the wallpaper on the walls that this amazing floral pattern on the far wall on the side where the road is, and then where the coat hangers came down, the coat hooks came down is a different pattern, so you're literally seeing the layers of the past in here, which is just amazing.

Then the footprint of the old wall and things like that. Something that we may just pass over without thinking about it if we were other places. That imprint has a history. I think that's a really, really neat thing to consider and become nerds about in the end of it. There's a small door on the north side here of the room. Where does this small door lead?

[0:56:02] JL: I love this small door. This goes into the loft. Again, we're facing north right now. To go through this door, we go into the loft that is above the summer kitchen. Those are the original parts of this house. That 1796 construction was the summer kitchen and the loft above it. We go through this door, we go into the loft.

[0:56:23] JH: Okay. This door, I’m saying it's small. It is small, but it's probably what? A little over 5 feet tall, maybe? A little over that. It looks like a child's door. Like, we're going to get a new balunba coming out of here, or something from the movie. But it's really cool to find these kinds of hidden gems and be like, “I wonder what's behind this small door.” We got to see what's behind it. This is above the summer kitchen. How old is the woodwork in here?

[0:56:53] JL: That's also going to be 1790s.

[0:56:55] JH: 1790s. Okay. That's amazing. I don't know if I’ve ever seen that outside of this place. That's fantastic. Let's head on in. I’m sure it's cold, because –

[0:57:07] JL: Yeah, it's very cold in here. No insulation.

[0:57:11] JH: Yeah. It's really nibby, because you have to duck down to get into this spot and you have a one small step and one larger step to get down in here. When you come down in here, the roofing work is just amazing. To think that this is that old is just fascinating. What would this room have? What's the history of this room basically, Jess?

[0:57:40] JL: It's still a bit of a mystery to me, honestly. It's not insulated in here, but you can see the remnants of a fireplace in the corner there. Meaning, that they would have been able to start fires in here and warm up the space in the colder months. In the summer when you're in here, it is boiling hot and you can barely – you can't spend much time in here. My guess is it was used as extra sleeping space at certain times of the year. It was probably used as storage space as well.

Again, talking about that Powers family era when this was a fruit farm, we know that temporary laborers would come to Niagara and work on these farms all throughout the region for a certain period of time, whether it be a couple weeks up to a couple months. We were told that a lot of those laborers would actually sleep in this room. I've always found that interesting. Standing in here, I think, helps tie you to that humanity of it again. I'm thinking, oh, man. If they were here when it was really, really hot, you just feel for them, right? I always find those stories interesting, and I would love to learn more about that.

[0:58:54] JH: Yeah. The room is slightly claustrophobic, only because of you have this arching look to the building itself. It's peaked, but there are small wooden archways that are accompanying those peaks in here. It has this pull where it draws you down lower. You want to duck, even though you don't have to. You duck through the door, you come in here, you can stand upright, but at the same time, it feels like, you're being – you're getting a big hug from the building, so to speak, where it's coming in on you. I can't imagine a bunch of people sleeping up here, but it could have been. It could have been that way. Yeah, it's definitely a different feel to the home when you come into a small room like this. It's obscure.

[0:59:43] JL: There's some stairs, actually, just behind us. These lead down into the summer kitchen. It would have been easy access to what was going on down there. We really don't use it, because it's a sketchy little stairway, but yeah, I just wanted to point that out as well.

[1:00:00] JH: Yeah. It's a different kind of feel in this room, and you can definitely see how it attaches itself to the downstairs in the summer kitchen, and then into the smaller entryway into the newer addition to the home. It's a fantastic little piece of history. It's in here and you can definitely tell it's not insulated. It is chilly in here right now in the early part of December. But not too bad.

[1:00:27] JL: It's not too bad. Canada can get worse than this. It's only what, zero today?

[1:00:33] JH: Yeah, I think. I think it's two. I think we're okay. We'll be all right. My hands aren't cold right now, so it's a little – I'm okay. I'm okay.

[1:00:40] JL: That’s a good sign.

[1:00:42] JH: Where would you like to head to next, Jess?

[1:00:45] JL: Okay, so there's really – I guess, there's the attic and the master bedroom are the two main rooms. Let's go to the attic.

[1:00:53] JH: Okay. We will move on through, back through the small door, into our previous location here. In through the ballroom and then back out into the hallway. You can definitely tell the temperature change from where we just were. We have this another staircase up to the top of the building. We will start our journey towards the roof, if you will. Now this is new for me, because I didn't see this last time we were here.

