A longtime resident of Uxbridge, Ted Barris has written professionally for 40 years - for radio, television, magazines and newspapers. The "Barris Beat" column began in the 1950s when his father Alex wrote for the Globe and Mail. Ted continues the tradition of offering a positive view of his community. He has written 16 non-fiction books of Canadian history and teaches journalism at Centennial College in Toronto.
When walls come tumbing down
I'd been planning the demolition of my garage for a long time. Built sometime in the middle of the last century, my fast disintegrating, single-car enclosure - I had come to realize - had outlived its usefulness and had to go. So, over the weekend, I hired a friend and his future son-in-law to help me bring the old building down. But what the destruction of my old garage revealed as it came down was a great deal more than I expected. For example, as we three demolition types took a break last Saturday afternoon, I asked my longtime next-door neighbour, Ronnie Egan, when she thought the garage had been built.
“Well, it seems to me it was about the time Mrs. Ferguson passed on,” she said. “In fact, it was about 1950 I remember I laid her out.”
What she meant, of course, was that she had indeed been with the aforementioned Mrs. Ferguson when she died and had probably assisted one of the local doctors or a mortician as they then arrived to take care of the body. At any rate, with all due respect to Mrs. Ferguson, it was during her residency in the house we've owned since 1988, that my garage was built. But that got my curiosity up. And a little while later - as we caved the garage roof in on itself - I pursued my neighbour for the details about some of the other former residents of my home.
Of course, as far as the town is concerned it's not my home. It's always been a bit of mystery to me that it doesn't matter how many years you've lived in a house, but it's not until you leave it or die that it takes on your name. So, I quickly determined that for a time my house had been known as the Ferguson place. But there was more, according to Ronnie.
“I remember Mabel and Fred Wilton,” she said. “They had lived there after the [Second World] War.” She went on to reveal that Mr. Wilton had also died suddenly in the house and that soon after that, the house had been passed to Ronnie Egan's son. There followed a whole succession of residents in the Wilton/Ferguson place. At another time in its history, my house, which had not enjoyed the benefits of a basement (when it was originally built in the 1920s), had one excavated and poured by another of its owners, likely in the 1970s.
What was remarkable about my neighbour Ronnie Egan's recollections of our house and its garage was that all of the owners had a special habit or characteristic or anecdote attached to their occupancy. There was one who'd rented it for a time. There was another who'd been involved in a motion picture. Another, Ronnie recalled, had come from Newfoundland and he always had boats stored in the garage or around the property.
“Verna Jones owned the place for a time,” she said. “I remember she used to line up apples on the roof of the porch to dry.”
What I had never before realized was that my house and its garage had had extraordinary lives well before my wife, our two daughters and I came on the scene. I guess it was a case of my believing that my house could only have history for as long as I had lived in it. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. All Saturday afternoon the histories of all my house's and garage's previous owners bounced around my head, just long enough for the demolition team to complete the job on the old garage. Among the last bits of debris I tossed into the dumpster from the garage was some neatly trimmed pine boards.
“Charles Shanks extended the living room on the place, you know,” Ronnie Egan also told me. And that I knew. I remembered it was Shanks and his wife - water-colour painter Jennifer Lawson - from whom we had purchased the house and the garage in 1988. It seemed as if it had been a lifetime ago. Of course it wasn't, because there are still people around town who know our house as the Lawson-Shanks residence.
By day's end on Saturday, the last of that original garage, probably built in the 1950s, had been brought down, cut into pieces and tossed into a waiting dumpster. I felt a little sad that we had eliminated half-a-century of history. But at least I had made a dent in the consciousness of my neighbours.
“Oh yeah,” I can hear them say. “There was an old garage there once … the one that Barris knocked down somewhere around 2010.”
