Whitehern House, Hamilton

June 10, 2013November 11, 2014Leave a comment

I’ll take any chance I can get for trips outside the city. Since leaving Montreal and giving up my car, it isn’t as easy to run away on a whim for the day. This week though, Kira left me her car while she flew off to visit her fiance for ten days in Chicago, and I took full advantage of it. On Saturday, Alex and I drove out to Hamilton to do some thrifting for the shop (we’re really excited about our next few shop updates!), and while we were there we took the opportunity to check out Whitehern and take some pictures. There’s a place in Dundas (allegedly haunted) that we were hoping to get to, but the weather was spotty, and we were on a schedule, so we stayed close – maybe next time.

Whitehern was home to the McQuesten family, a fairly influential Victorian family in terms of industrial development in the area. There’s a great family history here, with links to all the children and what they did with their lives, as well as some pretty amazing bits of letters between the family members. My favourites are the ones from the Mother, who sounds like she was pretty sassy. The house itself is open for viewing, and from what I read, it still contains a lot of their original belongings. As usual, I went on a day when it was closed, so we weren’t able to get inside to visit, but it looks like it might be worth a tour.

Outfit Details

On Alex

Yellow blouse: Larkspur Shoppe Summer Collection

Floral Skirt, Brown belt, Shoes & Purse: Thrifted

Bowtie: Handmade

Socks: Urban Outfitters

On Meaghan

Shorts & Blouse: American Apparel

Tights: Target

Shoes: Bass

Belt & Sunglasses: Thrifted

Posted by Meaghan

Ellis Wiley

March 4, 2013March 4, 2013Leave a comment

I stumbled across the above Ellis Wiley photo when I was reading this post about cycling in 1970’s Toronto on The Torontoist blog (I can’t wait for it to be warmer out, so I can start riding my bike around again!). A quick google search later, I was browsing a whole library of his photos on the Toronto History Flickr page. Despite how much I miss Montreal, I’ve grown to love this city – and Wiley’s photos somehow make me love it even more.

All sources say he was a Toronto born accountant, who took up photography as a hobby and wound up taking some great photos of some of this city’s most iconic buildings as they were being constructed. He used Kodachrome and Ektachrome film, the latter of which has a tendency to fade quickly. Luckily, the Toronto City Archives scanned and digitized his collection, so that I could make a silly little blogpost about him today!

Posted by Meaghan

The Scadding Cabin

December 3, 2012November 11, 20144 Comments

Last Saturday, Alex and I went for a walk, determined to take some blog photos despite the cold. We walked over to The Scadding Cabin which is just down by Lake Ontario, at the bottom of our street, and the light was so perfect, we decided it would be fun to take film photos instead of digital ones. Neither of us know a thing about photography, so we just kind of let the scenery and the sunset do all the work, and we are pretty happy with how they turned out…. It made us both want to learn a thing or two about film cameras, though, so that we can take even nicer ones in the future. These are our favorites from the roll of film we finished.

The Scadding Cabin, as far as I can tell, doesn’t have a very exciting, or scandalous history (except, maybe for the fact that John Scadding was killed by a falling tree), but it is the oldest building in Toronto!

The cabin was build in 1794, by John Scadding, who managed Colonel John Graves Simcoe’s estate back in England. John Scadding followed his employer to Canada in 1792 and built himself a tiny little one bedroom log cabin which burnt down, so he built himself another one, which is this one here. The cabin was moved from the east bank of the Don River, where it was originally built, to the Exhibition grounds, by the York Pioneers and Historical Society as a historical exhibit for the first Industrial Exhibition.

Apparently they open the cabin up for visits every year at the Canadian National Exhibition, which Alex and I actually went to this Summer, but we must have been too distracted by tilt-a-whirls and broken down fun houses to notice. Maybe next year we’ll take a peek inside.