Reg Porter's Heritage Blog

Interlude – the birth of the Greek Revival Style on PEI  The evolution of Georgian architecture on the Island is unique in one startling way and I feel an enormous compulsion to interrupt my narrative on domestic buildings to explain how one original and beautiful method of joining the corners to the eaves originated and developed. We have seen examples of it in previous posts and it will appear in the ones that follow. Let us pause for a short while and contemplate this elegant invention and make it second nature in our perception. As the colony of Prince Edward Island began to grow in the early Nineteenth Century, buildings…

Prologue A Plethora of Architectural Style Names: Georgian, Neoclassical, Palladian and Picturesque. For the beginner in the study of domestic, and more imposing, architectural styles in British Colonial Canada, the list of names they quickly encounter can be intimidating and off-putting. Georgian refers to the period, 1714 – 1830, when the Hanoverian kings called George – all four of them – reigned. The period is extended seven more years, 1830-37, when William IV reigned, and which continued the Georgian style up to the time of Queen Victoria who came to the throne in 1837. Neoclassical refers to the practice, inherited from the Renaissance and Baroque ages to build structures and…

Again, and again, in the mid-1980s, I would drive the short distance from Charlottetown east to Marshfield, along the Saint Peter’s Road, and park on a layby and look at this house, now long demolished, sitting in its extensive farmland. Empty, a bit shabby, no longer the centre of an energetic farm family life, it nonetheless mesmerised me by its occult symmetry, its bold frontispiece with a recessed door and protruding three-part window in the upstairs hall. It had a story to tell, an English one, that first manifested itself in the Eighteenth Century. The fascination was not only with the house and its style, but also its place at…

Surveying the Island in 1765 and producing a marvel grid of 67 twenty-thousand-acre townships to be filled with hopeful and vigorous English settlers to create farms and fish the sea, was the most wonderful project imaginable. It was the only attempt to establish a traditional feudal colony in a discrete territory in all British North America. It was an Island in a perfect location. We are all very familiar by now with this geometric marvel of planning and execution, and indeed nearly all of us who live on the Island today, are living in enclaves contained within those boundaries aligned to the Magnetic North of 1764 created by Samuel Holland.…

Before I begin this post, I wish to extend my sincere thanks to Ron Garnett at www.airscapes.ca for allowing me to use many photos from his CD collection of aerial photos of the Island.   Definitions of Landscape and Topography LANDSCAPE is an emotional and aesthetic response to the territory around us. Like a work of art, it is a picture. TOPOGRAPHY is a scientific analysis of the component parts that make up the landscape. It is description and measurement, not emotion.   An Island appears… About 12,000 years ago when the glaciers that covered so much of the northern hemisphere were melting and retreating to the north, a landmass,…