If you would like to contact me, please send an email to reg@regporter.com.

 

The Central Plan House –The Doric and Ionic Styles begin to dominate Domestic and Civic Architecture.

Resuming our discussion of the early Georgian central plan house as it appeared in the first six decades of the Nineteenth Century, we leave the Greek Revival style and examine the use of two Classical Orders – Doric and Ionic – as they appear on Island houses, interpreted by the hands of the builders.

 

 

The Ionic Order appears in the Georgian World.

The Ionic Order is the second of the classical orders to appear after Doric. Its most dramatic use occurred on the Akropolis of Athens during its complete rebuilding in the Fifth Century BC by Perikles (c. 495–429 BC), a powerful political figure. The Ionic order placed on a section of the Erechtheion, a multi-use, multi-faceted structure, is the finest ever sculpted.

Capital from the Erechtheion (421–406 BC), the Elgin Marbles, the British Museum.

 

This capital became known to architects of the Georgian period when Lord Elgin purchased it and brought it to London at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century. The general design had already been in use for centuries, using Roman examples of the form funnelled down through the Italian Renaissance. Examples were to be found in all the guidebooks produced for architects and builders. Isaac Smith would have seen many engraved pictures of this, and similar capitals during his career.

 

 

1834 – Government House

When Isaac Smith built Government House in 1834 the approved design, in the British Palladian style, required a two-storey portico in the Ionic order. It had to be Ionic because the verandas that surrounded the house were in the Doric style. Since Roman times there were strict rules about stacking the orders.

The practice is seen most dramatically in Rome on the Colosseum where the ground course is Doric, the second, Ionic and the third, Corinthian.

 

Concept for the original design of Government House by Reg Porter.
Ink and watercolour rendition by David Webber.

We can see Smith’s original arrangement of the Ionic order on Government House from pre-1873 photographs. In this detail you see the Ionic column and pilaster capitals that hold up the entablature as it returns into the wall. That pilaster, having the same dimensions as the column, was topped by a half Ionic capital.

Column, pilaster, and entablature of Government House.
Detail of a post 1860 photograph in the R. Porter Collection.

In 1873 when Prince Edward Island joined Confederation, Government House lost its original verandas and portico with all the columns replaced by square posts with trim that hinted at Doric mouldings. As a result, the full Ionic capitals designed by Smith disappeared, except for those flat ones that were left on the tops of the two pilasters.

In the 1990s it was decided to remove the 1873 posts and restore the Ionic portico and the Tuscan Doric verandas. The four posts supporting the entablature and pediment were replaced by modern round columns of a diameter much greater than the originals. An incorrectly designed capital was carved out of laminated wood and placed on top of the new columns. These capitals soon began to disintegrate.

A decision was made to take down the original 1834 pilaster capital on the left side so that it could be studied. It was stripped of paint, repainted, and put back, then later removed, and thrown away and replaced with a copy.

If you examine this capital closely you can see that it is little more than a block of wood with spirals carved at either end. The volute scrolls do not seem to be a separate part as they emerge from the centre of the block. There is also no attempt made to create the bowl-like element on which the scroll rests, which could have been carved with an egg and dart moulding. It has no round collar and being a block of wood, sits on top of the pilaster. In a few years Smith, with the help of a highly trained mason, would do much better on Province House.

When the laminated wood capitals disintegrated there was an energetic push by the Government House Committee to have facsimiles of the original capitals put on the new, much larger columns. In 1999 Masonry Conservator Trevor Gillingwater was hired to produce a suitably proportioned copy of the original that was cast in a metal alloy so it would not disintegrate. It was a stopgap solution, but at least what we see today, scale aside, is what Smith wanted on the portico.

 

1847 – the Ionic Capitals at Province House

Thirteen years after the portico of Government House was completed, a much grander Ionic portico was built at the new Colonial Building in its last stage of evolution.

Oblique aerial of Province House – from the internet

In the original design the Colonial Building was not meant to have north and south porticoes nor east and west projecting pavilions. It was to be a simple rectangle with all the definition in the Doric style, both columns and pilasters. Because of an uproar among politicians about the meanness of the design compared to the elegance of Nova Scotia’s Legislature, Smith was asked to change his plan, to make it grander. What he ended up doing was to change a handsome Greek Revival rectangular block into an English Palladian country house replate with porticoes and wings. This is what we have today.

Following the regulations of the classical orders the porticoes were placed on massive bases that lean against the building because the walls were already built. Here one can see the columns supported by the entablature of the heavy base, and in their turn, supporting the entablature, cornice, and pediment of the projecting porch.

