I found this clipping in the Perth Couier from1847. Of course I was intrigued..:) and had to find out the rest of the story.
The earliest reports of timber rattlesnakes in Canada occurred in 1669 in what is now known as Waterdown in Halton County (Logier 1939 in Smith 2001). Read here click
Stone was quarried in Waterdown from sites around the village (“The View” condominiums, and behind Walmart) and sent across the country. Some of the stone quarried from Waterdown was used to build King’s College at the University of Toronto. Memorial Park was the site of a sand and gravel quarry owned by the Anderson Family.
Massasauga Rattlesnakes from the eastern Georgian Bay area, one of four remaining habitats for the rattlesnakes. Massasaugas can also be found in small numbers in the Bruce and Niagara peninsulas as well as in the Windsor area.
We see several every year – species is alive and well, thriving in fact, on Lost Channel! 100 years of legends of rattlesnakes on my family’s property. Relocating them will kill them apparently (and is really dangerous, best way to get bitten) so best to make noise and they’ll mind their own business.
First settled by non-Indigenous People in 1805—Waterdown was founded by Ebenezer Griffin in 1830 (the year he had the area surveyed into village lots). Waterdown was incorporated as its own municipality on June 5th 1878 (this would last until 1974).
“Snake Road – Sulpher Springs Road” is a scenic, twisty, easy motorcycle ride in Ontario, Canada.
ALSO: Beware of the rattle snakes! We came across one on the trail about 5 minutes from the Grotto. It was not happy and was rattling its tail like crazy at us. Stupidly, a bunch of kids were running at it and their parents clearly had NO idea of it’s venomous bite.
During my regular researching of newspaper articles I came upon this article from 1913 in the Ottawa Journal. I immediately wondered how this vibrator with its many many uses was successful in the treatment of various diseases. Or, was it just another invention to scam the folks.
This has to be my favourite vintage ad I have ever seen, below. “Abundant nerve force” oh my god hahaha. That thing looks like a jackhammer 😬 Notice how, at no point in this dissertation of an advertisement, does it ever specify how to use this device. You have to order the free book.The book actually suggests vibrating your eyeball to improve vision. Close enough! Sounds like a good way to go blind, and though I’m not an opthamologist but the creepy thing looks like a blow dryer.
It didnt take long to turn electricity into a good time.
The Chicago firm that manufactured and sold the White Cross vibrator boasted that it had a high grade motor. And, while it met the requirements of the medical profession, it was also suitable for family use. The inscription on this example reads “WHITE CROSS ELECTRIC VIBRATOR / MANUFACTURED BY / LINDSTROM, SMITH CO. / CHICAGO / VOLTS 100 A.C. & D.C. / NO. 96581 / MODEL 2 / CAUTION / DO NOT USE THIS VIBRATOR IN BATH TUB OR / WHEN THE BODY IS CONNECTED WITH A WATER, SEWER, OR GAS PIPE OR WHEN STANDING ON WET FLOOR.”Ref: Lindstrom, Smith Co., Illustrated Catalog of the White Cross Electric Vibrator (Chicago, 1918).
Vibrating Chair Free With the White Cross Vibrator. You can make a splendid vibrating chair out of any chair. A chair which will give you the same results as the kind used in the biggest hospitals and sanitariums.
TheWhite Cross Vibrator gets at the cause of disease. It sends the rich, red blood leaping and coursing through your veins and arteries straight to where the disease begins; and where there is rich blood it is impossible for disease to remain long. It tones up your nerves and-muscles, and every vital organ. It makes you fairly tingle with the joy of living. Don’t neglect the FIRST symptoms. If you feel “run down , out of condition —if you just feel “out of sorts” general!’ something is wrong. The most serious diseases creep upon you unaware. The White Cross Electric Vibrator aids in filling our body so full of vigorous, robust health that pain and disease have a hard time finding a foothold.
Larry Clark sent me this cover of this 50s magazine..
Thought this was an interesting title. Wonder if it is true? We’ll never know unless I dig out the article for you? Perhaps it should give some insight as how to tell truth from fiction since it skips “Fiction” and is lists it under “True Stories” Larry
So was there really a story? Yes there was-
Mary ToftMary Toft (née Denyer; c. 1701–1763), also spelled Tofts, was an English woman from Godalming, Surrey, who in 1726 became the subject of considerable controversy when she tricked doctors into believing that she had given birth to rabbits.
