"Dockside" is in family hands once again, restored to its original lustre.
In a rare moment of synchronicity, my husband and I had the same thought at the same instant as we drove past a familiar house in Burin, NL, in the summer of 2005. Our mutual thought: "If the house is really for sale, and the price is right, we buy it!"
The generic "For Sale" sign hung ambiguously on the garage rather than the house. But there was no mystery about our desire to own the house: it was the birthplace of my mother-in-law, who was seated behind us in the car as we made our way to the cemetery to visit a family grave. Marion Moseley Brown had not set foot in her family home since leaving Burin after her father's death in 1936. The day after we saw the sign, Marion was able to cross the threshold for the first time in almost 70 years. Within hours, the house was ours.
Marion's father, Arthur John Moseley, served as Burin's only doctor for more than 20 years. After graduating with a medical degree in 1905 and marrying, Arthur returned to his native Sydney, NS, to practice medicine and start a family. Although the Moseleys had been a prominent Nova Scotia family for several generations - Arthur's great-grandfather was a shipbuilder and his father served as mayor of Sydney and Speaker of the Assembly - Arthur was not settled on a comfortable life in Sydney. While covering the rural Newfoundland practice of a convalescing colleague, Arthur discovered the demanding life of an outport doctor. Though the family did return to Sydney for a time, the doctor eventually accepted a position in Marystown, on the Burin Peninsula. The 1921 Newfoundland census finds the family living in Burin North, in the house where twins Marion and Russell were born on New Year's Day, 1925.
We had our first stay in the house in early 2006 - February! The ultimate test! A new furnace kept us toasty, and the house was friendly (creaky, but ghost-free). In a century-plus of life, we were just its sixth owners. The years had stripped the house of its gingerbread woodwork and double veranda. In 1983, clapboard had given way to aluminum siding. Of the three floors and basement, only the two middle levels were in passable condition. The third floor had been abandoned for years. The wallpaper was peeling and the roof leaked. The basement was home to a moribund furnace and its floor…well, we were reminded of that Robert Redford film, A River Runs Through It. No surprise, really, since half of its foundation is the actual hillside.
Our first glimpse into the distant past of the house came with a title search. We could trace Dr. Moseley's purchase of the house in 1932: he had obviously rented for a number of years. The vendor was Sarah Vigus, widow of merchant James Vigus. We figured that James had built the house, probably around 1900, but there were no land transfer or construction records.
Word soon got around old-town Burin that "the Moseleys are back" and a surprising number of people in the area remembered the doctor and his family. Before long, Marion Penney Coady, whose family bought the house from Alice Moseley (Arthur's widow), sent us a beautiful front-view photo of it as it looked in the late 1930s. We had seen earlier pictures of the house from different angles, but they were usually focused on the Moseley twins at play, with the building as backdrop. Now, for the first time, we were able to see the whole house in all its past grace and finery - and knew what our goal must be.
Our first big stroke of luck was a recommendation that St. John's contractor Garnet Kindervater do the restoration. While he does not normally accept such long-distance projects, Kindervater eventually visited Burin to assess the scope of the task and agreed to take it on. He would work with as many local suppliers and services as possible, but would bring his best tradesmen from St. John's for much of the job. That meant one or more workers taking up residence in Burin almost full time, starting in January of 2007.
The only radical structural changes in the house involved removing the sagging bathroom and the doctor's surgery waiting room, both of which had been cobbled onto the back of the house. We surrendered one small bedroom to create my dream bathroom, with an antique claw-foot tub and pedestal sink. The first-floor surgery, long since altered beyond recognition, became a compact but comfortably arranged three-piece bath and laundry room. The tiny window of the old waiting room has been preserved in its back wall.
As the work progressed, we learned that Kindervater's reputation as a builder and restorer was founded on something more than just solid construction and attractive design. He and his crew - especially master carpenter Brendan Gregory - have a "feel" for the style of a fine old house, an empathy with the materials, workmanship and ambience of a home with a history. Everything new in our Burin house looks like it's been there all along. (Equally to their credit, the basement is now dry!)
We were certain that secrets and treasures would emerge from behind the walls and under the eaves of the old house, and Kindervater's crew saved everything they came across that might be of interest to us. That included samples from generations of wallpaper and linoleum, and large swaths of wallcovering made of glued-down 1930s newspapers and flour sacks. They also found brass curtain hardware (now polished up and re-mounted), hearth tiles, pieces of an old parlour stove, and a bayonet from a 1922 American Springfield rifle.
The upstairs bathroom yielded what I consider to be the original "title" to the house. A piece of packing crate, bearing the words "James Vigus, Burin," was built into the interior wall. This was the first of several crate slats that turned up in the walls in three different rooms. Could there be any doubt that the thrifty merchant used his own surplus material to build his home?
By far the most unusual historic secret built into the house had to be put out of sight once again with the restoration of the clapboard exterior. While removing the old additions, the crew uncovered a wall constructed of hand-hewn split logs, placed upright side by side like barrel staves, their seams caulked with oakum, mimicking the construction of a ship's hull. The St. John's crew had never seen the like, though the local word is that this technique can be found in a number of old houses in the vicinity. This log configuration stretches across the entire back wall of our house, but nowhere else.
Our restoration was guided by one simple principle: we don't want a "new" home, but we don't want to live in a museum, either. The main bedrooms and living areas, though remodeled over many years, have been left as we found them. Demolition work in the upstairs hallway unexpectedly revealed pine floors and a paneled ceiling that were ripe for restoration. I designed a window seat unit for the enlarged landing space, and Brendan built it to look as if it had been there forever. We wanted the exterior to match as closely as possible the look of the old photograph, but we were ready to concede to small changes dictated by standard-sized windows or modern building requirements.
The result is a very successful compromise. "Dockside" (as the house has always been called) is both a family legacy and a peaceful retreat from the dizzying pace of life in Toronto, where we are still based. We're delighted that the efforts of the past two years have earned us a place in Burin, so that each time we "come from away" our neighbours say "welcome home."
Dockside received a Southcott Award from the Newfoundland Historic Trust in June 2008.