A Heritage Gem

THE OLD HOUSE STANDS proudly at the end of a gravel driveway overlooking the Raisin River in the picturesque eastern Ontario village of Williamstown. Dating back to 1784, it is one of the oldest structures in the province, and in every room there are signs of age. The wide floorboards are creaky and uneven. The doors, which hang from ornate iron hinges, squeak when opened. And the windows are unable to keep out the draft. This, a plaque on the front lawn tells us, is the Bethune-Thompson House.

The house is named after two important former residents: the Reverend John Bethune, who introduced Presbyterianism to Upper Canada, and David Thompson, the celebrated fur trader and map-maker who helped survey the Canada-U.S. border. Both lived here with their families in the days before Confederation.

The Bethune-Thompson House is one of 49 buildings owned by the Ontario Heritage Foundation, but one of only two rented to a family for use as a private home. The current residents, formerly from Montreal, are David and Delande Anderson and their two children, Winston and Nara. One of the conditions of their lease is that they allow members of the public to tour the house; each year, the family welcomes about 800 visitors. "It is really one of the great experiments in heritage management," says David Anderson of the arrangement.

The Ontario Heritage Foundation could not justify the cost of simply opening the house to the public – it felt there would not be enough visitors to cover expenses. Opening it as a museum was not a possibility because Williamstown already had the Nor'Westers and Loyalist Museum, explains Denis Héroux, a project coordinator with the foundation. And so the current arrangement was struck. "The Bethune-Thompson House is of very significant and great architectural and historical value," says Héroux. "And this partnership means that it is open to the public, at least on a limited basis. It is a great arrangement."

But David Anderson does more than make it possible for the public to view this heritage gem. A genial host and keen student of history, he brings the past to life. "David has become fascinated with Thompson and Bethune," says John Warkentin, a retired professor of historical geography from Toronto's York University. "He's compiled a significant collection of archival material and knowledge, which he shares with visitors."

THE BETHUNE-THOMPSON HOUSE is not a grand building. A symmetrical structure with a white plaster exterior, it has a large central section with a flared roof in a French-Canadian style and a full-length veranda. On either end is a small wing. The southern wing is actually the original section of the building, a log cabin constructed in 1784 by Peter Ferguson (Ferguson had been a private and "Indian scout" with the King's Royal Regiment of New York during the American Revolution.) The northern wing, which has a gambrel roof and enclosed veranda, was built in 1913, replacing the original north wing, which was damaged by fire. The central part of the house contains most of the living space. According to Anderson, a diligent researcher, it was constructed for Bethune in 1805. The cost, 348 pounds, was covered by Alexander McLeod, a retired partner of the Montreal-based North West Company and friend of Bethune's.

Although a work of many hands and different eras, the facade of the Bethune-Thompson House nevertheless possesses a pleasing harmony. The front door is centrally located with a pediment, or low triangular gable, overhead and two large windows on either side. To the right of the entrance hall is the parlour; to the left, a cherrywood staircase leads up to the bedrooms. Beside the staircase, on the ground floor, is a cozy study that looks out over the Raisin River, and at the back of the house is a large room that served as a formal dining room for both the Bethunes and the Thompsons. As one listens to David Anderson talk about life in the house during the 1800s, it is easy to imagine the families dining in the room, the parents at the ends of the table with their many children on either side. (The Bethunes had nine children of their own and cared for the Métis daughter of John's friend Alexander McLeod, while the Thompsons had 13 children, although only 10 survived into adulthood.) Next to the dining room is the morning room, where Bethune and Thompson may often have worked during the early part of the day, taking advantage of the morning sunlight.

Cooking for the large Bethune and Thompson families was done in the original section of the house, which has a substantial stone hearth that occupies nearly an entire wall. To the right of the hearth, a steep, narrow staircase leads up to a cramped attic.

Over the years, the log walls of this wing were plastered over, but much of the plaster has now been removed, revealing two interesting facts about the early structure. The log cabin was built using a French-Canadian technique called poteau sur socle, or post on sill, which was rarely employed in Upper Canada. And the walls were formed by posts (squared logs placed vertically) secured by horizontal logs. The interior surfaces of the posts were hacked from top to bottom with an axe in order to create a rough facade to which plaster would adhere. "The builder," says Anderson, "was undoubtedly French Canadian."

The main brick section of the house reflects both the Georgian era in which it was built and the social status of Bethune. The record of Bethune's life is sketchy, Anderson explains, but it is known that he was a university-educated native of Scotland who immigrated to North Carolina with his mother and brother in 1773 at the age of 22. He joined the Royal Highland Emigrants as a chaplain in 1775 and during the American War of Independence was captured and imprisoned in Philadelphia. In 1778, following his release, he moved to Halifax and then, in 1779, to Montreal. Three years later, he married Véronique Waddens, the daughter of a fur trader, and the couple moved west, settling in what was soon to become Upper Canada. Here, Bethune ministered to the Gaelic-speaking Scottish Loyalist settlements being carved out of the ancient forests. In 1787, the couple settled in Williamstown, where Bethune formed the first Presbyterian congregation in the new province and oversaw the construction of a log church. As well, he started congregations in the nearby villages of Lancaster, Martintown and Cornwall.

Little is known of Bethune's domestic and personal life in Williamstown, but Anderson's research has shown that he kept a substantial library in his home. He likely wrote his sermons in the study and morning room and entertained guests in the parlour. He also taught school at the log church and in the early days had to travel by canoe up and down the Raisin River to visit his congregations in Lancaster and Martintown be-cause roads through the thick forests had not yet been constructed.