[1:01:42] JL: Watch your step.

[1:01:43] JH: But yes, there's installation and then other things here. You don't want to step on that. What are we looking at up here, Jess?

[1:01:50] JL: Yeah. This is the attic. I don't know too much about this room, to be honest. It's still a bit of a mystery to me. You can see right now that all of the floorboards have been taken up. This is because we are doing upgrades in this room as well. We've done, as you saw the electrical and the HVAC upgrades in the other parts of the house. This is a room that still needs to be done. You can see there's two windows on either side, on both the east and west side. What else do I show? Oh, you can see all the little nails coming through the wood in the ceiling here.

We've got a tin ceiling on here right now. I don't know if you can hear that. I mean, the roof has been redone multiple times over its history. There were cedar shingles on here at one point, not too long ago. They probably would have been on here originally. Yeah. That's all I can say about the attic, really.

[1:02:52] JH: Yeah. It's your typical attic. But it's an immense attic, because of the size of the home itself. Lengthwise, it is immense, and it does have that feel, again, of just like an attic, it has that claustrophobic feel to it, where you can see the beams and you can see as Jess said, all the nails coming through. You definitely want to have a tetanus shot before you come up in here, because you don't want to get stuck on anything here. But yeah, it's an awesome space to see, because you get to see both ends of the house and you get to see the stone work on both ends of the house as well. Really, really cool spot. We'll head back down the stairs here, Jess. Where do you want to go next?

[1:03:32] JL: Let's go in that master bedroom.

[1:03:34] JH: Okay. We'll head down here and we'll go down to the master bedroom. Take our time walking down here, because I can be clumsy, especially when we have podcast cables. I don't want to yank my headphones off, or anything like that. Walk down the hallway here, on the second floor.

[1:04:01] JL: This is the master bedroom. Hi, Pam. Don't worry about us. We've got some co-workers here today. This is an office space. We have six of us that work here regularly. This is an office. It was originally the master bedroom. Now, it's our main office. We've got a couple people that work in this room, then we've got a couple rooms off to the side for more office space. Yeah. This would originally have been the master bedroom, so more of a sleeping quarters. We also have a lot of other interesting stories to tell in this space. One of which is connected to World War I.

During World War I, there was actually a training ground across the street. Right across from us is Short Hills Provincial Park, which a lot of us use to go hiking, walk our dogs. It's a really common place that a lot of people in Niagara are familiar with. Whenever people ask where I work, where's The Brown Homestead? I always say, it's across the street from Short Hills. That park was actually a training ground during World War I for Canadian soldiers. This room, The Brown Homestead, or the John Brown House being across the street was actually a really good vantage point for the officers that were leading those drills.

In this room, this is where they would have hung canvas cloths out of the window to indicate to the soldiers the different drills that they were doing. We actually have pictures of this. It's really interesting. Black and white pictures of the Powers family when they were here, talking to and connecting with all of the soldiers that were here and used this house as their headquarters during that training period. We have pictures of people like, Canada's Minister of Militia and Defence, Sir Sam Hughes, in our front yard with their cars; bringing all their horses here and doing drills with the horses, because there was a big barn, because the Powers family, they had a barn and they had horses. Yeah, so I like talking about that in this room. I think that's a really fascinating piece of history in the story of this home.

[1:06:13] JH: Sam Hughes is an interesting character from the past and I've had a lot of conversations with Canadian friends about Sir Sam Hughes. It's really interesting to be in a room in St. Catharines where Sam Hughes was, because you don't normally think of Sam Hughes being here, but he was. He was going around and visiting locations and seeing what the men were up to and how the drills were going and such, because he was managing as much as he could. Sometimes not in a good way to the people underneath him, but that's just the way it was. Yeah, it's a great space. I’m glad it's being used as an office and being kept up in that new way. It's an office once again, like it was during the First World War. On the wall, you have the mission and vision of the location. I think this is very important from a public history standpoint to be able to highlight this. Could you explain those to our listeners?

[1:07:07] JL: Sure. Yeah. The Brown Homestead as an organization, obviously, we have a mission statement. Our mission is reimagining historic sites as engines of progress and development. Our vision is compassionate communities using innovative thinking and an understanding of their place in history's continuum to build a more harmonious future. These are the mission and vision statement that were come up with by Andrew and his wife, Jennifer, when they first purchased this place in 2015, and had a lot of conversations about what they wanted this site to end up being. That is our mission and vision here moving forward. Reimagining historic sites as engines of progress and development.