Photo by Trevor Gillingwater, 2015-05-30.

 

Since 2013 the Colonial Building has been closes to visitors so that a huge restoration project, both inside and out, could be carried out. The scale of this long project is difficult to comprehend. At this time (2023) there are still major parts of the building requiring exterior and interior stonework, and the complete restoration of the interior as it was when the building was first constructed in the 1840s.

On 2021-07-13 a newly carved replacement Ionic capital on the west corner of the south portico was put in place.

Photo by R. Porter – 2022-09-01 24

One can see in the above photo both the elegant details of the Ionic style at its simplest, and the feminine allure Vitruvius claims emanates from it. It seems to pulsate with life.

 

The Ionic order was used for decoration on the inside of the Colonial Building, especially in the support of the balconies above the two legislative chambers. There are both full capitals and flat pilaster capitals. These were carved out of wood and painted to resemble veined marble.

Photos by R. Porter, 2015-09-17.

 

 

***********************

 

 

The Appearance of the Doric Order

The Doric columns of the Parthenon were too big for Lord Elgin to buy and ship back to England. However, even before he visited Athens and became desirous of these antiquities, two Englishmen, James Stuart and Nicholas Revett had drawn in the most exacting detail, and were publishing in stages, all the architectural features of the Akropolis buildings. It was through these huge engravings that Smith and his masons could have discovered the essence of Greek Doric.

Plate from James Stuart & Nicholas Revett. The Antiquities of Athens measured and delineated by James Stuart F.R.S. and F.S.A. and Nicholas Revett Painters and Architects, vol. III (ed. Willey Reveley), London, John Nichols, 1794.

 

You can see the essence of the Doric capital with its large soup bowl block, whose sides are in the form of an echinus moulding – an eccentric curve – with a block or cushion called the abacus on top that supports the entablature. This capital sits on the column shaft which can either have concave flutes or polished and left round. The Greek Doric order has no base but sits flatly on the top course of the temple floor.

 

The Doric order appears on the Island

What is the earliest appearance of the Doric order on the Island? I believe there was a Doric surge in the 1830s when TWO houses displayed an awareness of the essence of the Doric order: the echinus moulding and the fluted column.

 

The Nelson House (187 Dorchester Street)

Samuel Nelson came to the island with Governor Fanning in 1785 and it was not until 1833 that the house was built at 187 Dorchester Street and rented for many years to John Barrow, another Englishman who served for a time as a judge (Rogers pp. 52-53). The house was typical of its day with the usual pilaster and eaves modillion arrangement. However, there was a small detail in the eaves that tells us something important.

187 Dorchester Street, Photo R. Porter, c. 1995.

One small detail, the crown moulding that joins the fascia to the soffit in the eaves, tells us that the builder was aware of forms appropriate to the Greek Revival style. Its profile displays an elegant echinus outline, like the cross section of a Doric column.

Photo by R. Porter, 2023-01-20.

This sort of moulding is associated with the Greek Revival, and the hand plane that shaped it was a new addition to the toolbox of the builder. He was fashionably up to date.

This is the only evidence that this moulding was ever on that building. During renovations in the first years of the Twenty First Century I found a piece of it in the dumpster next to the house, and made a display of two pieces, with the original layers of paint, and stripped to be bare wood to see the details.

 

 

Norwood, (311 St. Peter’s Road)

For the second telling architectural detail of the advancement of the Greek Revival style on the Island we have to make a pilgrimage to Wright’s Creek at 311 St. Peters Road , Charlottetown,  and to your left, hidden in trees, is a house called Norwood.  The history of Norwood is unclear and it may have Eighteenth Century origins.  The Hon. George Wright (1779-1842) and his wife, Phoebe Cambridge (1780-1851) lived in the home until, in 1812, they built a larger house, Belmont, a short distance away, across the road. Various individuals, connected with a brewery and mill operation made possible by the damming of Wright’s Creek, lived there, but the Wrights continued to maintain ownership of the house for some years, as can be seen in Meacham’s ATLAS of 1880.

https://www.historicplaces.ca/en/rep-reg/place-lieu.aspx?id=7091

At some time, most probably in the 1830s, Norwood seems to have received a major renovation in the popular Greek Revival style as it was practiced in a radius of Charlottetown. It may have been inspired by John Levitt’s building of his new house, Binstead, nearby, overlooking the Hillsborough River, in 1833. This would have given Norwood a new lease on its stylistic life. The builder added a remarkable feature that completely modified the traditional Georgian arrangement of the front door frame.

