unrestored daguerreotype

When we first saw the house in the fall of 2006, there was a small cased daguerreotype sitting on the pump organ. I thought about that old picture quite a lot. When we bought the house it was filled with such things, large and small. But this one photograph drew me back to it over and over. I wondered why it was still here. Elizabeth Hyde had once written that when she bought the house in 1961 many of the things inside it were already here. She wrote that it was as if the previous owners had simply gotten up and left one day, leaving their things behind. Could this photograph have been one of those things? Could it have actually been here since the house was built? The thought seemed both incredible and plausible, and it's odd, when you think about it, that a thought could be both.

But then after we moved in, Elizabeth's daughter told us that Elizabeth had actually bought most of the things that were now in the house at auctions here and there, over the years. But Elizabeth's daughter was just a small child when Elizabeth first moved in. So there really wasn't any way to know if this old photograph -- or any of the other stuff -- had already been here. Though I do think that the families who lived here before, first the Perrys, then the Gouldens, and last the Demings, would have taken their things with them when they left the island. It would seem so un-Nova Scotian to just leave things behind like that. But I couldn't know, really, whether the photograph had been a part of the house for a long time, or not.

If the daguerreotype had been here, then it could have been from the Perry family. William and his father Jonathan built this house in the mid-nineteenth century, and well before that the Perrys lived in an earlier house, down below the lower apple orchard, a place that's a ruined rock foundation now. There were several Perry daughters. Could these have been two of them? And yet, the styles in the photograph are from a generation earlier. The young women I was thinking of wouldn't have worn their hair like this, not in the late nineteenth century. It seemed more likely that Elizabeth had bought the photographs in some dusty antique store somewhere. And now they were here, two young women, sisters, maybe twins, from who knew where, gazing out at me. But they could not speak, because nobody knew who they were.

During our first year here I was beginning to research the history of the house and learn about the Perry family and Nova Scotia life in general in the time when the house was built. I returned to the picture over and over. It had such a hold on me. Could it be a window into the very world I was learning about? It was a mystery I wouldn't be able to resolve. But I did write a poem.

Unrestored Daguerreotype

Two young women are identically dressed in mourning.

They seem not interested in having their picture taken

and sit looking as if they'd rather be someplace else.

Their hair is curled in complicated ringlets

likely out of style by then

in Boston and Halifax and other centres of fashion.

The someplace else could be home again --

this wild fir-tipped island,

this house where they grew up,

a Nova Scotia fisherman's daughters.

The picture sits here still, slowly dissolving into its elements.

Their caught faces float pale on the surface glass

while all dark detail of hair and dresses and eyes has slipped away

to reveal a stippled disintegrating painted black background

layered underneath.

Nebulae wink in the folds of their sleeves,

comets arc through their heads

and if you look closely into their eyes you can see all the way to

the vast swirling night sky that reels above this place forever.

outside looking in

I love this picture looking through the kitchen and into the living room. Greg took it one evening.

a burial ground in the back orchard

Myrtle Goulden Demings, who lives directly across the western channel in Carleton Village, grew up in this house and has so many interesting memories about the island. She could write a book! Her parents bought this property around 1910 and her family lived here until the 1950s. Myrtle married a young soldier who was stationed at Fort McNutt, George Gribble. After the war, George became the assistant lightkeeper at Cape Roseway, and Myrtle and George and their infant daughter Bernice lived at the lighthouse.

Myrtle told me that there are some old graves here, where we now live. Her father always told the children not to play in the southeastern corner of the back orchard, because people were buried there. But even back when Myrtle was a child, there were no obvious markings for any graves, she told me. They had been worn away long before that, I guess.

It helps to date the graves that they are inside the boundary of the stone wall. Moses Pitcher was granted this land in 1785, and when he sold it to George Ross in 1787, for nineteen pounds and eight shillings and four pence, it was sold with improvements and the buildings erected thereon. In those days anyone who was granted land was expected to make improvements within a specified amount of time, or else they could lose their grant. One of the main improvements would have been clearing stones, and one way you cleared stones was to build walls out of them. (Another way was just to throw them into piles off to the side of a field for the time being. We have some of those, too.)

