Kelwood: an English Estate in Canada
W.
Lacey Amy
From
MacLean’s Magazine, November 1912.
With photos by the Author.
More on Kelwood—http://vitacollections.ca/cramahelibrary/299/Exhibit/3
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The remarkable country home
described in this article has many points of exceptional interest. Twenty years
were occupied in the selection of the lumber used in its construction, walls
two feet thick divide its rooms from basement to attic, and every inch of its
woodwork is solid oak or bird’s eye maple. Built in 1863, it still stands “a
repudiation of the decay of age.” Overlooking the village of Colborne, in the
province of Ontario, “Kelwood” is in every sense a fine old English estate,
such as is rarely found in Canada.
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Frantic orators
to the contrary it is not such a long step from the man with the hoe to the man
with the estate. The coexistence of two conditions that sound so discordant is
largely a matter of ambition in these democratic days of home-spun opulence.
The possession of an estate is not a formidable aim, nor the dream of an
uncontrolled brain in Canada. To his suburban lot the street-car landed
proprietor hurries home at six o’clock, swallows his lunch from one hand while
he changes his shoes with the other, and shoulders the immortal hoe to revel in
the soil of his twenty-five foot lot—his soil. An hour earlier a fellow
land-owner, more fortunate in his half-acre and shorter hours, has tightened his
belt for the solving of the problems of garden and lawn and park in space
confined past his ambitions. Still earlier in the afternoon an auto has broken
the speed laws in a cloud of dust to reach further out the estate of five or
ten acres; and in white flannels the owner is giving directions to the
landscape gardener and the shovel men, ever with the storied English estate in
his mind.
But to Canada
there is little opportunity for the broad estates that have maintained in
England not only a beauty of landscape, but also a distinct class of
independent gentlemen, honest to themselves, their dependents and their
country, historic for the staunch integrity that is bred of centuries of proud
dictatorship and dignity. The growth of such an estate occupies too many years
and demands too much ready money for Canada to have attained to that luxury in
a general way.
It is only when
the native forest has been seized and trained before the hum of commerce and
rush began its modifying assaults that this country has been able to mould a
genuine old squire’s home for the ambitious Canadian. And perhaps the only
instance of that in Ontario, at least, exists to-day within ninety miles of
Toronto.
Kelwood is
honored only in its own district. But by age, by location, by its grand old
trees and roadways it lays silent claim to wider distinction. For almost half a
century it has held watch over the village of Colborne. From the brow of a
hundred-foot hill rising abruptly behind the village it looks out beyond the
houses half hidden in the trees, over the flashing waters of Lake Ontario, and
on a clear day away to the smoke of Rochester. And behind the house it hides
its sixty acres of park and drive and pond, a fairyland of shadow and
brightness, of grove and clearing, of woodland paths and graded driveways, of
hill and hollow, of rustling bower and trickling spring. The forty acres of
farmland complete the requirements of the most ambitious squire.
Far back in
Canadian history when the taint of commerce was relieved by government grants
of land and other favours, when the pioneer with faith to spend for the future
was rewarded in the present, the grandfather of Joseph Keeler built three
sawmills. The risk brought the gift of several thousand acres of land, covering
the present sites of Colborne, Lakeport and Warkworth. Incidentally the
slow-growing seed of Colborne was planted at that time.
Joseph Keeler,
the grandson, was a man of feelings and ambitions. One of these was to
represent his district at Ottawa. In this he succeeded three times. Early in
life he felt the spur of the estate ambition and commenced its fulfilment in
his daily duties. At that time he was the master of Cat Hollow, now Lakeport,
from which the shipments of the district in lumber and produce were made.
Quietly he made it a practice for twenty years of selecting the best of the
lumber that passed through his hands and storing it in his large storeroom,
called the Marmora. In 1863 he commenced the structure that satisfied him for
his life and will gratify a few more generations to come.