We're not just a static piece of history. We are a piece of history. We're a really important valuable piece of history for this city as the oldest house in the St. Catharines, but we're not just stuck in the past. We want to work every day to make sure that we can offer things to people that is relevant in the present. For example, we have a victory garden program, where all of the food that we grow in our community gardens go to local food banks. Things like that. Free programming for the community in a way that is useful and helpful. That's the mission and vision.

Around it, you'll see we have eight values that we try to live by. You'll see it in our social media if you follow us. You'll see some of these hashtags, Community Connection, Vibrant Culture. Vibrant Culture, that refers to our organizations feeling towards our volunteers and our team and making sure that everyone feels welcome when they're here, whether they're a paid staff, or if they're a volunteer. We've got a really awesome, awesome group of volunteers. We try to create that Vibrant Culture where we have.

Perks where we offer a meal once a year, where we can gather and talk about – just connect with each other and have a free meal. Then also, we've gone curling with them. We've offered a couple cool local hikes with a history tour component. We try and make it a place where people want to become part of this group. Vibrant Culture. History's Continuum is another value, which we've talked about throughout this tour, showing all those different layers of history from the past to the present and into the future. What is that continuum of history and trying to see all the connections and show those connections, instead of just showing one static point in time.

Economic Sustainability, that's a big one. Yes, we all love this place, but how do you keep it running? The money is a huge, huge factor. We are not owned by the city. We don't get any government funding at any level. We are a non-profit organization. For organizations like that, especially, it is so hard in Ontario to run a place like this. That is why we have to try so hard to think outside the box and try to make it a place where people will want to come and spend money and help this place thrive and to keep it running.

My boss, Andrew, he's great at doing this stuff. He's done a lot of feasibility studies and had a lot of conversations in those early years since they purchased on how exactly to develop a model to make something like this economically sustainable. I can't speak to that as well as he could, but that's what that value means.

Innovative Thinking is another value. Trying to think of think outside the box, think of new ways to approach history and to approach our work here. Everyman's History, that's as you know as a historian, that's a common term for the every person, the layman, the worker. Often, these historic places are representative of a really important person who lived here, or who built it. I wouldn't say, the people here aren't important, but they definitely – they weren't involved in politics and they didn't build the Welland Canal or anything. They just farmed and we just want to share those stories. Everyman's History is another value.

We have Holistic Education as another one. That's actually been a really cool one for me working here is every time we have a heritage trades person, whether it be a mason, or a carpenter, or a plasterer, or someone doing some restoration, they always offer an educational component. I can try it a hands-on – I can repoint a wall. They give us these chances to tell us what they're doing, and then give us a chance to try it ourselves under their supervision. At this point, our newer staff are getting those opportunities as well, which is really great to see. There's a Holistic Education.

Then the last one isEmbracing Uncertainty, which I think, I’ve talked about before, but just that idea of the fact that we don't know what these rooms look like. There's no pictures. We don't know what was going on in here when this house was first built, or even at other points in time. We just have to do the best we can with the knowledge that we have, embracing the fact that we don't know, and just making our choices based off of that foundation. Those are our eight values.

[1:12:37] JH: Yeah, that's fantastic and I'm so glad that it's on the wall to be a constant reminder of that. So many people can come in here and just take a picture of it on their phone and keep reminding themselves, too, that there are certain values on this wall, many of which, we as public historians need to embrace more of, or keep going with when we embrace it. I think it's hugely important that things like this are seen by so many different people, because it could give them that incentive to want to try holistic education in new ways, or have innovative thinking in their day-to-day life at a museum, or such. It's great that it's here and available for staff to see and for visitors to see as well, because it tells a story of why you're here in the first place and what you're trying to do. That's awesome. I love visuals. I'm a visual learner. I like being able to see all these. It’s great.

We've covered a lot of the home, and I know that soon, it's going to start to get a little dark. I know that you wanted to go outside and check out some of the buildings outside, because there are some structures out there that you want to cover that are very important. Would you like to make our way outside and we can check out some of those?

[1:13:53] JL: Yes. Let me grab the key for the cabin.

[1:13:55] JH: Oh, sure. That would be a thing we're going to need. Okay. Take a little side journey here to grab the key. Both of us also have headsets on, so we could hear each other I'm literally attached to her right now. I have to go where she goes, so there's going to be some extra footsteps involved in this. But that adds to the ambiance. It's all fine. But when we first come to this location, you see some of the outbuildings out back. I was immediately drawn to them, because usually, sometimes I come to a museum, or a historical home and it's the home itself and there's not much else. But here's something else for visitors to experience. They each have their own history and their own interpretive models as well.