 

Photos: R. Porter, 2007-02-16.

Norwood’s decoration is very much like the other central plan houses we have been examining except that the position of the door has shifted to the gable end so that the central plan disappears. We now have a new style, the gable end house. The pilasters are still all capped by the Plaw/Smith modillion and the windows framed as little temples, so typical of the Greek Revival style as it evolved on Prince Edward Island. By now that style had become a formula used everywhere that the Smith contractors built houses. The general effect is all very much what we have come to expect except for the front door.

Fortunately, the door and its frame have survived, and its discovery was an astonishing event. True, it was a Georgian door with sidelights, but instead of the expected fanlight or transom there was a solid entablature with a heavy cornice supported by slender fluted Greek Doric pilasters. The carpenters did not carve, or turn on a lathe, any form of Doric capital but simply inserted a block between the pilaster shaft and the entablature. A similar block has been inserted at the base to protect the fluted ends from the effects of the weather. Should one question the attribution of the Doric order without the evidence of capitals, remember that following the rigid rules of the stacking of the orders, Doric is always at ground level.

Norwood was a complete departure from ordinary practice of framing formal entrances which could show many variations, but all within more conservative limits. This was different. It was original, and a strong statement that Greek Doric, popular for some time on the Mainland and in the United States, had finally reached the Island.

 

From time to time in our search for the evolution of our architectural styles we are amazed at what we see on houses. Thomas Essery’s Corinthian capitals at Springfield and the fluted Doric pilasters at Wright’s Creek are two such mysteries. But we had/have them and are forever excited by the variety and invention of our built heritage in the first half of the Nineteenth Century.

 

1843-44 – Province House in the Doric Style

When it was built in 1811 the John Plaw courthouse provided architectural inspiration to local builders. At that time Charlottetown was a very small town indeed and not much space was required to produce legislation, govern the colony, and administer justice. By the 1830s however, things had begun to speed up and the members of the government felt a great need for a much larger building that would accommodate the two houses required for government to operate, places for record keeping, a courtroom, meeting rooms and offices for the major officials. Thus, as early as 1837, at the request of the Lieutenant Governor, Isaac Smith agreed to work on a plan for a suitable building to be erected in the centre of Queen’s Square. Two years later the fickle politicians announced that the design for the new legislative building would be selected through competition. One is not surprised that Isaac Smith won the competition. But it must have been all so tiresome and frustrating.

It would not be until 1842 that the government was able to face the prospect of erecting a Colonial Building. Smith’s plans had to be altered again and sealed tenders for a stone building were to be submitted. The building was to be 120 feet long and 50 feet wide and was to be three stories tall with suitable corridors and staircases defining the space and providing necessary access.

Reconstruction by David Webber. Ink and watercolour. Copy in R. Porter Collection.

 

The early description specified that the lower course would be stone cut with banded French Rustication and polished. The doorways were framed by recessed columns. David Webber’s reconstruction, based on several original drawings that survive, gives you an idea of what the Colonial Building was intended to look like.

Drawings in the Public Archives show the level of decoration and articulation that were expected, with narrow projecting frontispieces defining the classical nature of the building not only on the entrance sides on the north and south, but also pavilions extending from the east and west ends of the building.

Smith, Isaac, Drawing of the façade of the Colonial Building in its first stage. Ink drawing. PARO.

After more deliberations and changes the construction commenced after the plan had been reduced in size and all sorts of decorations removed. The cornice to support the slate roof had to be constructed of wood made to look like stone with many coats of paint. The building was to be 122 x 56 feet, and probably still resembled what we see in David Webber’s reconstruction.

 

Work commenced in 1843 and during the first season foundation trenches were excavated and stone walls built up to a height of 25 feet above the ground.

Photo by R. Porter, 2013-12-29.

This detail of the southeast corner gives you an idea of the colour of the polished sandstone from a small quarry in Pictou and the way the corners would be defined by Doric pilasters rising from the rusticated first storey base.

 

The Major Doorways

What is most exciting about the two major recessed doorways to the new Colonial Building was that they were defined by pairs of true Greek Doric fluted columns in the purest style, framing a doorway with side lights and a door surmounted by an elliptical arch.

Photo: R. Porter, 2015-07-01.

