Written by Susan Evans Shaw

Photography by Jean Crankshaw

Published by James Lorimer & Company Ltd., Publishers

Erland Lee House, 1801

In 1792, James and Hannah Lee, United Empire Loyalists from Maryland, arrived at Saltfleet Township, where James, in 1801, was granted 200 acres along the Niagara Escarpment. Their eldest son, John, Married Mary, eldest daughter of Enoch Moore, Lee's next-door neigbour. Enoch owned land at what is now 552 Ridge Road, where he had been living from hte time of the 1791 survey. About 1800, Enoch left his family and disappeared without a trace and without obtaining proper title to the land. It took forty-eight years, until 1844, before Mary at last got title, although she, John, and their family had been living on the property since 1808. In that year John built a small frame log house, where he and Mary raised eleven children.

In 1837, their youngest son, Abram D'Arcy Lee, added a front section to the already existing house. Abram married Jemima Pew, and their son Erland Lee, born in 1864, inherited the farm. Erland a charter member of the Farmers' Institute, in 1897 invited Adelaide Hoodless to speak at the Ladies' Night of the Saltfleet Farmers' Institute. On February 19, 1897, the first Women's Institute in the world was organized at Squire's Hall, Stoney Creek, with the original by-laws and charter drawn up by Janet Lee, with wording assistance from her husband Erland, Ernest Disraeli Smith, M.P., and Frank Metcalfe Carpenter, M.P.P.

Adelaide Hoodless became a crusader after her fourteen-month-old son died from drinking impure milk. Since her successful effort in their founding, the Women's Institutes have become the worl's largest rural women's movement, numbering about 6 million members in First- and Third-world countries. The Institute taught food safety, pushed for pasteurization, and ssaw to it that bread was sold in bags and roaads had yellow dividing lines.

The house is a well-preserved example of Ontario Gothic revival, a white board-and-batten structure with bay windows, green shutters, and, along the gables, hand-carved maple bargeboards, so called because the pattern resembles a paper chain of maple leaves. The steep side-gabled roof has a central Gothic gable surmounting a pair of round-arched windows with matching green shutters, and directly underneath them is a pair of rectangular windows with shutters, and directly underneath them is a pair of rectangular windows with shutters. Between the upper and lower pairs of windows are paired carved medallions. The double front doors and Georgian lintel, arched sidelights, and plain pilasters are sheltered from the elements by an elaborately trimmed front porch.

From the parking area the first view of the house is the west elevation, which is topped by a gable with decorative bargeboards over two pair of windows that echo those under the front gable. Farther south along the same elevation there is a rectangular two-over-two sash window embellished with a shallow arch.

Typical of this style of house, there is a summer kitchen tail behind the middle section, constructed around the original log cabin. Little is left of the 1808 cabin but the floorboards, a dresser, and a very plain dooor, free of moulding. In the front section of the house, the pur boasts a 9 1/2-foort ceiling, but the medallion, valence, and rug all date from the 1940s. The fireplace is only a facade, and the house was heated by a coal stove, the vent for which remains in the hall.

Upstairs there are four bedrooms opening from a central hall. In what was once the boys' bedroom, there is a low door in the south wall that is the height of the original unheated loft --- 45 inches --- where the family slept in the days of the 1808 cabin. John and Mary Lee and their children would have been happy to snuggle together on bitter winter nights.

ISBN 1-55028-867-9