Canadian Houses
of Romance

by

XIX

SWORDS AND SASHES

(In the Village of Niagara)

THE Village of Niagara is the essence of old Upper Canada.
     In summer it is full of sweet-william and peonies and larkspur; and there are carefully-marked old houses; and occasional meetings of the Historical Society. The memory of a hero pervades the place. His ghost, in a scarlet uniform, with a cocked hat and a sword fairly leaping from its scabbard, is everywhere to be seen. That he was a noble and spirited hero makes his hold secure; the life of the village leans upon the drifting aura of his wraith.
     It is true that, from time to time, a few wealthy strangers have been known to come and build modern houses; but they do not often stay. Even the Queen’s Royal, which was a social centre for over fifty summers, has closed its doors; the Provincial Highway between Toronto and Buffalo sweeps by without entering; and the village thinks of Brock, and his day of glory and his four funerals, and every year or two it presents another memorial tablet to a fallen hero or an ageing building.
     The town has had nine names, beginning with Ouinagara and ending with Niagara-on-the-Lake. [page 138] It was the seat of the first Parliament of Upper Canada in 1792. The earliest newspaper began a year later. After the decisive episode in the War of 1812, known as the Battle of Queenston Heights, it was left a “smoking ruin in the hands of [page 139] the enemy.” Fort Goerge was built in 1794; St. Mark’s Church, ten years later. The latter was used as a hospital by the British after the Battle of Queenston Heights, and by the Americans as a barracks in 1813.
     The greatest treasure in Niagara’s historical house is the cocked hat of General Brock, with white ostrich plumes, red and white cockade and gold plated chain. Pamphlet No. 5 says:

     Since, like George Washington, we cannot tell a lie, it must be confessed that Gen. Brock never wore the hat as when it arrived for him from England he lay in a hero's grave in Fort George. A letter is in existence written by him to his brother: “All the articles I ordered have arrived except the cocked hat, for which I am sorry, as on account the enormous size of my head I find it difficult to obtain a hat to suit me.” The ladies of the Historical Society, Toronto, wrote to have it measured inside, and the result quite justified the use of the descriptive adjective as the measurement was twenty-five inches. A military order of 1811 that the ostrich plumes be inside the flaps, and another in 1814 repealing this order justify the position of the trimming. The hat was used at the different funerals, being placed on the coffin in 1824 and again in 1853 when many old soldiers asked permission to try it on. 

     Indeed, it is at present what you might call tattered.

     Thrusting the hero from us, though we never finally escaped him, we went lazily up the village [page 140] street towards the camp grounds and officers’ headquarters to see The Wilderness. And there we heard a romantic story and found a lovely house. The land on which it was built was given by the Indians “in return for many good deeds” to Mrs. Daniel Claus, daughter of Sir William Johnson, and widow of their Superintendent. To acquire the property they sold a part of their holdings on the Grand River. The first house was [page 141] burned when the Americans fired the village in 1814. This one was erected during the next five years on the same plan as Longwoods, Napoleon’s house at St. Helena. Year by year the Indians used to come to receive their presents, sitting under these great trees. The rambling, one-storey house looks like a child at their feet. There is a marvellous Balm of Gilead, over two hundred feet high, and sixteen feet in circumference; and a huge oak, said to have been brought a century ago from the grounds of Windsor Castle.
     The Mohawks, under Brant, coming down from the headquarters of the Six Nations, could see it from a long distance over land or water. They must have thought well of their lordly gift as they sat in its shade waiting for their presents and treaty money.

     William Kirby, a Yorkshire man, the author of the celebrated historic romance “The Golden Dog,” lived quietly and usefully in Niagara for many years in a modest house on River Street. And accumulating in his desk, afterwards to be stowed away for years in the attic, were diaries and documents and letters of considerable importance. Here are copies of Indian treaties, and observations as to the doings of the countryside, with some perspective of the outer world; and letters conveying the pleasure of Queen Victoria in “Le Chien d’Or”, and from [page 142] Lord Tennyson and the Duke of Argyle and others. Niagara’s literary house is linked by marriage to one of its oldest families, for Mrs. Kriby’s mother was the daughter of Daniel Servos.

     Something wise and old, belonging not so much to pioneer life as to well ordered family existence, comes to one in Niagara. Palatine Hill, the Servos’ homestead, some two miles from the village, is a quaint wooden dwelling set on the edge of a grassy amphitheatre of daisies. But step over the door sill and time seems to stand still, as though for a moment you could catch a detached fragment of old life.
     This family was of Prussian origin. Christopher Servos came in 1726, and his son served under Sir William Johnson in 1759. Palatine Hill was an important estate. The long drive to the house from the entrance gate was lined with the dwellings of farm hands, carpenters and millers. For the amphitheatre of daisies was occupied then by grist and saw mills, busily at work, and part of the house was used as a government store. People came from long distances to have their grain ground and to buy provisions and furs. Near the house is an old barn in which American dragoons were quartered for a time. In the family graveyard lie four generations of the same name. [page 143]
     It was pleasant to be received by a daughter of the Servos family, here where old names seem linked through the generations. To come from The Wilderness and the home of William Kirby to the quaint rooms of Palatine Hill was like a little round of social activity with pleasant ghosts, all connected by friendship or marriage….Five o’clock tea with fraternal phantoms…Here is a shell snuff box in “token of gratitude from William Claus to Mrs. Eliz. Servos, 1801.”
     The Historic Room at Palatine Hill is full of echoes of pioneer adventures: an old saddle used by Grandmamma Frey when chased by Indians as she was carrying despatches, news of escaped slaves, and rumours of Assemblies at Navy Hall, when French counts and their ladies, American commissioners, governors and their parties, and neighbours, such as the celebrated Mr. Tom Talbot from his castle of Malahide near St. Thomas, came to dance with the elite of Niagara.
     This house is still remote, strangely untouched. The low rooms, filled with priceless mahogany and walnut, and crowded with bric-a-brac, are full of yesterdays.
     Why is it that no high-set house achieves the distinction of one which appears to be on the level of the ground? This one feels as though it had sprung naturally into being, and was not unhappy in old age. The very sagging of its eaves is pleasant, and [page 144] the lines on its face are lovable. So is the tiny totter of a step between the dining-room and kitchen, and the humility of narrow stairs going up to the servants’ quarters. How did they plan so perfectly years ago, when everything—money, time and labour—was so hard to secure? It is difficult to draw the portraits of these places, for everything lies in the way that one feels them. The Servos house is lovely because it is simple, because it exactly fits [page 145] its surroundings, because it is an echo of early Ontario, into which such glorious courage went.