It was not uncommon in the Shelburne area to bury the dead on the land where they died. Cemeteries were few and far between in those days. And people were not so squeamish about death. It was more an integrated part of life back then than it is today.

So this small burial ground -- maybe containing one or two people -- is likely to date from sometime after Moses Pitcher made improvements to his fifty acres. After George Ross bought the property in 1787 this place was called Ross's Landing. Ross may have used it as a staging and storage place for supplies that were brought onto the island, and maybe as a fish-drying place. Ross was a Shelburne merchant and one of the few who stayed in business after the town went downhill. Just before his death in 1816 he sold this property to Dorcas Thomson, the wife of his business partner.

Neither George Ross nor Dorcas Thomson would have lived on McNutt's. Their business was conducted from town. But Andrew Lightbody did live here, from the late 1780s probably until his death in 1816. An 1823 deed says that Andrew Lightbody was "in possession" of the property before Thomas and Mary Barrow owned it.

Andrew may have been a disbanded soldier of the 42nd Highland Regiment of Foot, a Scot like Ross. It may have been Andrew and his wife Mary and young daughter Margaret who settled here in 1787 or thereabouts, to oversee the Ross concerns on the island and to continue to clear and improve this property as tenant farmers.

The building of the lighthouse began in 1788, a few months after Ross bought this property. The lighthouse was completed in late 1790. Andrew could well have been the man who made sure that supplies reached the lighthouse site from Ross's Landing. He received a substantial payment of over fifteen pounds on January 7, 1790 from its builders for having taken care of the lighthouse "to this day."

Andrew died in 1816, and sometime soon afterward Thomas and Mary Barrow became the property owners. They lived here as farmers until the early 1830s when Jonathan and Martha Perry came to live and raise their brood of children.

Until I'm able to do more research I can only guess that someone from the Lightbody or Barrow households is buried in that corner of the back orchard. I'm certain there will be another chapter to this story as I find out more. But for now, I'm so grateful to Myrtle for sharing this amazing piece of knowledge, which I never could have known about otherwise.

remembering our house renovation

The September 2010 issue of The Griffin, Heritage Trust of Nova Scotia's quarterly, has the second part of my story about our house. You can read it here. You can also download the June 2010 issue, which contained the first part of the article. It's terrific to have The Griffin delivered via Internet. If you want to keep up with Nova Scotia historic preservation, you can subscribe to The Griffin and you will receive email notification when each new issue is available for downloading.

the old Hyde place

Brian Race loaned me this photograph of our house, which was taken in 1985. You can see Brian at the left of the picture. He is making and installing the wood-framed storm windows that we still use. At the right is Elizabeth Hyde, who bought the house in the early 1960s and set about restoring it. As is the way of old houses, once it was restored it needed constant maintaining. It was a never-ending process for Elizabeth, who spent summers here for decades (as well as two winters) until her death in 1993.

faces from the past

Beatrice Gribble Smith, who was born in this house, sent me some beautiful photographs of her grandparents and great-grandparents, all of whom lived on McNutt's Island. Beatrice is the daughter of Myrtle (Goulden) Gribble Demings and George Gribble. Beatrice's mother Myrtle was born in this house, too. You can read more about the Goulden family on McNutt's here.Here are Beatrice's grandparents, Bertha (Snow) Goulden and James Goulden. I think the narrow sliver of white along the left edge of the picture is the southwest corner of this house. Behind Bertha and James I think I can see the clothesline that was attached near the side door in the earlier photograph. So I'm pretty sure the picture itself was taken on McNutt's, at this house.

Here's the notation Beatrice made on the back of the photograph:
I'm writing this in exactly the same space where Beatrice was born, even though it's lost two of its walls and is now a part of the living room instead of a separate bedroom. I wonder who else was born or died in what used to be this small room, or just slept here over the years.

