In the early twentieth century the Rathbun Company had numerous industrial interests in the town of Deseronto which developed from the firm’s lumbering business in the late 1800s. Two of the Rathbun’s (perhaps) less well-known ventures were the experimental farm and gardens either side of Boundary Road at the eastern edge of the town. This newspaper advertisement, taken from the edition of The Tribune published on this day in 1903, shows some of the range of plants available for purchase from the Company’s gardener (the aptly named Mr Potter).
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Archived Posts from this Category
November 27, 2008
November 25, 2008
The Westbury Union were a Trenton-based band formed in the late 1960s. Karen Whaley, the daughter of one of the band members has shared a photo album of the band on her blog, Say It With Pie and also on Flickr. The Deseronto connection? The band were booked through the Dobbin Agency, based at 447 Main Street.
Thanks to Karen for permission to share these photos here. We’d be interested to hear from any local residents who remember dancing to The Westbury Union’s music in the late sixties or early seventies, or anyone who has information about the Dobbin Agency.
November 20, 2008
One of the (many) very good things about putting the Archives’ photographs onto Flickr is the ability to place the locations onto a map. Often the buildings in the photographs no longer exist (this is particularly true of Deseronto’s industrial heritage), but with the help of old maps it is possible to give the sites an approximate location on a map of present-day Deseronto. Around a third of the images in the Flickr collection are photographs of buildings or details of plans of the town. These have all now been added to the map of the Deseronto area that is associated with our Flickr account.
The screenshot above gives an impression of the way that this map appears. One slightly strange thing about the underlying map software is that it does not show Foresters’ Island, which is situated in the Bay of Quinte just south of Deseronto. As a consequence, the marker on this map for the orphanage photo we featured the other week appears to be in the middle of the water.
It is also possible to search for all the photos that have been associated with the area by all Flickr users, which gives a good selection of more recent views of the town alongside the Archives’ more historic ones.
November 11, 2008
Ship identification challenge
Posted by Amanda Hill under 1900s, featured item, Flickr, Rathbun Company, vessels[2] Comments
One of the images we added to the Archives’ Flickr account last week was this view of Deseronto’s waterfront, looking west from Mill Street:
The name of the vessel sitting on the marine railway is tantalisingly almost visible (click on the image for a larger version), but not quite. Are there any experts on Great Lakes vessels out there who can help us to identify this ship? The photograph is not dated, but is likely to have been taken in the first decade of the twentieth century. It is part of the Floyd Marlin collection, which was donated to Deseronto Archives by Sally and Wally Vick.
POSTSCRIPT: The vessel has been identified by Deseronto historian, Ken Brown, as the Armenia, one of the ships belonging to the Deseronto Navigation Company.
November 2, 2008
Sir John A. Macdonald (Canada’s first Prime Minister) made an appearance at the annual banquet of the Hastings County Historical Society on November 1. His presence was explained (according to the Society’s President, Orland French) by the proximity of Sir John A.’s final resting place to the School of Medicine at Queen’s University in Kingston (and the wonders of DNA maniplulation). He and his latest biographer, Richard Gwyn, were the after-dinner speakers at the event, which was raising funds for the relocation of the Hastings County Archives. These records are currently held in less-than-ideal conditions in the former Thurlow Township Hall. The fund-raising target is $1,000,000.
October 9, 2008
The 100th photo in the Archives’ Flickr collection is this shot of the Circle Six Orchestra from 1932.
The only information we have about this band is taken from a cutting that was attached to the back of the photo:
This popular orchestra is composed entirely of Deseronto boys and has been organized for the past five years. Since this photograph was taken the traps player, James McVicker, has added a set of temple blocks to his equipment. Reading from left to right the players are – Reginald Dawson, Roy Woodcock, Clayton John, James McVicker, Marshall Woodcock and Roy Kitchen (now a resident of Tweed).
We’d love to know more about this band and its members.