The parishioners clearly appreciated his efforts, says Anderson. They paid him an annual salary of 200 pounds, an enormous sum in those days, when a typical farmer in the area earned about 25 pounds a year, a skilled craftsman 50 and a surgeon 100. "It tells you how central the minister was to people's lives," Anderson notes. "He was the source of culture, literary education and guidance regarding moral upbringing. He worked extremely hard and was always on the road baptizing children, marrying young people or burying the dead."

John Bethune died on September 23, 1815, at age 64, and two weeks later his widow sold the house and approximately 40 hectares of surrounding farmland to David Thompson, a retired partner of the North West Company. Thompson had spent 28 years in the fur trade, the first 13 with the Hudson's Bay Company and the balance with its competitor, the North West Company. After leaving the trade in 1812, he and his Métis wife, Charlotte, and their family lived in Terrebonne, Que., 25 kilometres northwest of the old section of Montreal, where Thompson devoted himself to several projects, the most notable of which was mapping the huge chunk of the North American continent that would one day become Western Canada. He drew his maps by hand, basing them on the hundreds of celestial observations he had made during his travels, which took him from Hudson Bay to Lake Superior to the Pacific Ocean, and from the upper Missouri River almost to the 60th parallel.

Thompson moved to Williamstown and accept-ed a position as an astronomer and surveyor with the British-American joint commission established after the War of 1812 to establish the boundary between Canada and the United States from the St. Lawrence River island of St. Regis to Lake of the Woods, near what is now the Ontario-Manitoba border. For 10 years, starting in the spring of 1817, Thompson spent his summers in the field, conducting surveys. During the winter, he worked in his home, drawing the maps that the British and American commissioners would use to delineate their respective territories.

The Thompsons had five surviving children when they arrived in Williamstown; Charlotte gave birth to a further six in the house. The first of these, Elizabeth, was born April 25, 1817, at 8:00 p.m., according to the record inscribed in Thompson's handwriting in a family Bible, which is now in the Ontario Archives. The last, Eliza, arrived March 4, 1829, and was baptized a little more than a month later on April 12. During those years, Thompson invested the substantial savings he had accumulated in the fur trade in land, residential property and commercial enterprises in Williamstown and the surrounding county of Glengarry. Eventually, he operated a general store, a tavern and potash production facilities, and leased out land and buildings.

Since the early 1990s, when he moved to the Bethune-Thompson House, David Anderson has welcomed thousands of visitors to the historic property. Many of them have come from Ottawa and Montreal, both about an hour's drive away. But others have arrived from farther afield. A single page from the guest book, which rests on a table in the parlour, shows that in August 2001, for example, there were visitors from Bombay, Glasgow, Belfast and Wellington, N.Z. "The reaction, especially among those from Ottawa and Montreal, is invariably one of astonishment," says Anderson. "They always want to know why this place isn't better known."

Location has a lot to do with it. Williamstown, a village of about 400 people, is tucked away amid the quiet, gently rolling farmland of eastern Ontario, 20 kilometres northeast of Cornwall and less than 10 from Highway 401. There is a sign just outside the community welcoming visitors to historic Williamstown, but there is nothing on the busy freeway to alert motorists or to encourage them to stop. Most visitors have a reason for coming, says Anderson, who was once a technical consultant for a multinational drug company but now earns his living by selling books over the Internet from the study where David Thompson drew his maps. Some visitors are descendants of the area's Highland settlers and want to connect with their roots. Others belong to historical societies, through which they hear about the house. Very few visitors just happen to be driving through Williamstown and stop to see the house. "We virtually never have visits from triflers," Anderson says. "Those that do come invariably have some knowledge of the place."

I FIRST VISITED Williamstown and the Bethune-Thompson House in 2001, while writing a biography of David Thompson. Never having heard of Williamstown before, I had to consult a map to find my way there from Highway 401 down narrow country roads with plenty of bends and turns. On arriving at the quiet, beautifully preserved community, I felt a century or so removed from the frantic pace of the expressway.

The village straddles the Raisin River, which once powered the sawmill and gristmill that served as anchors for the settlement. There are no traffic lights in Williamstown, just one four-way stop at the principal intersection. A small grocery store stands on one corner, and kitty-corner to it is a pre-Second World War service station, which is well maintained even though no longer in use. The Nor'Westers and Loyalist Museum is located a little west of the intersection in a two-storey, 19th-century building that was once a school.

Anderson, a man of medium height with tousled black hair, gold-rimmed glasses and an easy laugh, greets guests at the front door and likes to take visitors on a tour of the village as well as the house. "When people call to arrange a visit, I tell them to get here in the morning," he says. "They come thinking they'll spend an hour. Little do they realize they're here for the day." Anderson enlivens his tours with historical nuggets uncovered by his painstaking research. He has scoured the records of the Williamstown Fair, one of the oldest agricultural shows in Canada, for example, and found that for several years, Thompson was raising prizewinning hogs. And at the McCord Museum in Montreal, he found a paper Thompson wrote in 1829 for the Montreal Natural History Society demonstrating that clearing land led to an increase in temperature at ground level. (Thompson's conclusions were based on research he conducted that involved burying thermometers in forests and meadows on his property and recording the temperatures several times daily over a period of two years.)

Thompson spent 20 years in Williamstown but left at age 65 with his wife and seven of his children after going bankrupt. Anderson has found documents that shed light on this sorry episode. Thompson had acquired eight properties, from village lots to 36-hectare farms, which he rented out. But when the Canadian economy was dragged down by a worldwide economic depression in the early 1830s, his tenants couldn't pay the rent, and in turn, Thompson couldn't make his mortgage payments. Eventually, his creditors seized everything, including his home.