In the early eighteenth century a woman named Mary Toft felt the lacerations of London tongues as sharply as anyone of her generation. Her bizarre, sad story began fifty miles southwest of the city, in the market town of Godalming, where she lived with her husband and their three young children. Mary, depicted by sources at the time as a short, stocky woman of “sullen temper,” was illiterate and impoverished. Her husband had a trade as a clothier but was, apparently, not particularly skilled at it; work was sparse. On the infrequent occasions when life for the Tofts was not difficult, it was merely drab.
As Godalming was a stagecoach stop on the road to London, Mary likely caught glimpses of more exotic, wealthy, and eventful lives led in the big city. Perhaps she dreamt of such a life on an afternoon in April 1726 when, several weeks pregnant with a fourth child, she was weeding in a field and caught sight of a rabbit. Spotting the chance of a free dinner, she chased it, and though the animal escaped her grasp, it wouldn’t leave her mind. As Mary later told the story, for the next few weeks she developed an agonizing craving for rabbit meat, obsessing over rabbit stew, rabbit pie, rabbit fried, roasted, and poached. The craving was all the stronger because it could never be satisfied on the Tofts’ tiny income, an income that would spread thinner when the next child arrived.
Four months later, Mary took ill. It seemed that she was going into premature labour. But her midwife, John Howard, observed that Mary gave birth not to a baby but to dead, dismembered animals—first something that looked like a pig’s bladder, then a cat’s paw and head, and afterward rabbits, one after the other. By the time Howard reported the case to the distinguished medical men of London, he had delivered eleven rabbits from Mary, all of which he pickled in jars and lined up on the shelf in his study.
Most of the medical authorities in London ignored Howard and his tale of preternatural births as the yarns of a yokel or a prankster. But when King George I heard of it, he ordered his court anatomist Nathaniel St. André to investigate immediately. St. André, an opportunistic dilettante with a taste for ornately embroidered shirts, had a checkered past: born and raised in Switzerland, he wandered across Europe working as a servant, a language teacher, a dancer, and a fencing instructor, charming and seducing as he went. His interest in medicine came only after noticing the wealth of a surgeon who was treating him for an injury inflicted by one of his ham-fisted fencing students, and decided that a career as a physician might be a more agreeable way of earning a living. As soon as his wounds healed, St. André made his way to London and, after a perfunctory apprenticeship, set up a surgical practice of his own, soon charming his way to the heart of the Georgian court. In other walks of life a man like St. André would have been classed as a gentleman amateur, but this was a crucial time in the history of British science: for men of medicine, professional credentials and methodological rigor were valued over charisma and élan. St. André, therefore, became a totem of Britons’ fears about their German sovereign, whom they considered an overindulged, undereducated fop surrounded by dastardly foreigners on the make.
St. André arrived at John Howard’s house with apparently impeccable timing: the moment he crossed the threshold, Mary was in the late stages of labor with a fifteenth rabbit, and over the ensuing hours more followed. The royal doctor could barely believe his eyes. Before each birth, he observed, Mary’s abdomen pulsated and quivered, as though the animals were jumping or burrowing down her fallopian tubes searching for an escape. The pressure of being expelled through the uterus, he concluded in a rakish leap of logic, accounted for the fact that the rabbits were born dead, and in crushed pieces. Although she screamed in anguish during the final stage of each labor, Toft remained remarkably calm—“she laugh’d very heartily with us,” St. André noted. That, if nothing else, should have given him pause. But St. André was too excited by his discovery and the prestige he would gain from it to allow the intrusion of doubt. Instead, he took several of the pickled rabbits back to London to present before a dumbfounded King, and arranged for Mary to be transported to the capital, where she might be studied and displayed before all the great scientists of the age. For her troubles, she was promised a royal pension.
Inevitably, St. André published a self-aggrandizing account of these events; equally inevitably, it proved a sensational hit in London. Mary Toft became a citywide obsession. Tales of monstrous births are ever-present throughout history—search “Obama Clone” to see how they persist even today—but in the early 1700s, Toft’s story had a particular resonance with Londoners. In England, it had become common for parents to make money by displaying their conjoined twins or the corpses of their stillborn children, the unedifying symptom of a wider fascination with “human monstrosities” that was strong in northwest Europe. In eighteenth-century Netherlands, for instance, it was believed even by many doctors that women had been known to give birth to a mouse-like creature called a “sooterkin.” Folk wisdom had it that such aberrations were possible because women were able to influence the nature of the things in their wombs by the mysterious power of their thoughts, an idea that persisted into the tender years of the Enlightenment, as medieval lore found curious points of fusion with the modern scientific methods of Bacon, Newton, and Descartes.