 

This was the face of the building as it was first planned. Its most powerful decorative statement – the door embrasure – was not supported by the Renaissance Tuscan Doric order but by massive Greek Doric columns with their lowest fluted course sitting directly on the threshold, or stylobate, as the top course of the base is called.

The capital consists of the round bowl-like echinus, incised at its base and providing the terminal course to resolve the end of the flutes. Over this is a massive cushion or abacus to support what is above. Connected to the capital is the top drum of the two sections that make up the column shaft. Time and oxidisation have given a slightly different colour to the various elements that make up the complete column.

 

Fit for a King!

 

It is important – vital even – to remember that this façade was designed with the clear knowledge that the sun would shine directly on the Doric columns, casting shadows that would enliven all the details – just like in the Mediterranean countries.

 

1844-’47 – Province House in the Palladian Style

The sun only shone on this façade for one year before the government decided to build great Ionic porticoes on massive bases. Here is an early form of the new plan that would change a bold Greek Revival Doric building into an imitation of something neo-Palladian from the previous century.

Smith, Isaac, Concept for adding Ionic Porticoes to the Doric Colonial building. Silverpoint drawing on coated paper, 1844. Trevor Gillingwater Collection.

 

If you compare this drawing to what was built you will see a number of awkward details as the architect tried to paste something Ionic on top of the Doric core.

Photo, 2020-01-07, by Trevor Gillingwater.

The portico base had to lean against the wall, which had already been built. By our time, everything was in danger of collapsing and in 2020 a brilliant engineering team had to suspend it in the air, pier by pier, while deep concrete foundations were put in place. The arrogance of our forebears had its price.

 

Island Domestic Doric appears.

These fully three-dimensional fantasies of Doric temples had no place in the domestic architecture of Prince Edward Island. Houses continued to be built with the beautifully panelled corner boards, but increasingly, the Plaw/Smith modillions on the soffit were replaced by pilasters topped by a simple but strong bevelled moulding that was an abstraction of the Doric echinus.

This is a very fine early example of that kind of moulding representing the Doric echinus.

In 2005 when Newlands on Queen Street was being completely renovated on an unimaginable scale, all the original architectural definition was stripped, tossed away, and replaced with new material. The treasures of my architectural life seem to be, for the most part, objects found discarded at the time of renovations. This Newlands capital came from a huge dumpster.

 

1850 Newlands

Newlands was built by the Hon. Joseph Hensley, a lawyer, politician, and judge who came to the Island with his family at the age of sixteen. He came from a naval family and received an education that permitted him, in maturity, and as a member of the city’s conservative elite, to break away from those ideals and side with the reformers. At the end of his career, he was appointed an assistant judge of the Supreme Court and lived out his years in this very stately house on Queen Street. At this time, we don’t know who the builder was.

 

476 Queen Street
Photo by Natalie Munn, City of Charlottetown

https://www.historicplaces.ca/en/rep-reg/place-lieu.aspx?id=2084

When I first went to document Newlands in 2005, to my immense surprise I found that the house had been completely stripped to the frame and boarding in a project aimed at a complete renovation intending to duplicate the original style. There was much to be learned about construction techniques by observing the walls stripped of their cladding.

Newlands, 2005-11-16, Photo: R. Porter

The entrance to the house was recessed to a considerable degree and consisted of a doorway that was typically Georgian in its elements. This push and pull movement in the façade provided both shelter to visitors and formality to the design.

The exterior of the house was tightly bound by its massive corner pilasters that were 16 inches wide. The windows had all been originally framed in the temple front arrangement of mouldings popular throughout the first half of the Nineteenth Century. The dormers were a later addition to make the top floor more usable for contemporary living. As renovated, the house still gives off its original powerful Georgian essence, strengthened by the massive pilasters with Doric capitals reduced to a flat moulding.

The Newlands Estate enjoyed a position of privilege in the Charlottetown Royalty, directly north of the earlier Spring Park estate.

 

 

Ringwood House across the Harbour

Across the harbour from Charlottetown, on the site of Port la Joye, the old French capital, a country house appeared some time between 1833 and 1843, between the time Margaret Fanning married Bentinck Cumberland and Captain Bayfield made a nautical chart of the Charlottetown Harbour. As far as we know, it was quite unlike any house built on the Island before this time. We know of its appearance only because an itinerant artist called A. E. Santagnello visited Prince Edward island in 1852 and produced half a dozen pencil sketches of Charlottetown, two of the Fanningbank Estate, the lunatic asylum and Ringwood Estate, which incorporated the Warren Farm and Fort Amherst.