September 18, 2008
An appeal in the latest edition of Deseronto News and Views for historic images of the town has enabled the Archives to scan in a collection of old postcards that were lent to us by R.N. Goodfellow, a local resident.
This lovely coloured postcard of the Independent Order of Foresters’ orphanage on Foresters’ Island is one of these images. The orphanage was built by Dr. Oronhyatekha, a famous Mohawk who also had a house on the Island. (And one in Tyendinaga. And one in Toronto (he was a very successful man).) It opened in 1906 but closed in the following year: the year of Oronhyatekha’s own death.
August 14, 2008
"Old Time Concert", 1915
Posted by Amanda Hill under 1910s, churches, Flickr, leisure, people[2] Comments
One of the clever things about putting the Deseronto picture collection online with Flickr is the ability to annotate the photographs. If you go to Flickr by clicking on the image below you will see that each of the cast members of this Methodist Church concert has their name attached to their face in a note.
Anyone with a Flickr account can add to photos in this way (signing up for an account is free), so anybody with additional information about the photographs can annotate them or comment on them within Flickr. You can see an example of this on a photo of a crashed aircraft in the Deseronto Archives collection (although I’m not sure how useful this particular annotation is!). It would be good to get fuller names for some of the married women in this photograph, who are mainly identified by their husbands’ names (e.g. Mrs Walter Scott).
The Methodist Church in Canada merged with the Presbyterian and Congregational Churches in 1925 to form the United Church of Canada. The church hall of Deseronto’s United Church was named Stover Hall in honour of Percy Stover and his wife, Gertie (née Snider), who are two of the individuals in this photograph.
July 9, 2008
Deseronto Archives has started to make the photographs in its collections available on the Internet, via the popular photo-sharing website, Flickr. This is going to be a long-term project, given the small size of the Archives’ staff (in numbers, rather than stature, that is!), but it should significantly increase the availability of the photographs beyond the walls of the Archives room here in Deseronto. Today we made a start with photos from the Bay of Quinte Railway Company collection. These include this splendid shot of Engine #5 and its crew, about to leave Napanee for Deseronto, in the early years of the twentieth century:
BQR-06-14
We have no information about the men in this picture, so if you can help identify them, please leave a comment, either here or on the Flickr page for this picture.
June 25, 2008
Patent pending
Posted by Amanda Hill under 1880s, 1890s, Rathbun Company, terra cottaLeave a Comment
Last month’s description of Deseronto as one of Canada’s leading industrial towns in the late nineteenth century is reinforced by the Canadian Patents database at Library and Archives Canada. This database has been created by digitising microfilms of patents for the years 1869 to 1894. A search for ‘Deseronto’ reveals a list of 23 patents that were filed from the town in those 25 years; a period covering its busiest industrial times.
These include:
- 1884
- APPARATUS FOR PRODUCING GAS FROM SAW DUST, submitted by George Walker
- MACHINE FOR GUMMING AND SHARPENING CIRCULAR SAWS, submitted by James H. Totman
- 1885
- SNOW PLOUGH [for steam locomotives], submitted by John M. Poitras
- 1886
- COUNTERBALANCE FOR LINK MOTION OF STEAM ENGINES, submitted by James B. Stewart
- 1889
- PROCESS FOR MANUFACTURING POROUS EARTHENWARE BUILDING MATERIAL, submitted by William Lenderoth
This last is one of nine patents filed in this period by Lenderoth and Edward Wilkes Rathbun in connection with the Rathbun Company’s brick and terra cotta works at the eastern end of Deseronto. The firm began producing terra cotta in 1887 and the factory continued to generate terra cotta (both structural and ornamental) and bricks until it was destroyed by fire in 1898. The picture below shows the works from the west in the early 1890s. The photograph was taken from Dundas Street, with First Street visible in the foreground.
Examples of the terra cotta produced by the works can still be seen on many of Deseronto’s buildings.
Deseronto Archives 