In those days of
few contractors, fewer brickyards, a man with ideas like Keeler’s had to
possess the hands to back his brains; he must work out his own dreams. Keeler
made his own bricks, which will stand a monument to his ability. In walls that
even fifty years afterwards stand solid he welded them together with lime burnt
in a kiln, now fallen in grass-covered ruins. And inside he fitted the timber
that had been drying for twenty years—drying so well that to-day not a crack
breaks the surface.
The house stands
a repudiation of the decay of age. Its builder was twenty years ahead of his
age in design, so that it is yet more modern in appearance than structures
that, born since, are ready to pass away. When Keeler built he had in mind his
descendants—many generations of them. Walls two feet thick divide the rooms
from basement to attic, making the cellar a formidable dungeon, and of the
upper stories a heart-rending waste of space. Between the walls a four inch air
space tempers the extremes without. Every inch of woodwork (there is enough of
it to build half a dozen modern houses) is solid oak or bird’s eye maple, the
doors running nine feet up in rooms of thirteen feet ceiling.
Each of the
sixteen rooms opens on both stories into a circular rotunda divided by a floor
largely of glass. The floor of the lower is made up of one hundred shaped
boards radiating out to make the complete circle from a point in the centre.
One of Keeler’s successors, possessing several traits more prominent than
taste, has endeavored to make these rotundas the showrooms of the house. In
every space on the walls between the many doors has been painted scenes that
for imagination and execution would give pointers to the first love story of
the boarding school girl. These paintings, ‘covering the walls up the stairs,
as well, are supposed to represent hunting and pastoral scenes. Wonderfully
colored cattle, huge, frisky horses, fish that no line would bear, deer in
beautiful poses—they’re all there, with embellishments none but that painter
could have imagined. And to leave no doubt of his ability to improve the
original this later owner painted the hardwood floor of the lower rotunda with
its hundred pointed boards—painted it, and in that useful kitchen color, grey,
at that. He also added a verandah of the style of twenty years ago. that
frills-and-furbelows style, that goes with Keeler’s effort about as well as a
lace collar on the neck of Venus de Milo.
In every room a
massive marble grate, black or white, tells of the provision for comfort. China
closets, clothes closets, window and corner seats reveal the hand of a woman in
the planning. The basement was built as the servants’ quarters, with kitchens,
bake ovens, grates, dumb waiters, ventilators and closets. And that the duties
of the squire weighed on Keeler is shown by the large west wing set apart as an
immense ballroom.
From the
massive, handless, oak front door, with its iron knocker, through a two-story
covered driveway one looks into the real dreamland of the estate. Only ten
yards north the park commences abruptly in stately pine trees. For a quarter of
a mile it wanders in a dignified way to the crest of a slope. In trees of
smaller size it climbs down the hillside, jumps a well graded driveway, and drops
slowly away again to a rippling stream and the remains of a pond to which the
muskrats took a disastrous fancy. A tiny ribbon of water winds through
evergreen trees that give way to nothing else until they reach the dam. And
there still remains a spring bubbling up in an iron pipe, approached by a
grass-covered road and a crude bridge.
All through the
sixty acres of trees gravel roads have been built, now hidden a little with
moss and years of dead pine needles. The driveway half way down the slope was
intended for the main road from the back country to Lakeport. But unsentimental
government surveyors interfered. The farmlands at the back of the park were
selected for the site of Colborne. But with the independence of things too
small to train, that village walked away and planted itself on the lower levels
on the other side of the hill. Unwittingly it took a stand where it would not
break in on the quaintness of old-land Kelwood.
A monied owner
with taste and no reverence for those paintings, a little underbrushing in the
parklands, a new dam indigestible for muskrats, a not-too-assidous regarding of
the driveways, a servants’ staff to brighten the house, an old English gardener
with his hands untied—these are the needs to assure the integrity of the dreamland
of Kelwood as an estate fit for any squire.
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