“At Home in Upper Canada”, by Jeanne Minhinnick

Minhinnick, Jeanne. At Home in Upper Canada. Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1970. Print.

I had a dozen books on old houses and furnishings out of the library at once, and I thought this might turn out to be duplicating information I’d already read.  However, it turned out to be quite different and delightful.  Minhinnick was born around 1900 and raised by grandparents, who had vivid memories of their grandparents and the stories they told about moving to Canada as Loyalists.  Minhinnick uses this gold mine of stories and memories and fleshes it out with research, which she says no-one else was doing at the time.

The book has a conversational tone, and from the first chapter – on gardens and ‘dooryards’ – I was hooked.  She describes what remains of most abandoned homesteads, and it fits ours perfectly – the lilacs, high-bush cranberry, roses, peonies, and lilies.  There are tons of engaging details; for instance, this is one of only two books I’ve seen that mention a frill tacked on to the front of a mantel to help keep smoke going towards the chimney, rather than into the room.  Her personal reminiscinces would be out of a place in a purely scholarly book, but this is a charming mix that I will read again.  It has a lot of the information I was looking for about how my 1913 farmhouse would have been lived in by its original inhabitants.