Attic renovations lead to historical discoveries in Ashton home
Regardless of which of the three ‘F’ roads you take (Fernbank, Flewellyn or Fallowfield), a drive from Stittsville to Ashton will provide you with a rich view of local history. The drive will include many farmhouses, barns and fields, both planted and fallow, a testament to the deep farming roots of the area.
The village of Ashton exudes history at every turn, including local churches, an historic pub, and original homesteads. Built in the late 1800s and jokingly referred to as one of the newer, ‘infill’ houses of downtown Ashton, there is a particularly beautiful home in the heart of the village that welcomed a new family of owners in the summer of 2018. Owners Seth Hamilton and Tanis Cappello have recently begun attic renovations that have led to remarkable discoveries. Many of the finds have ties to local families whose names you may recognize, as they grace some of our local roads, parks and community centres.
Tanis and Seth’s house was originally built in 1890 by Thomas Fleming, for his bride Elizabeth Stewart. The house next door was built by Elizabeth’s Dad, Neil Stewart, in 1845. When Elizabeth married Thomas, she only needed to move next door to take over the role of mistress of her new home. An original photo of the house can be found in the archives at the Stittsville Branch of the Ottawa Public Library, labelled ‘Fleming House- approx. 1890’.
The land that Tanis and Seth’s house is built on definitely used to include an additional 3.5 acres, and possibly many more than this. The Ormrod family bought the majority of the land from Thomas Fleming in the early 20th century, and three generations of Ormrods have lived in the house built since.
Seth and Tanis’ house is full of fascinating original details. The second floor boasts original pine flooring, which to be honest, has seen better days, but is a remarkable addition to the house nonetheless. If you look closely, there are signs of how the layout has changed over the years. For example, it is apparent that the closets were added after the original build, as there are beautiful original door plinths with bullseye rosettes that disappear a few inches into walls to accommodate the closet add-ins. Notably, there is a strange tiny square-shaped window in their son’s bedroom, at floor level, as well as a large square patch of non-matching wood in the floor, both of which indicate that a stairway existed at some point, long before the space became a bedroom. There are original plaster ceiling medallions, featuring pineapples, which would have been incredibly exotic in 1890, and used as a status symbol to demonstrate wealth and sophistication, even though most (including the original owners of the house) likely never saw a real pineapple in their lifetime.
Every single doorway in the house is transomed, and there are a few decorative vents left in the bulkheads. The house has never had a wood burning heat source (for example, a firesplace), other than a woodstove for kitchen cooking; rather, it had two coal burning furnaces in the crawlspace basement, and used duct work and the transoms to move heat around the house. This system would have been incredibly high tech for the time period. There is a metal bracket on the baseboard on the stairwell that leads to the basement, which Tanis and Seth were told would have housed levers in the brackets, used to open and shut flues to change the flow of hot air to different parts of the house.
As noted, the couple have begun to work on their attic. They wanted to remove all of the musty insulation and upgrade to spray foam. The original floorboards for the attic were still in place, although unfixed and therefore easily lifted. The family quickly discovered that the space under the attic floor had been used to hide a century’s worth of garbage. The space was stuffed with mostly broken shingles and debris: in fact, 2900 lbs of this treasure was removed in total. Amongst the garbage Seth and Tanis found a few real treasures, some of which seemed to have fallen into the under-floor space, while others had obviously been carefully hidden.
Details of special finds to date are as follows — An Orangist Handbook dated 1912, owned by Joseph Ormrod. The old Orange Lodge is now a residence, and can still be seen on Ashton Station road, past the original Highway 7. Also found were an old Christmas card sent by a Mary Watson, a delicate beaded leather baby bootie, the wings from a toy tin plane, a toy tea cup (the saucer got lost into the industrial vacuum sucking the insulation), some metal broaches and dresser handles, a leather scrap, a green glass saucer (or possibly the bottom of an old, thick glass bottle), and a key from a child’s violin. The family also found a wheel from an old chair, and an item in the far right of the second picture which they are unable to identify.
Source: https://bit.ly/2BiMAbs