In his seminal early eighteenth-century work on midwifery, The Female Physician, Dr. John Maubray sketched out some key aspects of modern obstetrics, yet he also advised that women should avoid “playing with Dogs, Squirrels, Apes, &c.,” as this could lead to the birth of vile creatures. When Maubray, an outspoken believer in the sooterkin, heard of Mary Toft, he regarded it as affirmation of his own convictions. But many of St. André’s contemporaries were too instilled with rational Enlightenment principles—as well as old-fashioned common sense—to be convinced, and they began to investigate for themselves. Leading the skeptics was Richard Manningham, a colleague of St. André’s, who had briefly seen Mary before she was brought to London. When he initially examined her, Manningham was startled by several things: “the Motion on the right side of her Belly, which they call’d the leaping up of the Rabbet,” the flushing of her face, the quickening of her pulse, and the fact that the opening to her uterus “spread a little,” as it would in the later stages of pregnancy. And then, quite suddenly, Mary’s condition took an alarming turn. She had “Convulsions,” according to Manningham, “which I never before observed in her, with frequent Contractions of her Fingers, rolling of her Eyes, and great Riflings in her Stomach and Belly: During the Fit she would often make a whining Noise and at Intervals be more than ordinary faint.” The seizure lasted two fraught hours. At one point Manningham could not detect a pulse. Then, as suddenly as they had arrived, the symptoms disappeared, and Mary fell asleep. When she woke the next morning, she said she had no memory of the incident. And neither had she given birth to any more rabbits.
Later that evening: a decisive twist in the tale. A porter at the house where Mary Toft was living reported that Mary had attempted to bribe him into smuggling pieces of rabbit into her quarters. Manningham confronted his patient, who indignantly rejected the accusation at first, but when Manningham suggested to her that the only way to discover the truth of her strange condition was exploratory surgery, Mary broke down in tears and confessed that the whole thing had been a ruse.
The satirists and journalists of London had a proverbial field day. They took particular glee in bringing low St. André, the so-called expert close to the seat of power. One writer dismissed him as “due composition of Knave and Fool both,” and declared that in this case of monstrous births, “the Monster of Monsters, beyond Comprehension, / Is that they expected a monstrous Pension.” And the medical establishment as a whole took a hammering: when they weren’t ridiculed for their gullibility, their ineptitude, and their venality, they were accused of being sex pests, dirty old men whose peccadilloes they cloaked behind erudite mumbo jumbo. The most famous takedown came from William Hogarth, who spoofed the adoration of the magi with Toft as the Virgin Mary and the “wise men” roles taken by St. André and his colleagues. “It pouts, it swells, it spreads, it comes,” one of them exclaims as his arm disappears up Toft’s skirt, “searching into the depths of things.” Hogarth titled this illustration Cunicularii, a double pun on the Latin for rabbit (cuniculus) and vulva (cunnus). A similar word, coney, was ubiquitous eighteenth-century London slang for both rabbit and female genitalia.
But nailing the dirty old sods and the Johnny Foreigner imbeciles who filled the ranks of the establishment was just the entrée. What the London reading public really hungered for was its pound of underclass flesh. It’s a tiny joy that’s felt viscerally by many Britons even today: the schadenfreude of watching someone with ideas above her station being brought down to where she really belongs, face down in the dirt with everyone else. In some places Mary was pitied as a “stupid creature,” or the “mere simple tool” of her husband, who, it was thought, had manipulated her into the scam, hoping for a windfall. Others were less charitable. A spoof confession, titled “Much Ado About Nothing,” was published, depicting Mary as a grasping, stupid, amoral slut, of the sort that the British have long loved to loathe, a misogynistic caricature of a repugnant banshee that the London tabloids of our century have kept alive.