I'm hoping other photographs and documents will float my way and that eventually we will have patched together a picture of life on the island in the first half of the twentieth century, which already feels so long ago.

google chairs

There were eighteen wooden chairs in the house when we arrived. I couldn't imagine how we would use so many chairs. Some were beyond help, but slowly Greg has refinished most of them. He finished the last four today.
I wonder what we will do with them.

more history of our house

Heritage Trust of Nova Scotia publishes a lovely quarterly called The Griffin. Its summer issue has an article I wrote about the history of our house, which you can download as a pdf file if you like. The photos that accompany the article are not all my own. The circa 1911 photo is courtesy of Danno Goulden, and the western and south-western elevations of the house before we bought it are courtesy of Wolfgang Schricker.

sleeping beauty

Here are pictures of our house before we bought it.I think it had always been painted red with white trim.
The yard looks nicely mowed even back then, when nobody was living here. We still have the same mowing crew. We had to take down the two chimneys. They were unsafe, but they were so beautiful, and I hated losing them. We used the old brick to make a walk along the side of the house.
You can see why we fell in love with it.

A provincial heritage property, definitely

Here's the link to the page about our house that's now on the Nova Scotia Historic Places site.

I wonder what the Perrys -- who built the house and lived here for fifty years or so -- and the Gouldens -- who lived in it for the next forty years or so -- would think about all this.
Here's a picture of Bertha Snow Goulden and her son Martin. They are standing outside the kitchen, near the breezeway door. Bertha Snow Goulden was born on McNutt's Island and lived her entire life here. Her children were -- of course -- island children as well. One of her daughters still lives across the harbour from this house.
These daffodils are blooming in the spot where Bertha and Martin stood decades ago to have their picture taken. In a sense the Perrys and the Gouldens still inhabit this house. In a sense, it still belongs to them.

Thanks to Dan Goulden for sharing this family photo.

How to keep warm

It has been cold here -- way, way below freezing -- for the past couple of days. This season, which for purposes of accuracy we will not actually call Spring, swings back and forth between extremes. One day last week I was outside raking up dead ferns in a short-sleeved tee shirt. Today that wouldn't work out so well.

There are two basic ways for us to keep warm when it's this cold. There's the day-time way: plenty of logs in the wood stove that sits in the middle of the living room and heats this one room pretty nicely, as long as there's no cold wind blowing in from the west, through all the tiny cracks in the house.

Then there's the night-time way: piling on the blankets in our unheated bedroom over the living room. We use a combination of an old wool blanket that came with the house, two quilts, ditto, one on top of the other, and then, on top of everything else, a fat layer of cotton comforter we brought with us when we moved here. I think the layering itself has some effect, since with each successive layer you are trapping pockets of air that effectively create more insulation. Of course one decent goose-down comforter would do the trick. But we don't own one, and we do own this other assemblage, and it works.

The first summer we lived here, Anne Barclay Priest emailed us to say that she wanted to come and visit. She would come over in her outboard motor boat, she told us. Anne is the author of Trafficking in Sheep, her memoir of buying a summer place at Green Harbour in the early 1970s, and later buying Blue Island and becoming an owner of sheep. During that time she became a good friend of Elizabeth Hyde, who owned our place for over thirty years, and died in 1993.

Anne laid out her route for us: she would cross the mouth of Jordan Bay, then round Cape Roseway, at the southern end of McNutt's Island, enter the Western Passage, pass along The Point, and come into Hagar's Cove. It's the way she used to come when she visited Elizabeth, she told us.

On the day of our meeting we watched from the shore as Anne steered her skiff along the Western Passage and headed into the cove. She moored in the cove, untied the dinghy that trailed behind her skiff, and rowed ashore, up to the remnants of the haul-up Elizabeth had built and used long before. After she tied up, she clambered over the old haul-up and we forged our way along the over-grown path from the cove to the house. Anne was already in her eighties that summer and still a force of nature.

Before she arrived, I worried that Anne might not approve of the changes we had made. But she enjoyed the wind turbine and the solar tracker and the idea of having electricity in the old house. She admired the washing machine and the indoor plumbing and told us Elizabeth would have loved it.