 

Santagnello, A. E., Ringwood House, pencil on paper. Glenbow Museum Collection, No. System ID: 5017928, Catalogue 62.112.12.

This terribly important house is known to me only through a digital scan of a colour slide of a photocopy of a black and white museum print. The Glenbow Museum is undergoing complete reorganisation as I write (2023-01-20) and I have been informed that my request for a scan of this work cannot be fulfilled until at least some time in 2024.

Obviously when Santagnello visited the Island in 1852 he heard of a house that was so special that he arranged for a boat to take him across the harbour to Rocky Point where there was a long-established landing place for boats.

 

The Fanning Legacy and Ringwood House

Edmund Seymour Fanning was born on April 24, 1739, in Southold, New York, the son of Hannah Tooker Smith and James Fanning (bef. 1695 – 1779). He married Phoebe Maria Burns on November 30, 1785, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. They had four children in 14 years.

He was well-educated, graduating from Yale in 1757. He went on to study law. He became involved in local politics during the American Revolution, particularly a branch of it called the War of the Regulators and was blamed for extorting money from the people. There were riots ending in 1771 when Fanning’s property and home were vandalised. He moved to New York with his patron, former governor William Tryon, serving as his personal secretary. At the start of the American Revolution Fanning was forced to flee for his life and again lost all his possessions. He was given the rank of colonel and raised a regiment of Loyalists named the King’s American Regiment on Staten Island. He was wounded twice in action. In 1782 with other Loyalists, he fled to Nova Scotia. In September of 1783 he became Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia. Two years later he married Phoebe Maria Burns (1765-1853) and they produced a family of four children:

Louisa Augusta (1786–1872), born 3 October 1786 at Point Pleasant in Halifax;
Frederick Augustus (1789–1812) born on 20 January 1789 in Charlottetown;
Mariah Susanna Matilda (1791–1879), born on 23 March 1791in Charlottetown;
And Margaret William Tryon (1800–1887), born on 16 December, 1800, in Charlottetown.

 

http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/fanning_edmund_5E.html

Edmund Fanning (1739-1818) was the second Lieutenant Governor of Saint John’s Island, serving from 1786 to 1813. It was during his time as Governor that, in 1799, the colony was renamed Prince Edward Island.

In Fanning’s time as Lieutenant Governor there was no official residence available, and governors had to find their own accommodations with the military or rent suitable houses in town. In 1786 Fanning set aside 100 acres next to the city of Charlottetown which had just been surveyed by Charles Morris, to be the governor’s estate with fields, farms, gardens and a suitable residence. No action would be taken to build a residence until 1834.  The location chosen was very beautiful and contained all the elements that would, in time provide a space for a noble house and farm in the Picturesque Style.

Fanning loved Charlottetown and obtained a great deal of property in and around the city. He also eventually got possession of Lot 67 and at least half of Lot 65, which contained the old French capital. In town, on a block adjacent to Queen’s Square, he built his city estate. He was an avid gardener and spent a great deal of time enjoying his plantings. People would walk by to see the beauty of it all.

 

After 19 years as Governor Fanning resigned in 1805 and returned to England briefly but returned to the Island and continued to live there until 1813. When his health deteriorated, he returned to London in 1813 and he died in 1818.

Fanning’s wife continued to live in Charlottetown with her daughters Louisa and Margaret. His son Frederick Augustus had died in military action in 1812. They were now very wealthy because of the thousands of acres of land they had inherited and enjoying the benefits of Fanning’s private fortune. He had eventually been compensated for all his American losses during the Revolution.

The daughters seemed to have managed the Island estates because when Thomas Haslam bought his properties in Lot 67 in the 1820s it was the daughters who closed the favourable land deals.

 

Captain Bentinck Harry Cumberland appears.

High society in Charlottetown occupied the Fanning family as they lived with servants and a full household in their town house. Life was to change for them when an officer with the unlikely name of Bentinck Harry Cumberland (1803-1881) was given a military post in Canada in 1829 at the age of 26. Four years later he was given command of the Charlottetown Garrison in 1833 at the age of 30. The Hon. Judge George Alley described Cumberland in this way (Brooks, pp. 698-99): “The Captain was a very tall, handsome, and well-proportioned man of striking appearance. He had two pronounced characteristics – stammering and swearing. He was also professedly a very devout man, and he obliged all his farm servants to attend family prayers conducted by him night and morning.”

