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Edgemount,
with its' superb view overlooking Stoney
Creek and Lake Ontario from atop the Niagara
Escarpment, is a festive Carpenter's Gothic
version of the Ontario Vernacular House,
festooned with flamboyant ornamental woodwork.
For over 160 years the Lee family, United
Empire Loyalists, farmed the two hundred
acre farm. The original 1808 log house was
enlarged and remodeled into its present
form in 1873. The house is sheathed in the
characteristic board and batten siding,
with wooden boards laid vertically with
thin strips called battens placed over their
joints. Two bay windows flank the main entrance,
which is protected by an open porch with
slender octagonal columns. The bays and
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porch are made into one architectural
statement by the lacy wood filigree
cornice that forms a continuous band
stretching across the top of the bay
windows and flat-roofed porch. The porch
is also decorated with a bold, geometric-patterned
grill. The front double door is unusually
wide with a plain Greek revival door
surround. It has two sets of glazed
doors, the outer set, no doubt, acted
as storm doors, giving some extra protection
to the house on its exposed site on
Stoney Creek Mountain. The
windows in the gables are very idiosyncratic,
being horizontally divided in two by
a band of decorated wood. The fretwork,
or bargeboard, is decorated in a patriotic
maple leaf motif while the roof is shingled
in wood: the most common form of roof
in nineteenth-century Ontario. |
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A surfeit
of wood decoration
Erland
and Janet Lee, the third generation of Lees
at
the Erland Lee Home.
to
occupy the house, gained fame for being
among
the
key founders of the Women's Institute, now
a worldwide organization
dedicated to women's education and development.
The organization, which was founded in 1897,
was recently made famous in the movie Calendar
Girls . The Institutes first constitution
was drafted in the Lee's house and Mrs.
Lee wrote out the first version in longhand
at her dining room table.
The
local limestone quarries of St. Mary's have
been the economic backbone of this charming
town for much of its history. Many of the
most attractive houses are, not surprisingly,
built of the local limestone quarried along
the banks of the Thames River. James Mackay,
one of town's seventeen early hoteliers,
built this sturdy limestone Ontario vernacular
cottage in 1865. The house's wooden
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features
are boldly treated as if to match the
strength of the limestone. The front
porch, added about twenty years after
the fact, is very handsome with tapered,
paneled, square columns; large, overhanging,
bracketed eaves; and balcony railings.
A nice touch is the open arch with drip
spools, terminating in elegant consoles
between the columns. The steeply
pitched gable, with sculptured bargeboard
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The
front porch's fancy
exaggerated S-shaped
curves, culminates with a
fretwork
finial, which instead of soaring towards
the
heavens,
flows downward, forming a beautifully
carved teardrop
pendant.
The Gothic revival
died hard in Ontario, particularly in the
rural areas where it continued to be used,
though with decreasing frequency, until
1890's. The Gothic revival has been called
the most important artistic movement to
come out of England. Gothic revival tenets
such as the organic approach to design and
the “honest” use of materials influenced
the development of modern architectural
movements and led to both the Queen Anne
Style and the Arts and Crafts movement.
ISBN
1-55028-845-8
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