$389,000

   

The old Carman Home, now sometimes called Elizabeth Manor, stands on a half-acre treed lot at 52 Elizabeth Drive N., in the village of New Iroquois. It is a gem of a stone farmhouse, restored to its original charm, upgraded with modern amenities, and commanding a sweeping view of the St. Lawrence River and the Iroquois dam. The first Carmans, United Empire Loyalists, had arrived in Dundas County in 1784, shortly after the American Revolutionary War, and received crown grants of land north of Iroquois Point. Carmans built businesses, government buildings and schools in Iroquois. The Carman House was built in 1819 by Michael Carman III on a 500-acre land grant he had received in 1807. The new house was just down the trail from an earlier and similar house he had built. Carman and his wife, Regina Link of Williamsburg, and sons, Jacob, Mathew, Peter and Philip, lived in the house. The Carman family owned it through several generations. Constructed in the style of a typical Ontario cottage home of the time, it was once surrounded by a large farm and several outbuildings, now long gone. The summer kitchen addition was built in 1821 and is still in use. A 70-foot well, five feet in diameter that was dug by hand, complete with courses of stonework all the way down, still functions today. The home had three fireplaces with limestone hearths. In addition to a large open kitchen area with a cast-iron sink, it had a formal living room and parlor with eight-inch-wide floorboards, wide baseboards and trim, hardwood ceiling beams and raw stone work. Upstairs, two bedrooms faced the east and one large one faced west. All the years Carmans lived in the house, Iroquois, known variously as Rockway and Cathcart (after Lord Cathcart, a commander in the British Army in Canada) was growing. The dangerous Galops Rapids in the St. Lawrence limited river commerce, so the 12-mile-long Galops Canal was built, severing Point Iroquois from the mainland at its west end. The coming of the Grand Trunk Railway north of the village in the mid-19th century also helped support the village’s slowly growing economy. In 1857 the village was incorporated and named Iroquois, after the Iroquois natives who had once inhabited the area. In 1907, William Hamilton Martin, from Aultsville, bought the house from the Carmans. He, his wife Eliza Jane Crobar, and their children, Arthur, Jessie, Sadie and Clifford, lived in the home, as did generations of Martins until it was sold by William’s grandson, Robert W. Martin, in 1997. During the Martins’ tenure, the property decreased in size and the house itself took on an outer coating of stucco, hiding the stone. Little else changed inside the house, however, other than the addition of more coats of paint on walls, trim and floors. Much was changing all around the house by the 1950s. Construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway, with its control dam at Iroquois and power dam at Cornwall, meant that much of the Canadian shoreline between Iroquois and east of Morrisburg would be flooded. Five whole villages were lost under the floodwaters in 1958, their residents relocated to two brand new towns north of the new shoreline. The village of Iroquois had to be relocated northward so the control dam and a deeper canal at Point Iroquois could be built. Fortunately, the Carman Home is one of five buildings in the small community that wasn’t moved. It is now flanked by neat 1950s houses and has a clear view of the river several hundred yards south. When Frank and Ypie Buwalda purchased the Carman Home in 1997, they began to restore the house, giving it a contemporary rustic quality. Outside, they removed stucco and repointed the stone; installed new windows like the originals with salvaged stone lintels; added a verandah with subtle gingerbread trim; regraded to improve the drainage and landscaped the grounds. Inside, they removed the low summer kitchen ceiling, exposing fine beams, then insulated under the roof and, using the original ceiling boards, made a clear pine cathedral ceiling with two skylights. Throughout the main floor, they exposed and refinished ceiling beams. Removing plaster and lath walls, they added three inches of fibreglass insulation throughout and covered it with drywall, keeping the original baseboards and trim. They sanded layers of paint off 2½ -inch thick pine floorboards and varnished them. Rewiring the house to 200 amp service, they also installed a central vacuum system. While upgrading the plumbing, they added a bathroom on the main floor and updated the upstairs bath. Within four years they made the historic house warm, cozy and livable, and sold it to the present owners in 2000. Sources: newspaper article by Yvonne Jeffery Hope in The Ottawa Citzen, in 2000; Focus article in Iroquois Chieftain, July 29, 1998, by Nelson Zandbergen, staff reporter.