     “But we must go on to the Count’s house,” said the lady from Niagara.
     “Which one?” I asked, as we left Palatine Hill.
     “Count Joseph de Puisaye, of whom you may have heard…and after that I thought that we might drive to Stamford to see the Village Green. The only Village Green in Canada—really a dear little place.”
     Secretly I hoped that the Count lived on or near the Village Green. But it was presumable that he was now deceased. And I found that this was so. He had been dead for exactly a hundred years, but information regarding him is freely circulated in Niagara to-day.
     He was, it seems—and I should have known it—a noted figure in Europe after the Revolution in which he had played a strange part, first in sympathy with “the people” and their alleged reforms, then, alarmed at their excesses, back to his own party. He escaped with his life and in 1797 applied to the British Government for funds to form a Royalist Settlement in Canada. And so he became the leader of a forlorn cause. He embarked with a little train of Royalists, some soldiers and two ladies; the Marquise de Beaupoil, and the Viscountess [page 146] de Chalus, with their waiting maids. Some of the party stayed at Quebec, but de Puisaye and the Count de Chalus attempted a settlement at the “Rivière de Niagara.”
     I was told that the house is hopelessly changed: “To be exact, only half of it is still standing.”
     The river, just approaching Lake Ontario, is quiet here. It moves steadily after its shimmering rush over giant walls.
     There is a thick hedge of box, and behind it a bit of a Norman house facing the river, with dormer windows and sharply sloping roof. Built against one end of the house is an old structure supported by stone buttresses. It has a vaulted interior and two divisions, a wine vault and a powder magazine; or a dungeon and a vegetable room, perhaps. The story is told by an old gardener that there were some ancient French pear trees, ancestors perhaps of those that grew to such a wonderful height at the Bâby Mansion near Lake Erie, trees of a rare variety that de Puisaye undoubtedly planted. And there are mementos of by-gone parties, and the legend of a room lined with mirrors, which in those days was almost a miracle. A letter from a friend in Kingston thanks the Count for a present of peaches, and speaks of having bought for him for only a hudred piastres “une petite nègresse.”
     De Puisaye went to England to finish his History of the French Royalist Party begun here, and [page 147] he never returned. He died at Blythe House near Hammersmith. There was no Canadian settlement.

     We were driving now from Niagara inland, through country roads neglected by motors, towards the fork of the old portage road around Niagara Falls, and St. David’s ravine road. And I heard the forgotten story of Stamford, how it was old and once ambitious; how Sir Peregrine Maitland built a vice-regal residence there, when Niagara was the capital of Upper Canada; and brought with him some military friends, the Dees, and Ottleys, and Mewburns, and others; and they all lived in a comfortable, old-world fashion with the Village Green in the centre and the Church of St. John the Evangelist, which they founded and furnished, on the edge of the Green.
     The road wound through beautiful country, but suddenly we came upon great banks of reddish earth looming up in queer shapes, and falling back into soft pink caves that were faintly jewelled by the rays of the sun. I saw that it was a great sand belt upon which, in the distance, huge machinery for its exploitation had been set up.
     And all this was once the Maitland estate. Here was the great house that Sir Peregrine had literally built, unknowing, upon the sand; a place of twenty [page 148] rooms, of careful gardens and terraces and lawns, and peacocks strutting on the lawns.
     “I do like a peacock!” said the lady from Niagara.
     “And there,” she went on, “is all that remains of the residence. It was once a Lodge.” The small stucco house on the edge of a pit might have been a real-estate office.

     Stamford was sound asleep. But we woke the vicar and he unlocked the tiny church, which may hold a hundred people, and must have been an exquisite place before they removed its ancient pews of black walnut and the beautiful choir stalls, of which only one remains. The original pulpit and altar of walnut is left, the servant’s gallery at the back, and an old alms-plate of heavy brass. The Maitlands’ square pew with its coat of arms has been replaced by a pale, modern bench. And yet a hint of the quiet beauty of the perfect little church somehow survives.
     I must say that the Village Green has been slightly marred by a tennis court at one end, about which electric lights are festooned. A cow should be gently grazing there. But one cannot expect too much.
     It was as we returned to Niagara, slowly through a twilight of misty gray, that the heart of the adventure [page 149] unfolded, unexpectedly, perfectly, like the sudden sound of a long familiar song.

There was a sound of revelry by night
And Belgium’s Capital had gathered there.

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