As we make our way out there, we need to be considering what those interpretive models are and how we are to embrace new history through these structures. But we are heading through the main hallway out the back door on the north end of the structure. I'm going to make sure I close the door, so the heat stayed in. We're going to proceed to the back of the building. Again, making sure I shut the door. We've had a little bit of snow lately, but it is not that bad out right now. It's going to get worse than that. But we also have these headsets on, which helps my ears greatly.

[1:15:41] JL: Yes. Good idea.

[1:15:43] JH: But there are four structures out here. Jess and I, I want you to be able to tell us a little bit about each one on this podcast, because each one has their own history and maybe in unique ways in which they are being used. Which one would you like to start with here?

[1:15:58] JL: We'll start with the Dairy. The Dairy is on our left here. It's a big brick building and it was built, both the dairy and the smokehouse were built in around the 1860s by the Chellew family. Again, this was a farm for so long, so they both had agricultural purposes. We're actually planning on turning the dairy into an ice cream shop, because right now, it's just being used for storage, and we want to be able to have it be useful in in a way that can bring people out here.

We are right across the road from the Short Hills, and a lot of people after a walk, or a hike, I think, would want to come for an ice cream. I could see that happening. That's the next stage of this project, this historic dairy.

[1:16:49] JH: Again, it's coming full circle again. We're going back to dairy-based stuff and going to ice cream, which I'm a huge fan of. Directly across, that is another brick structure that the Chellew family may have built. Which structure is this?

[1:17:02] JL: Yes. This is the Smokehouse. Again, it's just used for storage right now. We don't have any particular plans for the future of this one quite yet, but they are part of our designation. We have a heritage designation here on this this property, which helps protect us and protect these small buildings. The Smokehouse and Dairy are definitely important historic elements of this site. We've got the smokehouse. Then just behind it there is an old outhouse, which actually wasn't original to this property. It was brought here by the home's previous owner.

I don't know too much about this building, honestly, and I'm not sure what we're going to end up doing with it. We're in the process right now of figuring out what we want to do with a lot of the stuff that's here, whether we want to display it, or what. I don't know. Maybe we can skip that one.

[1:18:01] JH: Yeah. It is a two-seater, by the way. It is a two-bathroom facility, just so everyone knows. I think I made that joke online to a couple groans, I'm sure, of this home being a two-bathroom because of that outhouse. But there is another standing structure back here, which I know a lot of people will be interested in. It is the Norton cabin. As we make our way towards it, what are your first impressions looking at this particular structure from the outside?

[1:18:33] JL: The Norton Cabin, you can tell that it's definitely got a lot of different layers to it and a lot of work has been done to it over time. It's actually really difficult to tell what on there is original, because a lot of it, honestly, isn't. But once we go inside, it'll be easier to tell what's original and what's not. It's a small little structure. There's a set of stairs. We just built these stairs leading up to the front door there. This building was actually not original to this site. That's an interesting part of our site that we have incorporated into the stories we tell. Because it is a really, really valuable building and it's really, really unique, and it's something that we want to do our best to preserve now as stewards of the Norton Cabin.

It was built in 1817, around 1817 by Mohawk Chief Teyoninhokarawen, who’s, that's his Mohawk name. He's also known as Major John Norton. John Norton was actually named by the Canadian government as a person of national historic significance in 2011. This structure was originally built by Norton in Caledonia. In the 1990s, the previous owner of this home, Jon Jouppien, who as I mentioned, is a heritage consultant, he heard that it was going to be demolished. And so, he actually brought it here to his property. He built that stone foundation that it's sitting on there, and he rested it on that foundation. It's been here ever since 1997.

[1:20:16] JH: We hear this from time to time of historical sites, which may have a structure, or a component of a structure on the premises, simply because it needs to be saved, and there's nowhere else to put it. This whole place here so is insured to have the ability to be saved and this is one of those such structures. I've never seen one on a site this size that size. It's a pretty decent-sized cabin for 1817, and it's sitting here and I'm so glad that it was saved, and I'm sure a lot of others are very glad it's saved.

It brings a different element into the story of this homestead, and I think it's a very interesting structure to see sitting back here. The deck and the stairs up to it are beautifully made and allow for easy access into the building itself. The structure isn't complete either, correct?

[1:21:08] JL: Correct. Yeah. When it came here, it was missing a wall, the wall that's facing the north side there. Also, it was missing a roof. This roof is clearly not original. It’s another, I don't know. What is that? Tin?

