The William and Martha Casey House
One of the oldest surviving Loyalist homes was saved from the wrecking ball in 2001 by a team of dedicated volunteers and was jointly headed by the Lennox and Addington Historical Society and the UEL Heritage Centre. Sitting on a point of land jutting out into the Bay of Quinte was a decrepit log building with timber-framed sections that stood shoulder to shoulder with large and expensive brick structures not a year old. On Peachy’s map of 1784 Lot 26 concession 3 was owned by one of the Roblin Brothers, however by 1786 the property had been purchased by William Casey. The picture shows the house in the 1920s. The portion of the house to the left is an addition that dates to 1840s.
The house was dismantled quickly and loaded onto a truck and taken away. For 5 years is sat in a field in Prince Edward County awaiting funding to be put back up somewhere it could be protected. The UEL Heritage Centre took full ownership and began to work on a plan for the future. An ambition plan was drawn up with a estimated cost of $200,000. In a short few months $70,000 was raised and the logs were collected from the PEC field and brought to the museum where they could be stored indoors.
The site of the proposed erection site was cleared in November of 2007 by a team of Archaeologists. We selected a site a short distance away from the historic burial grounds in a small clearing on a hill overlooking the water, not unlike its original location. Currently the UEL Museum is seeking more funding to add to its $70,000. Originally we had hoped to re-erect the building as it would have looked however on inspection too much of the original building had been lost or was a later addition. In the interest of historical accuracy we now plan to erect the building as 100% original. But how do we do that when only 50% of the building survives? Simple, we erect it within its own display case. With that aim in mind we changed our plans and started to design a space in which to erect the building to protect it from the elements and better show off the original character.
We approached Tom Gunsinger of Bel-Con Engineering in Belleville, a company which designs and builds steel frame structures and together we came up with a large bare space that incorporated as much glass as we could afford and a raised catwalk on which visitors could look in through the upper storey windows and view the roof structure. The new plan actually reduces the overall cost of the project as fewer measures would be needed to protect the house were it sitting out in the weather. It also means we do not have to guess at things like paint colours, shingle styles and grounds keeping. In the summer of 2009 Lake Ontario Park in Kingston announced it would be removing all the structures on its campground to make way for future development. We approached the city with an offer to reuse the 1950s steel frame pavilion, which just so happens to be just the proportions we had in mind. Check back to see what the outcome of our proposal will be.
Last summer a woman visiting the museum approached me and said she had a deed in her family that we may be interested in. She said it was an original land grant from the 18th century, but could tell me little more. I suggested that we would most certainly be interested. She said she would call me and walked off. I waited a year for that call.
We have numerous documents dating to the 18th century here at the museum. We have indentures and letters of support for petitioners and receipts for sale of American lands during the Troubles, but we did not have a deed granting free crown land to a loyalist settler of Adolphustown. There are quite a few around; we just have never been offered one.
Finally, a year later, that call reached me, in the form of a handwritten phone message. Someone had called with a deed to donate; they left a name and a number. The family name was Box. Unfortunately, the Box family are not loyalists but I called them anyway and set up a time to see it.
The deed was tossed to me across a kitchen table. It was tightly curled, badly frayed, but otherwise intact with no missing sections, thanks to the fact that someone many generations ago had thought to attach the fragile paper to a reused piece of old cotton sheeting.
On the outside of the document the name Christopher Paterson was legible. “So, this is not your family's?” My hopes rose; the Paterson/Peterson landed at and settled in Adolphustown.
“No, the Box's bought the land off this fellow,” he said prodding the package.
He showed me where the old Box farm was on the 1878 map I had brought with me. There was an E. Box on the map - but not where he thought it should have been. We pried the document open a little more and found mention of the eighth concession. There was no 8th concession in Adolphustown. Something was wrong, either I had a later document or this was not even in our region.
After some paperwork, the deed changed ownership and I brought it back to the museum to get a closer look. The first step would be to uncurl the document without destroying it. Over a period of days I laid small sections of the document out under glass, unfolding corners and aligning tears. Last Saturday, during a slow day, I had the entire deed under a single sheet of glass.
...lot number five in the second concession additional...1794...town of Fredericksburg
And there on the 1878 map, E. Box. We had simply opened the deed to the wrong spot, the mention of 8th concession was an additional grant of land in nearby Camden township.
Christopher Peterson [Paterson on the deed] was born on December 23rd 1764 in Schraalenburgh, New Jersey. His parents, Nicholas and Annatje Demarest were both born in Tappan, New Jersey. Christopher, along with two older brothers and his father, were among the defenders at the Block House of Bergen Woods in the summer of 1781. He married while at the temporary settlement of New York in 1782 and there signed up with Peter Ruttan's Company Six of the Associated Loyalists and eventually landed in Adolphustown under Peter Van Alstine where he appears on the October 5th, 1784 muster.