When Margaret Fanning, now 33, met the captain it must have been love at first sight. On the 25^th of November 1833 Margaret married Bentinck Harry Cumberland in Langham, in the East Midlands of England.

This is where the mystery and frustration begin to take over the story – and it all concerns the dating of Ringwood House and the convolutions of Cumberland’s military career. Did Cumberland move into the Fanning home when the couple returned from England, or did he continue to live at the barracks while his wife stayed at home with her mother and sister?

Or, wanting privacy and their own household, did the they move to Warren Farm at Rocky Point where Cumberland, through marriage, had just inherited half of Lot 65 with all its tenants, and a most generous annuity? Cumberland would not want to live in the scruffy old Warren Farm under those circumstances, or would he? Was Ringwood built in 1833-34?

This detail from a nautical chart made by Captain Bayfield in 1843, published in 1845 and updated to 1860, clearly indicates the topography of this story.

 

Detail from Bayfield R.N., Capt. H. W., assisted by Lieuts J. Orlebar & G.A. Bedford, 1843. Published according to Act of Parliament at the Hydrographic Office of the Admiralty, May 12^th, 1845. Additions to 1860 and 1862. Sold by J.D. Potter, 31 Poultry & 11 King Street, Tower Hill, London. PARO Collection.

The location of Ringwood is clearly visible on the left where it is situated on a hill ringed by trees.  This perhaps clarifies the name given to the house. It has been highlighted in green. Prior to the expulsion of 1758 this was part of the village of Port la Joye. Across the inlet is the rising land that leads to the English Fort Amherst, on a prominence above where the now completely obliterated French fort used to be. In this area, on the west side of the stream, was a substantial house called Warren Farm. It was here, before the construction of Government House in 1834, that governors, like Walter Patterson, would live from time to time.

In different accounts there is confusion between Warren Farm and Ringwood House, some believing they are the same place. That is not the case as Ringwood was a new construction, in a very fashionable style that was bringing the various Georgian architectural expressions of architecture to an end on the island. A powerful Doric presence, as we have seen at Newlands, was the new fashion in the years leading to Confederation.

 

By 1852 Cumberland was so well established there that the latest map by George Wright celebrates his presence.

Detail from George Wright, MAP of PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND, in the GULF OF ST. LAWRENCE, Comprising the latest Topographical information afforded by the Surveyor Generals Office and other authentic Sources 1852 … Engraved map on linen backing, 129.5 x 68 cm. PARO 1169.

 

There is more about the site of Ringwood that should be thought about. It is poignant. Long before Ringwood House was built there had been, on that very soil, a French village called Port la Joye. The French, fanatical in documenting everything, had in 1734 painted a very detailed view of what would be Warren Farm and Ringwood Estate. Life builds on top of life, and Ringwood was probably built where the most prominent building in the village on the right had stood – on top of the hill, overlooking the very spot where the Deportation took place.

Detail from CARTE DU PORT LA JOYE DANS L’ISLE ST. JEAN/ 1734/ Verrier Fils/ Fecit … l’Année 1734. Avec la Veüe prise du coté du Port. Ink and watercolour on paper. LAC Ph240-Port la Joye/1734.

As we walk about on our daily round, we rarely stop to think about what we might be walking on, be it Eighteenth Century or the Twelfth Millennium at the end of the Ice Age.

 

The Fanning house burned down in the late 1840s. ELM – (January 1901) tells us it burned down in 1847. Another source from a learned journal (S. Bendall, p168) tells us that the house burned down in 1849. Mrs. Fanning and the other daughter returned to England to settle in Bath (why not?) so they are now out of our picture. Cumberland and his wife were living at Ringwood at that time. It is worth noting that Cumberland was one of few landlords who actually lived on their Island estates, and in the case of Lot 65, among his tenants.

Frogmore House, 140 Rochford Street, 1841. Circa 1860 sepia drawing by Fanny Bayfield.
Photo of original courtesy of Mr. & Mrs. Johnston, the owners of Frogmore.

In 1848, for 1,225 pounds, Cumberland bought the splendid house at 140 Rochford Street built in 1841, perhaps as an alternative town base to replace the Fanning property, but he and his wife continued to live at Ringwood. This house was called Frogmore, no doubt after the house in the Frogmore Estate at Windsor where the newly-crowned Queen Victoria would for a time live.  We know what Frogmore looked like in its original state because Fanny Bayfield did a sepia sketch of it in its landscape that is now in the collection of the Johnstons, long-term owners of the property. The house, as depicted by Bayfield, is central plan with a large Palladian window, reflecting the door below, rising through the eaves into a small centre gable. We will have more to say about this 43 x 39 foot Georgian townhouse, which is described in Rogers 1982 (pp. 270-272), at a later date.