[1:21:20] JH: Yes. Yes. We'll call it tin.

[1:21:24] JL: Okay. That was added on at some point over the last 20 or 30 years. I've seen pictures of it on its original site before it was taken here, and it had a barn style roof on it, which also, would not have been original. It's had a lot done to it over time, because different families actually lived here after Norton moved out of it. Yeah, so that roof that you're seeing is not original. Then, you'll see when we go in that the north wall is missing. It's covered with plexiglass.

[1:21:55] JH: Okay. We'll head on inside and take a look. Again, this is another way of showcasing different families, if you will, different generations and how they interact with structures. But also, different ways that we as historians and public historians interact with the structure, and even saving the structure in itself, if that is available to people to be able to do. That goes along with the need for all of us to take care of these structures as best as possible, even if they are not fully intact. It's not a loss. It's not a complete loss. As long as we have some structure, it's an asset.

When you walk into the structure, you walk in on a metallic deck inside here and you can definitely see out the north side that there is no wall to the structure at this time. But a beautiful outlook across the orchards out back, so that's a nice little thing to see. Then the beams of the structure, obviously, are available for sight and the side walls as well. But this is a really different kind of experience here at The Brown Homestead. There's a lot of uh information on the wall about John Norton and the Norton cabin itself. What are some other tidbits about this structure, Jess, that you'd like for our listeners to know?

[1:23:25] JL: I guess, I could explain a little bit more about who John Norton was. He was born in Scotland in 1772, a Scottish mother and a Cherokee father. He came to North America as a soldier and was stationed at Fort Niagara. He actually was a linguist. He spoke up to 12 different indigenous languages, and he also worked for the British Indian department as an interpreter. By 1799, he was living among the six nations of the Grand River, where he was adopted as a nephew by Joseph Brant, who gave him the title of war chief. During the war of 1812, he actually led Six Nations warriors in many battles. It was after that war that he built this cabin on the Grand River.

He's got a lot of interesting history tied to him. A lot of people, I think, know of John Norton as a warrior, and because of all what he did during the war of 1812, and his work that he did with the British-Indian department. But I think it's also important to talk about the fact that he was really well educated and he spoke all those different languages, and he played a really important role as a translator and an interpreter between the two groups of people.

[1:24:42] JH: Going through all these different structures and such, I have to make sure that we give a shout out to all the places that people can go online to be a part of the experience. Where can people go to find out more information about The Brown Homestead and possibly, events that happened here?

[1:25:00] JL: Definitely, check out our website, thebrownhomestead.ca. That's where you can access our journal and our podcast, which are two of our main ways of sharing our research and the stories that we tell come through those two main channels through our podcast and our journal, which are on our website, as well as all of our upcoming events and programs. That's also something that we have on the website. We also have a lot of social media. You can check us out, Facebook, Instagram, we have a LinkedIn, we have TikTok. You can find us on all of those.

[1:25:32] JH: Awesome. Jess, thank you so much for your time today and going through all the structures and the different rooms. It really means a lot to me. Because as I said earlier, I love doing these kinds of podcasts, where we actually walk through structures and talk about them. I want to give another special shout out to Alison Innes for allowing us to be on to discuss these kind of things. Hopefully, everything comes out well and we have a good experience, where people can close their eyes and they can envision what we saw today, and maybe they will come on out as well and want to visit the site. Thank you so much for doing this.

[1:26:07] JL: Oh, thank you very much, John. It was great to meet you and to be able to do this and to share this history with you, and I appreciate it.

[END OF EPISODE]

[1:26:14] SN: A big thank you to The Tattooed Historian, John R. Heckman for touring The Brown Homestead with us, and of course, to Alison Innes and Brock University for hosting all of our fun on Foreword.

If you liked what you heard, be sure to subscribe to The Tattooed Historian and Foreword wherever you get your podcasts and find them on social media. I know, I especially love The Tattooed Historian’s YouTube channel, as a really good rabbit hole to get lost in all things history. Head to our show notes on our website for the links.

That's it for this episode of The Open Door. We'll talk again next month as we continue to look for ways to create a better future by exploring the past.

[OUTRO]

[1:27:04] ANNOUNCER: Thanks for listening. Subscribe today, so you won't miss our next episode. To learn more, or to share your thoughts and show ideas, visit us at thebrownhomestead.ca on social media, or if you still like to do things the old-fashioned way, you can even email us at opendoor@thebrownhomestead.ca.

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