Michael Robert Bussière photographed these and other old stone buildings across Ontario.
With a camera and a book of maps, a retired professor travelled Ontario to documents the province’s oldest stone buildings, several of which are in Niagara.You may not know by looking at it, but Ontario's oldest building is a stone house in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont. It stands on a street corner in a residential area, a rectangular building with lightly coloured stones, 1.5 storeys, and three uniform windows framed by three chimneys.
He got out his camera and a guide of Ontario driving routes, and started driving to every old stone building he could find. "Ontario is terrific for road trips," Bussière said. Bussière visited structures from Niagara to Glengarry County, he said, some multiple times, so he could photograph them in different seasons and lighting conditions.Defiant Builders: The Story of How Loyalists Constructed a New Society from StoneThree of the oldest pre-date the War of 1812, during which many of the structures in southern Ontario were destroyed, Bussière said. All three are in Niagara.
Its location is significant too. The Brown Homestead website says it is located along the "Mohawk Trail," an Indigenous trade route which ran along the top of the escarpment from the Niagara River to Hamilton's Ancaster area and beyond.A third significant stone building Bussière wrote about is Nelles Manor in Grimsby. Now a museum, the large, two-and-a-half-storey house took 10 years to build and was completed in 1798.
Over generations, Marshall said, "people live in those houses and leave the imprint of their lives," he said. And in Canada, he said, there are too few places where one can visit places that have been lived in as long as the Brown, Secord or Nelles properties.Early Indigenous people hunted mammoth in Hamilton area, 'unprecedented' study suggests
"You can map the development of the province according to these buildings, and you can find threads that connect them all together."
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