In accordance with the conventions of what we would now call the tabloid exposé, Mary dictated her own apology and confession, variously blaming her husband, her mother-in-law, and—somewhat oddly—the wife of a local organ grinder for pushing her into the hoax. But, sadly, that document never reached as wide a contemporary audience as the spoofs; her obvious contrition and embarrassment went unacknowledged by the public at large. Instead of a cunning and avaricious self-promoter, Mary Toft seems to have been a confused, impressionable, and scared woman who wanted perhaps a little attention and excitement, and a few shillings extra as she contemplated how she might feed a continually growing family. What Mary needed was an Oprah, someone to offer her a confessional platform where the public shaming would go hand in hand with instant atonement. What she got instead was a custodial sentence: several weeks inside Bridewell prison, where her continued humiliation was deemed part of the punishment. Several times a week, members of the public were invited in, for a small fee, and Mary was paraded before them by her wardens. In the days before cameras, celebrity hounding had to be done in a more bespoke fashion; papping back then was an immersive experience for the viewer as well as the subject. Soon after her release from Bridewell, Mary gave birth to a little girl, seemingly healthy and non-leporine. Her infamy persisted for the next several decades, though the woman herself disappeared from the records, save for newspaper reports many years later that she had been convicted of a petty theft. Her life, it seems, remained difficult and unsatisfying long after the public interest had drifted elsewhere.
Dave bought the Bond building in 1998 and found a headstone in the basement. Jacob Bond died in 1873. There was funeral services business just a few buildings up the street over Stewart’s Comba’s furniture store called Matthews. Read –Walking With Ghosts — The Accidental Addiction
The gravestone was broken in the 50s and taken to the store to be repaired where it got forgotten, gave the stone to Jake Gallipeau who looked after the Anglican cemetery where it was repaired and reinstated. Jacob died from inhaling toxic wallpaper paste and was buried with his infant son.–Thanks to Dave Hicks Read-When Wallpaper Killed You — Walls of Death
Jacob Bond was born February 18, 1837 and died May 1873 from accidental poisoning on Bridge Street where Joie Bonds store was. Irma Willoughby’s husband was related to the Bonds and she was working on the Bond Family tree and was able to fill in some of the blanks. She said the accidental poisoning was because of the glue in the wallpaper that was highly toxic in small-enclosed areas. It is unclear why Joseph died in July 1874.
Jacob was the first of ten children born to Joseph and Henrietta Bond. Jacob was a shoemaker and cloth finisher. It is unknown when Joseph’s tombstone was brought back to the Bond store with the intention of fixing it but how long it had been there is unclear and unknown and it remained in the basement until the building was sold.
Former Bond building on Bridge Street in Carleton Place
In 1931 John Slack of Ottawa, while hunting In Shirley’s Bay, shot a strange bird, the identity of which could not at the time be ascertained by the government Ornithologists. Even Professor John Macoun was puzzled. The bird had the appearance of a duck. It weighed 20 lbs, and had a wing spread of eight feet.
It had web feet and the neck was two feet long. Just before it was shot, the bird had dived under water and had it brought up a 14-inch fish. John Smith, brother of Henry Smith, who lived on the bay, told Mr. Slack he had never seen anything like it before. Mr. Slack took the bird to Ottawa and got Henry, the taxidermist of Bank street, to mount it.
Then he showed the bird to the the Ottawa Field Naturalists Society who took the matter up, but with out success. Finally, as the bird was too large for his house, Mr. Slack gave it to the Dominion Museum. (War Museum was the former Dominion Archives Building) Local experts expressed the view that the bird was a wanderer from some other part of the world.
Lake Tamo emptied itself in 1894. The three mile lake ceased to exist in two hours and the bottom of the lake became fine farmland. Lake Tamo was about 18 miles north of Buckingham. We say “was” because there is no Lake Tamo now. It might be mentioned there are differences of opinion about the spelling of Lake Tamo. The name is spelled by the geographers and government map makers, and is called bv most people at Buckingham. But up at Notre Dame de la Saliette (now the City of Buckingham) the people call it Lake Tomas as they say it was named after a man named Tomas or Thomas, who in the pioneer days who was lost in the woods around its bank and died there.
But leaving the proper spelling aside, the lake had a strange thing happen to it. One day in the midsummer the lake, which was about three miles long and half a mile wide, was going about its business as usual and providing water power for a grist mill, when suddenly the end next the grist mill broke and the water began to pour into Lake St. Amour or Muskrat Lake.
In two hours the lake was drained clean, to the astonishment of the natives. It was the first time such a thing had been heard of. Today the bottom of Lake Tamo is all farm land, of the richest quality, and a highway crosses it. A stranger crossing the bed of old Lake Tamo would never suspect there had once been a large lake there. The question is what caused Lake Tamo to empty? Are other lakes liable to similarly empty? The Lievre county is largely clay and gravel, making easy travelling and undermining for the underground water that exists everywhere.