Today Frogmore is much changed due to extensive renovations in the early Twentieth Century, which added an enormous frontispiece jutting out of a large  veranda. It is all vaguely inspired by the Romanesque Revival Style which was popular on the Island at that time. The only original feature of the house remaining is the cladding popular in the 1830-40 period, which consisted of wide planks laid horizontally and separated by a groove to simulate the technique called French rustication in masonry construction. Government House in 1834 had been clad in that manner, as well as a number of other houses in the City.

Because he and his wife continued to live at Ringwood, the house was rented out to Captain Cumberland’s wife’s sister, Miss Mariah Fanning, who occupied the home until 1850 when she left for England (Rogers, p. 272).

Had Ringwood House been built when Margaret married Cumberland in 1833? We have a chronology full of holes. According to Bayfield it was standing on its hilltop in 1843. Santagnello rushes to make a drawing of it in 1852.  By that date the house could have been standing for 19 years, and most certainly, if Bayfield is the first to note it, for 9 years. My hesitancy in risking a possible date for this house is that I feel it is necessary to place it in a stylistic framework. Architecture, for the most part, loves continuity. Who was available to produce such a striking design out of the blue? One immediately thinks of Isaac Smith and his 1837 concept for the new Colonial Building.

What is the source of the design for this house? One immediately thinks of the top two floors of the design Isaac Smith produced for the Colonial Building as early as 1837. It had been displayed in town and was public knowledge. Could this be the source of inspiration for Ringwood House?

 

 

The house is a solid hip roof rectangle of two stories. It has three bays divided by four enormous Doric pilasters. The two pilasters flanking the entrance support a pediment below which is found a large Palladian window, presumably echoing the shape of the front door with its side lights. But the front door is covered by what appears to be a semi-circular glassed-in shallow porch, also articulated with columns whose style we can’t quite determine in this poor-quality reproduction. The baseboard of the house, at least in this drawing, has a solidity that gives the impression that the house is standing on a ground course, like the stylobate of a temple. This increases the strength of the design, giving the impression that the house has been placed on a podium, no matter that it is only baseboard height.

On the east (?) side of the house is a huge bay window topped by a balcony railed in with diagonal slats, in the Chinese Chippendale style that had been popular for a long time. A door opens into the upstairs hall.

Immediately behind the main house is a huge kitchen wing, also articulated with the same massive pilasters as the main house. Just where the house joins the kitchen is a small octagonal structure with a pointed roof of indeterminate use. Is this the well house?

 

With the sources currently available, it is difficult to establish a chronology for Cumberland and his wife. The details of Cumberland’s military career are confusing, because after resigning his post in Charlottetown he once again, some time later, found himself in the army with a new promotion. He and his wife left the Island in 1858 when he was only 55. Arrived in England, he was raised to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel on March 30, 1858. This 1858 newspaper advertisement [source] for a massive sale seems to indicate that he cut himself off from the Ringwood Estate in a definitive fashion. (It is dated 1852 but that is a typo.)

 

 

What happened to Ringwood after that? Cumberland continued to administer the estate as an absentee landlord and collected his rents. He must have rented Ringwood to a suitable tenant whose identity we have not yet discovered.

On the 1862 and 1874 Wright Cundall maps of the Island Cumberland is clearly, ostentatiously even, still in possession of his Lot 65 estate. It is the last gasp of the feudal landlord.

 

MAP/ of/ PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND,/ in the/ GULF of St. LAWRENCE,/ Comprising the latest Topographical information/ afforded by the Surveyor General’s Office/ and other authentic Sources/ the Sea Coast, Rivers, etc. being laid down from the Survey,/ recently completed by Captain H. W. Bayfield R. N./ BY/ GEORGE WRIGHT ESQR./ Surveyor General/ 1852/ with corrections and additions to 1874,/ by/ H. J., CUNDALL L.S., 64 x 127 cm., probably engraved and hand-coloured (information not clear on lower right below margin), Archives de la Ville de Montréal. BM005-3_02P001.

 

On August 19, 1867, the following article was published on page 3 of the Examiner.

It states clearly that due to fires started in the neighbouring woods Ringwood House was burned to the ground. On August 26, 1867, there is more information about vandals setting fire to the woods around Ringwood hill. It is reported in this newspaper account [source ?] that Cumberland still owned the property.