In the bedroom she spied one of the quilts and burst into laughter. "These two quilts!" she said. "Elizabeth and I had quite a spat over them. I had found this wonderful quilt maker in Jordan Bay. And I had ordered two quilts for myself. Then I made the mistake of telling Elizabeth about my find. When I went to ask about the progress of my quilts several months later, the quilt maker told me that Elizabeth had already come and bought them, out from under my nose. I was mad at the quilt-maker for selling them to Elizabeth and I was mad at Elizabeth for buying them. But I got over it, and Elizabeth just thought it was funny."

I think of the three women whose stories intertwine like a design in a quilt: the quilt-maker herself, and the two friends, each with such an adventurous life. We have the quilts by the quirk of a trick, and then later by the kindness of Elizabeth's daughter who left them here for us to keep. They remind me every day of how all the various bits and pieces of our lives are somehow patched together.

And of how, the more you look at anything, the more beautiful and intricate and surprising, really, you see that it is.

On these cold nights they keep us warm.






Yesterday I had a lovely back and forth with Janet Gordon, a quilt-maker who lives in Hall's Harbour, over on the Bay of Fundy. It's cold over there, too. Janet got me thinking about these quilts we inherited. She has a blog about the quilts she makes and sells, and about life in Hall's Harbour. If you want to learn how to quilt, she has a teaching blog, too.

A provincial heritage property, maybe

In late 2008 I applied for our house to be included in the Provincial Registry of Heritage Property. It's a list cared for by the Province that indicates properties of special value to Nova Scotia.

I wasn't sure whether this house would qualify. It's not especially old by Nova Scotia standards. Its vernacular Greek Revival architecture is typical of its time and culture but I didn't think its style was exceptional. And it was the house of plain fishermen and farmers, island folk. Nobody famous ever lived here and nothing "important" ever happened here, as far as I know. So I wasn't sure if it would meet the Provincial standards.

I was hopeful, though. Historic preservation as a movement has come a long way since its own beginnings. Its focus has broadened to recognize the significance of properties that evoke the everyday life of ordinary people and a pre-industrial world we have lost.

Here's part of what I wrote: "[This house] is the last remaining of several that formed an island community throughout the nineteenth century and up until the Second World War, when most residents left the island. Besides Cape Roseway Light House, the island had a school and a post office, and various businesses such as canning. The islanders kept vegetable gardens and owned sheep whose descendants still roam the island and are themselves an important (and overlooked) part of Nova Scotia's cultural heritage."

I'm always wanting to put in a plug for the sheep while I'm at it. I also wrote about all the island's history that I knew of at the time, and added a bibliography of references to the house that have appeared in various books and articles over the years.

Then, while we were away, we received notice that the house had been recommended! A registered letter lay waiting patiently in the Shelburne post office until I could come home and sign for it. The letter says, in part, that the house is "very rare in terms of its architecture and its survival as an original residence on an offshore island. " That statement makes me curious about the other offshore islands, and whether any of the original houses are still there.

The benefit of being listed as a Provincial Heritage Property is primarily to help people realize the value of this shared heritage, which can be so easily lost. A Provincially Registered Property can't be demolished, so the designation affords a degree of future protection. There's also some financial support for specific kinds of work done on the exterior of the house. For example, I would love to eventually replace the asphalt roof singles with cedar shakes, which they would have been originally. This designation could pay for some of that expense and make it a bit more feasible to consider doing it.

So, now that I have signed for the registered letter, we're in a thirty day comment period. After that, a final decision will be made about registering the property.

To find out more about this program, take a look at The Nova Scotia Historic Places Initiative web site.

You can read about this photograph of William Perry's signature at the post entitled Autographed House. There are many other blog posts about the house, all under the label "house."

Making room

The beams in our house are held together with wooden pegs instead of nails, even though the house was built around 1858 and nails would certainly have been available. But back then people didn't like to innovate when it came to building their houses. Besides, they were fishermen, and boats were built with pegs. William Perry and his father Jonathan built this house in the traditional way, which was tried and true.
The beams are notched so that they fit neatly together, and the whole weight provides stability and support.
The house that William and Jonathan Perry built has stood the test of gale force winds for a century and a half.