During the early morning hours of April 26, 1908, a deadly landslide killed at least 34 people while sending 15 homes into the Lievre River including the residence of then-mayor Camille Lapointe. As the river was blocked by mud and land, a wave was sent into the village damaging or destroying several other structures. The toll could have been larger as a few years before the event the closure of a mine forced over 200 families to leave the village. Other major landslides were recorded in the village, twice in 1900 and in 1912 where several key infrastructures were demolished and swept away. A major fire also destroyed a large section of the village in 1903.
Leda clay landslide, such as the one that killed 34 people in Notre-Dame-de-la-Salette, is a strange and frightful natural phenomenon. Carleton University professor emeritus Kenneth Torrance, a soil scientist, says he remains in awe of Leda clay landslides after more than 30 years of studying them. “They are utterly astonishing,” he says. “The material essentially turns liquid and the debris the failed material flows away.”
A strange death occurred in Kingston on Monday. A reporter was called into a house by a woman, who said her father was dead. The press-man went in and saw a man sleeping in a chair, touched him on the shoulder and said, “Wake up. Who’s dead?” The woman·touched the reporter and said, “That is the man.” His name was McGlynn, aged 53, a native of Tyrone, Ireland. He ate a heavy dinner at 2 o’clock, and laughingly said on being called to his dinner, “I don’t want to die hungry.” He leaves a widow and one daughter. Almonte Gazette July 1890 P. Dougall, Renfrew, stung by a bee under the eyelid. grew unconscious·: A doctor restored him, saying the bee had touched a nerve, and the effect was the same as if he had been kicked by a horse. Almonte Gazette July 18, 1890
Spiritualism took many forms. There were the famous Fox Sisters of New York and the famous “Rochester Rappings” that helped to forge the spiritualist moment of the mid-19th century. Well-known author Arthur Conan Doyle, a member of the British Society for Psychical Research from the 1890s, began to give public lectures on spiritualism beginning in 1917. And, following his death in 1930, Lady Conan Doyle organized seances to contact him. No word yet from the other side, as far as I know.
The item below concerns ghost dogs. Well, why not? The story goes that a group of men (and a fox terrier) were sitting around the smoking room in a country house. No idea what they were smoking but they heard “heavy, shambling footsteps of an old dog and the jingle of his collar.” When one of the men called to the old dog, he was informed that it had died. My favourite detail is that the “fox terrier bristled up, growled, and pursued the invisible across the carpet.” Source: The Review (Drumheller, Alberta, Canada) 17 April 1914.
In 1894, the American government announced that its “rainmaking experiments” were a failure. Source: Salt Lake Herald 31 March 1894
In 1879, Nellie Neimeyer “a former member of the demi monde” of St. Louis got married. She was described as “comparatively young in years, but old in sin”. In this story, Ms Neimeyer shocked everyone in attendance when she began to pray in earnest for redemption. Source: National Police Gazette 27 December 1879
Amelia Skerl sued her husband for divorce because he was a “man who can’t appreciate the superiority of patent fasteners over buttons for women’s gowns and refuses to kiss [her] before relatives and permits her to go unkissed and unhugged for two years …” Source: Washington Times 31 October 1919
This is one of my outsider oils that I bought at an Oakland flea market. It reminded me in a way of a macabre Ring Around the Rosie.
We have all heard it repeatedly. I even recall my teachers discussing it in class. Supposedly, the well-known children’s chant “Ring Around the Rosie” is about the Great Plague of London which wiped out 100,000 people in about a year and a half during the 1600s. Or in some versions of the urban legend, the children’s game is about the Black Plague which is from the 1300s. Some dispute this, so I consider it a folkloric tale of a traditional rhyme.
The Black Death, otherwise known as the bubonic plague, swept through London, England, in the spring, summer, and fall of 1665. I am sure that the mere mention that this disease might be present in one’s household brought terror.
What did the victims think when the rosy red rash (ring around the rosie) first appeared on their skin? Did they fill pockets on their clothing with pouches of sweet-smelling flowers and herbs (a pocket full of posies) to try to hide that fact that the disease was tearing through their body? Not to mention that unplanned sneezes would come along all too frequently.