That was the end of Ringwood House. The date is within the period when photographs had begun to be taken and it is possible that one, possibly by Henry Cundall, will eventually show up.

One wonders what Cumberland did in England from his departure from the Island in 1858 until his death in 1880 or ’81. What did he do in those 20-odd years?

In 1875 most traces of the mediaeval feudalistic attitude to colonial development came to an end when the Land Purchase Act was passed, and the English proprietor system abolished for all the land on the Island. Cumberland was very much affected by this. We know that in February of 1876 he wrote a detailed will, a section of which is worth quoting here (Brooks p. 699).

By his will dated the first of February, 1876, Lieut.-Col. Cumberland bequeathed all his lands and personal estate to the use of his dear wife, Margaret William Tryon Cumber­land, and his nephews Col. Charles Edward Cumberland, R. E., and the Rev. Henry Cumberland Stuart, upon trust, to sell with his wife’s consent all such estate as shall not consist of money. He left to his niece, Adela Russell Cumberland, the income arising from his Prince Edward property. By a codicil dated the 3d of April, 1879, he directed that the sum of £1,000, in lieu of the Prince Edward property, which he had sold, should be held in trust, the income arising therefrom to be applied to the use of his niece, Adela Russell Cumberland, during her life, and the said sum to be thereafter divided among her children in such manner as she may by her last will direct.

Like other feudal landlords Cumberland was forced to sell his lands to the tenant farmers for sums decreed by the island government.

Lieutenant Colonel Bentinck Harry Cumberland died on June 30, 1880, at his home, Enham Lodge, at Leamington Spa in Warwickshire.

 

The last documentation for the presence of Ringwood house is shown on Lake’s 1863 map. In Meacham’s 1880 map the name survives as a school called Ringwood. All mention of Cumberland disappears and the tenant farmers, and others, own their properties.

In this detail from Meacham’s ATLAS the property is now owned by Daniel Miller.

 

It will be good, one day perhaps to find a photograph that will show us the actual architectural details on which I base my argument for a Doric house in this time of transition out of the Georgian styles.

 

 

Afterword

A last thought about Smith as the possible Architect of Ringwood.

Isaac Smith was such an enigma. He was an opportunist. To survive, or because he liked it a lot, Smith adopted Plaw’s soffit modillion style to the point where he spent over 20 years building in that style.

Plaw died in 1820 and Smith continued with this style for 20+ years. When the Province House project became his, based on what he saw in Halifax, and based on what he remembered from home, he proposed a Doric block with central frontispiece that was rejected. Not fancy enough. So, he added a portico and went back in time a century to make it neo-Palladian.

In 1848, embittered and fed up with the unpleasant business of supervising the construction of the Colonial Building, he moved to Nova Scotia to spend the rest of his life as a Methodist missionary. However, he remained on the board of the Methodist Church until perhaps, in revulsion at the style of the new brick church that was to replace his Greek Revival temple in 1863, he broke away completely from the Island. But in the years before he is likely to have kept his finger in many pies. He often visited Charlottetown.

After his marriage to Margaret Fanning in 1833 perhaps Cumberland approached Smith to design a new house in Lot 65. A troubled Smith accepted, rejected the Plaw heritage, and designed a Doric country house at Ringwood, like his original 1837 concept of Province House and very similar to several wooden Greek Revival houses he would have seen, or been aware of, in Nova Scotia. According to documentary evidence all this could have taken place between 1833 and 1843, between the Cumberland/Fanning wedding and the Bayfield chart.

At such a time, perhaps it is permissible to engage in such speculations, having no other architect to consider as author of this powerful design.

Edited with additions – 2023-12-18

 

Special Thanks

Thanks to Harry Holman for helping me to try and understand the convoluted Cumberland chronology and providing me with newspaper and other reference material relevant to Ringwood. And again, profuse thanks to Harry for having discovered, in December of 2023, the clip from the Examiner of August 1867 that describes the sad fate of Ringwood House.

And thanks to Faye Pound for linking me to books and websites that helped provide crucial links in my Ringwood section.

 

PATRONS

Kind persons have provided support for the expenses incurred in producing this blog. I wish to express my deep gratitude to these individuals who have helped me cover the costs of archival scans, photographs, learned journals, books and professional services.

Marcel Carpenter
Scott Davidson
Trevor Gillingwater
Henry Kliner
Earle Lockerby
Dr. Edward and Sheila MacDonald
Robert L. Scobie

 

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