The house reminds me of Peter Rankin's beautiful illustrations in Joanne Taylor's story of a nineteenth century Cape Breton house, Making Room (McClelland, 2004).

Timeless winter

Here are some pictures I took a year ago, in late January 2009. I was walking along the main road when I took this picture. The spruce topple over pretty easily when they are weighed down with heavy snow. I think the McNutt's Island road crew will have plenty to do when we get home.
This is one of the old signs along the main road to the lighthouse.
The island is all shades of grey and white this time of year, and the sharply defined darkness of bare branches, like pen and ink. Only the house stands out, a reminder of blue sky and sunlight.

West wind

A few times each winter low temperatures and westerly winds converge upon this house. Then we remember that for all its bright paint and fresh shingles the house is a leaky old thing, and that there are gaps around the doors and odd corners where a cold imp lurks, and huffs and puffs at our ankles as we walk past. We wear eccentric get-ups, including clothes more likely to be worn outdoors. I have discovered the charming wool cap an old friend knitted for our daughter twenty five years ago: it covers my ears and ties beneath my chin and I have taken to wearing it night and day.

But Greg got us a pile of good books at the library last week, just in time for this. Best of all was Sarah Water's fantastically creepy The Little Stranger (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2009). I pulled my chair close to the wood stove and covered myself with a quilt and read about down-on-their-fortunes English gentry huddled around a fireplace in their ancient dilapidated mansion.

It is the west wind that makes the difference for us between comfort and discomfort. No matter how cold it is outside, the wood stove keeps the living room perfectly warm unless that particular wind is blowing. But the west wind also sets the turbine spinning, so that adage about an ill wind that blows nobody any good comes to life. Anyway, today the wind has finally stopped, and we will go on about our business, both indoors and out.

A visit from MaManna

Neither Greg nor I is the technical type. We sometimes say how helpful it would be if one of us were. But alas.

So since we live completely off-grid, we are fortunate to have an integrated solar and wind turbine system that is reliable and low-maintenance.

But we have been worried that we didn't understand how to perform one of the essential maintenance tasks that has to do with keeping the batteries properly charged. In the meantime, the company that installed our system in summer of 2007 was folded into another Nova Scotia company called MaManna. And we worried that we might get lost in the transition and be stranded on an island with nobody we could call if things broke down.

So today Sandy Hines and Steve Arseneault from MaManna came by for a visit. They looked at the solar tracker and the wind turbine and the batteries and the generator, and then Sandy walked us through the maintenance tasks for the batteries. Basically he translated the battery maintenance manual into non-technical English for me while I took notes, in English. When we finished he told me to re-read the manual to reinforce what we had gone over. Now that Sandy has explained it to me, I believe I can correctly equalize the batteries all by myself like a big girl.

Here is the bank of switches and monitors that is the brains of our off-grid system. In order to live this so-called simple life I am on far more intimate terms with specific gravity, a crucial but not simple reality, than I would ever have imagined being. Actually I probably never thought once about the phrase "specific gravity" before coming here. And Greg now knows lots more about propane tanks and generators than he used to. Not to mention how to stare down this panel when necessary.

The visit from Sandy and Steve and tutorial from Sandy gave us the confidence boost we needed. I find the batteries quite intimidating, but the more I work with them the less fearful I become. Isn't that always the way, and not just with batteries.

A peaceful autumn evening

The last remaining fisherman's house on the island, seen from the back orchard, a little after sunset this evening.

What lies beneath

The old houses on McNutt's were built with stone cellars and stone foundations. You can see the remains of these cellars and foundations at several places on the island. The oldest cellar on the island may be the McNutt house cellar, which was built before 1765. The cellar of our house is below the kitchen. Jonathan Perry and his son William built this house in the late 1850s.
The steps into the cellar were made by splitting huge rocks into rectangles using a technique called plug and feather. Which I will describe later, after I have learned more about it. You can find these dressed stones -- no longer used --lying around on the island.
The stones for the cellar walls were carefully selected and carefully placed.
The cellar walls are a little higher than six feet.
In the cool dim underground light, I lay my hands on the wall and feel its past: how father and son dug the cellar, chose all these stones from around the property, hauled them to this place with an ox, and laid them in the sequence that stands today.