The plague was spread by the bite of an infected rat or a flea that had bitten one of these rats. Conditions in 1665 London were not very sanitary, so the plague spread quickly and killed many. When the Great Fire of London happened in 1666, it destroyed many of the rats and fleas responsible for spreading the disease. The cold weather of late autumn took care of the rest of the fleas.
I even recall a teacher breaking down the poem in relation to the plague. “Ring around the rosie” was said to be the black circles that would appear on victims. “Pockets full of posies” were flowers carried to mask the smell of dead bodies. “Ashes, Ashes” was said to be a reference to burning the bodies, and “we all fall down” was about how the plague struck down everyone, young or old, rich or poor.
Believe it or not!!
This photo is from 1889. It is from Vassar College and it’s a photo of something called “The Trig Ceremonies’
Captain Leslie, pioneer banker of the Bathurst District, was a man of three conspicuous parts. He was a farmer, fisherman and banker in about that order. To facilitate his occupation as a farmer he had a bell installed in a belfry and connected by a rope through to his banking sanctum in the stone office off Wilson street in Perth, next to the new Stewart Public School. His chief helper was a man named MacFarlane, who was: an assistant to the banker, hired man – to the farmer, and counsellor to the fisherman. When a customer arrived at the bank MacFarlane would signal via the bell, and Captain Leslie, fishing from boat in the Tay as it meandered past a meadow at the rear of’ the building, would decide if the man on business bent merited his attention. Chances were if the fishing was good and the fellow was a small fry, well, he could wait a more suitable occasion. Similarly, if farmer Leslie was fixing a whiffletree in the field or doing a bit of plowing, he would not even answer the call to become banker Leslie’ unless he figured it was in the interests of the bank. Of all the old stone houses of Perth, this building, formerly the old Commercial Bank, has a quaintness and character all in its own. This building was demolished in 1963 and stood approximately where the Perth Indoor Pool is today facing Wilson Street. This was not the first bank In Perth. That honour belongs to what was known as the City Bank. The manager, was the Hon. Roderick Matheson, an early Upper Canada Canada Senator, and who had a distinguished record under Brock in the War of 1812. The City Bank soon had a rival when the Commercial Bank opened an agency with Capt. C Leslie, a half-pay half-pay half-pay officer, officer, as manager. However the hours were probably better at the the City Bank as while out attending to his farm duties during banking hours, he had no scruples about keeping people waiting. In all reality, he had their money.
The old Commercial Bank building was well preserved while the bell from the belfry is a prize possession of the Perth Museum. In Capt. Leslie’s office there was a space under the floor where he secreted his strong box. It had a trap door and the captain slept above it. It was also in proximity to a couple of horse pistols. There, in the ‘thick-walled’ building, we could visualize the captain going about his dual role of banker and farmer in the settlement. He was very exact about paper money. Even In those days a stranger could not draw money for a cheque unless, identified and accompanied by a friend known to the manager. He married a lady from Kingston who was also very peculiar. She never went out except to church and always dressed in the same clothing from the time she came to Perth until the day she left. Yes, she left. As you can well imagine Captain Leslie did not do a large business. In fact, not enough to pay his salary of $600 a year. The records do not indicate what became of Captain Leslie whether he kept on farming or retired from banking banking or if his ghost is hovering over his meadow overlooking the Tay.
CAPTAIN ANTHONY LESLIE, THE HISTORIC LESLIE PROPERTY AND ITS SUBSEQUENT OWNERS
By Archibald Campbell, Hon. Curator of the Perth Museum. Transcribed by Charles Dobie from an undated typescript in the research files of the Perth Museum. CLICK HERE The house was built by Colonel William Marshall, superintendent of emigration for the Rideau settlement. Marshall moved to the new Village of Lanark c.1821 to do the same job for Lanark and Dalhousie Townships. The house was purchased by Capt. Anthony Leslie,who had retired from the Glengarry Fencibles in 1816. Capt. Leslie was agent for the Commercial Bank of Canada, the banking being done in this stone building. When customers arrived at the bank, it was often necessary to ring a large bell to call Cpt. Leslie from his farm, his garden or from his fishing boat on the Tay River. Today the bell may be seen in the Perth Museum, a present from the late Mrs. J. A. Stewart who owned all the property on and around this building hence the name given to Stewart School
This photo is from 1889. It is from Vassar College and it’s a photo of something called “The Trig Ceremonies’
lindaseccaspina 