This Old House

Big Bras d’Or’s greater metropolitan area features two dwellings near and dear to me. One is the cabin I built a half-century ago, relying on resources largely limited to a few hand tools and a strong back. The other is an old house I long ago dubbed Wuthering Heights, presumably because it stands imperiously by itself on a hill with a view to kill for. From the early 1980s, it was the place where my Boston friend Bob Nagel liked to spend his summers and hold court for his legion of friends. 

The history of the old house predated Bob by several decades. It was built some time about 1890. In 1938 a catastrophe befell a local family, one reflected on the face of a grave marker in a corner of the Big Bras d’Or cemetery. The headstone lists the names of five children of Archie and Amelia Dunlap who perished in a house fire. The children ranged in age from a five-year-old namesake daughter, Amelia, to Daniel, 14. The Big Bras d’Or community rose to the occasion, providing a new home for the Dunlap parents and their surviving children—the same house that in forty years or so would become the place where mirth and merriment would be routine adornments of a Bob Nagel summer.

The lost children’s mother had been one among the tens of thousands of English “home children” exported to Canada from 1869 to 1932, children who had the bad luck to be orphans or to have parents who lacked the means to look after them. On June 17, 1899, Amelia Thompson was one of 98 children who arrived in Halifax aboard SS Siberian. Amelia was seven years old that late spring day. She was given a new home by a Boularderie Island family.

In the fullness of time Amelia would marry Archie Dunlap and begin her career as wife and mother. There are other names on the Dunlap headstone, including that of Henry, who was born in 1914—when Amelia was 23—and lived only to age 6. Yes, there was great misfortune in the Dunlap home, but there were joys too. My friend Shirley, Amelia’s granddaughter, has fond memories of her grandparents and the happy hours she spent with them in the old house. She has a picture of Amelia taken in 1959 on the front veranda. In the image Amelia is sitting in her rocking chair, smiling.

In 2002 I took the lead role in building a new screened porch for Bob at the front of his house, just where Amelia had sat in her rocker years before. The porch supplies marvelous views of Kelly’s Mountain, the Great Bras d’Or and the Bird Islands, and it became the venue for countless festivities in the years from that time right through to 2015. Shirley was among the celebrants in many of them.

When Bob left us in 2016, his many Cape Breton friends grieved not just for their lost friend but also for the happy times they had shared with him on the porch. There are steel ships and wooden ships, he liked to say, but no ship like friendship. Passing from the dining room into the porch, friends walked under a sign: THESE are the good old days.

People come and go, and so do old houses. Eventually Wuthering Heights and the 147 acres in which it stands went up for sale. At age 130 or so, the building was showing its age: a crumbling foundation, floor joists in some parts of the main floor a fella was disinclined to trust. My bet was that Amelia’s place had only a slim chance of surviving. The new owner would almost certainly raze it and replace it with something new.

But I was wrong. Rather that demolishing the historical house, Dinao, the new owner, decided to save it. A good thing, I say: the house is not only shot through with history, it has ‘good bones’ too. Under Dinao's stewardship, crumbled bits of the foundation are now repaired, new windows are in place, and just this past while, a shiny new metal roof will emancipate Dinao and her friends from having to worry about rainy days.

On Saturday Jan and I led Lynn and Louise on a tour of the excellent trail Dinao and her friends have built from the woods behind her house all the way to the provincial park at Dalem Lake. The trail is a thing of beauty and a joy for outdoorsy folks who like birds, wildflowers and the great variety of mushrooms that flourish in the forest. Savouring myriad memories at the old house, we all rejoiced at what has become of Wuthering Heights.

Bob is not available to see Dinao’s work but I have no doubt that he would rejoice in the knowledge that the old place will continue to be rich in laughter and delight for years to come.