Days of grace

Nova Scotians would have a few days of grace before the hurricane's arrival, a weather forecaster said earlier this week.

One night Greg made a list of everything we needed to do before the storm. He has been crossing items off the list since then. This morning he went into town, while the harbour is still calm. When he comes home we will intensify our preparations to secure everything.

But some things can't be secured. There's the oak tree just in front of the house. Myrtle Goulden, who was born in this house and grew up here, told us that her brother Burns planted that tree as a gift to his mother. Bertha had wanted an oak tree. He may have planted an acorn, or maybe a sapling. Myrtle wasn't sure which. Burns was born in this house in 1914 and Myrtle said he planted the tree when he was about twelve. So it's around eighty years old now. It's the only oak tree on McNutt's.

The tree is very close to the house. Over the years it has been pruned so that its branches do not actually hang above the roof. But still, it is very close. In summer it harbours the birds and gives us shade. In autumn it protects us from the westerly winds. In winter its bare branches give us beauty. It is home to lichen and mosses. And this time of year it is full of leaves and wind resistance. It could blow over in the coming storm.

These days of grace have given us time to prepare. But they also give us a chance to touch the oak tree's branches, to admire the curve of its wide embrace. For all that we can't make secure, we can somehow tell our gratitude now, just in case.

Goulden House on McNutt's Island, circa 1911

It is a summer day almost a century ago. Someone is standing in the side yard with a camera. He, or she, steps back to show the entire house in the frame, not completely successfully. This is our house now, and for the first time I am looking at it as it once was long ago.

A woman stands in the doorway. A man stands next to her, outside. He's reading the newspaper. There is a clothesline strung from the breezeway out into the yard, and a bit of laundry drying there. Maybe this is a Sunday, since the man is dressed in a well-ironed shirt and trousers.

To the right of the doorway is the dairy-keeping room and the woodshed. This is a household economy that creates what it consumes: fells trees and splits logs for heat, milks its cow and churns its butter, preserves its vegetables and fruit and fish, hunts or raises and slaughters meat.

Between the camera and its subjects there is a tall flowering hedge, maybe of roses. It's a practical way to define the space of the house, but it's also a thing of beauty. There is more than necessity in this world.

The woman and the man are likely Bertha Snow Goulden and her husband James Andrew Goulden. They married in 1906, across the harbour in Gunning Cove. She was seventeen on her wedding day, and her fisherman husband was thirty eight -- more than twice her age.

Bertha had grown up on McNutt's Island. When the census taker came around to the island in 1901 it was duly noted that Bertha was then eleven years old, the oldest of five children, and that she lived with her parents Arthur and Melinda Snow and her brothers and sisters. Her father was a fisherman, too, like nearly every man she knew.

James and Bertha bought the house in 1911 from its builder and first owner, old man William Perry. Bertha knew this house well, from her childhood. It was a part of her deeply familiar world. And she would live here, and go in and out of this door, until the last two days of her life. She died in July 1952, not at home on the island, but at Roseway Hospital across the harbour in Sandy Point.

If the picture was taken soon after the Gouldens moved into the house, then it captures Bertha in her early twenties and James in his early forties. By the time they moved across the harbour to the island she and James already had three young children. She will bear seven others in this house, and she and James will raise all of them here.

It is a photograph of an ordinary moment in an ordinary day. "I've brought my camera," the photographer announces. "Come out so I can take your picture." James doesn't mind; he seems to enjoy it, and even poses a bit. Bertha is shyer, or maybe just in the middle of doing something else. She won't come outside, but stands and looks into the summer light.

Many thanks to Dan Goulden for his kind permission to use this family photograph. Vital statistics and census records are available at NSARM.