Christopher did not survive into old age; he died in 1827 at the age of 63. The records at the UEL Archives in Adolphustown do not, unfortunately, include land transactions for Fredericksburg and we do not know who purchased Lot 5 after Christopher's death (and finding out would have involved getting in the car and a trip to a neighbouring research library, a trip I shall save for later).
By 1861 Frederick Box was living on the property. Born the same year that Christopher died, Frederick came to Canada from England and seems to have done well for himself. By the age of 34 he was living in a one and a half storey stone house with a live-in servant couple. Frederick was not a loyalist but his wife, Elizabeth Eve, was. She also happened to be the younger sister of one, David Wright Allison, the Loyalist descendant and builder of the house in which the UEL Museum is now housed – actually, as I write this I am sitting in D.W.'s bedroom (now the research library). The property was in the Box family until a generation ago when it passed into the Hare family.
As I was shuffling old maps across my desk and flipping through census returns, an older couple wandered into the library. They were not looking to do research; they said they just liked old houses and were poking around. We talked. They mentioned they once lived in an old house and had found many interesting things in the walls, including a perfectly preserved pair of ladies boots. I asked where this house was. They mentioned it was up near one of the side roads off county road 8 by Hay Bay Genetics. I asked him to show me on the map I had in front of me and his put his finger down on Lot 5 Con 2!
In my office they looked at the deed, all the while the husband repeating, “I grew up in that house!” The house that his mother still lives in is a 2 storey wood fame that looks to be from the late 19th century and is not the one in which Frederick Box lived in 1861. But Mr. Hare told me about an old stone foundation behind the house where he used to play as kids. Nothing is known about the house other than it was made of stone. But he remembers that every spring the plow would always turn up little treasures any time it came close to the old foundation. It was later bulldozed and buried, now under a field of feeder corn. “But everything is still in there, we never dug it out” Mr. Hare tells me.
What are the chances that the stone house whose foundation was a playground for the Hare children began its life as the new home of a young Frederick Box, or maybe even the second home of Christopher Peterson, after the original log structure had begun to sink into the ground? Old Mrs. Hare is not one to have strangers poking around so I would not be welcome if I showed up one morning with a shovel, but her son, who seemed as keen as I am, mentioned that anytime his mother is to be away, he'll give me a call, “We can go back there and poke around”
I'll be waiting for that call.
In our files we have a note about a water jug we know little about. The note reads, "possibly pewter or aluminum". Many 19th-century metalwares were produced cheaply and sold unmarked, so there are no markings to guide us. We have many such “mystery” pieces in the museum; unmarked and of unknown origin but potential gems everyone.
To help the UEL Museum sort out its collection of “white metal” artifacts, we approached Prof. Herbert Shurvell, a chemist with the Art Conservation Program at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. Last Friday afternoon was hot and humid when Gus lugged his large black case up the steps of the museum in Adolphustown. Inside the case was the University's recently purchased X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF) device. Gus just happens to be one of two people licensed to use it. With XRF technology we can very quickly analyze the elemental composition of artifacts. Point the device at a pewter water jug, press a button like you're taking a picture with a camera. And voila! Pewter is no longer just pewter; it is a mixture of other metals; maybe 85% tin and 5% lead, or 95% tin and 1% copper.
These details about what artifacts are made of is vital to understanding the culture that produced and used them. Understanding the details of the culture that produced and used artifacts also helps to identify where a piece of history comes from. For example, pewter made in England from the 15th century onwards was strictly controlled. It was divided into three grades all based on the content of tin and the presence of certain metals like copper and lead, with the highest quality having the most tin content. Gus's XRF gun will instantly tell us how much tin, copper and lead is in any artifact we want.
The two objects at the UEL museum that we were most interested in were a large platter and that water jug. They are both gray and dull to look at, but the water jug is much lighter in weight and colour. It does not have the weight of pewter, but its style and condition suggested it might be quite old.
Gus pointed the XRF gun at the jug, and within seconds we knew it was not pewter, but aluminum. Aluminum has not been in common usage for very long. Conclusion: the jug could be no older than 1890. The platter, on the other hand, turned out to be 95% tin, 1% copper, and the rest lead; an ideal recipe in the 18th century for a fine quality pewter. We still don't know the exact date yet, but a platter made after 1800 would more likely be stamped from sheet material, and ours looks to have been cast in a mold.
It is quite possible this rumoured Loyalist artifact may prove to be the real thing. Now all we need to do is find some spare time to do the extra research to find out for sure...