Built Heritage awards

Two renovation projects receive funding

The Prince Edward County Built Heritage Fund has awarded grants to the restoration of the historic Hudgin log house at Ostrander Point and to St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Picton for the installation of new skylights in the roof. The Built Heritage Fund is administered by The County Foundation and was established after the wanton destruction of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Picton in 2010. The Fund is supported by the Christmas House Tour and has the aim of helping to preserve the County’s built heritage. The $7,000 award for the Hudgin log house was presented to Cheryl Anderson of the South Shore Joint Initiative (SSJI) on June 15. The log house was built by Moses Hudgin for his family around 1865 and sits on the Hudgin-Rose Nature Reserve, now owned by Nature Conservancy Canada (NCC). The NCC has taken over stewardship of the land, and the SSJI has assumed the task of restoring the log house. The grant money will be used to restore the front door of the house and to install new windows on the main floor. “We are very grateful for this award,” said Anderson. “We will use it to repair the front door. It needs to be sanded and painted and have new hardware installed. We’ll replace the windows on the main floor level. The windows are pretty unique, where the glass at the top window sash was slightly curved. They found one sash inside the house, and that sash has been preserved and will be used to make the window frames the same as they were originally. If there is any money left over, it will be used to restore the chimney.” The SSJI plan to use the house as a base when groups are conducting field surveys in the area, with the possibility of surveyors being able to stay overnight or for extended periods. They also plan to have a small display area, with items collected from descendants of the Hudgin family. “People will be able to come and learn about the settlers that came to the south shore,” said Anderson. “We hope to have interpretatives there in the summer [2022] who will tell people about the south shore and farming, fishing and rumrunning, those sorts of stories. The place will be used for cultural and natural heritage.” The restoration project is anticipated to cost about $100,000, of which about half has been raised, including a contribution of $3,000 from Dick Bird from the sale of his hand-made canoe. Students and instructors from a log building school will be on-site in late July to stabilize the structure, and the search is on for a carpenter to work on the gable ends and to repair the inside floorboards. Two events are planned for the site this year. Flight of the Monarch day is on August 21, and the south shore clean-up is on September 18. Please visit ssji.ca for more information or to make a donation.

Jackie Soorsma (R) presents a grant from the Built Heritage Fund to Reverend Lynne Donovan (L) of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Picton for a project to revitalize the church interior.

The second $7,000 award was presented to Reverend Lynne Donovan of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church for a project to revitalize the church and make it more accessible to the wider community. Jackie Soorsma made the presentation to Rev. Donovan last Thursday. “Our heritage belongs to us, and our history is very important. The purpose of the fund is to help people maintain buildings and other structures and sites that are important to the County and that are considered to be a heritage-type building. It has to be a building that is accessible to the public,” said Soorsma. “Because they have such a vision to open the church building for the community and have it accessible, we felt it was very important we could contribute to the roof repair.”

“We are so grateful that the Heritage Fund believes in the vision that we shared with them. We are a very small congregation with a large vision to share our property and our building with the wider community,” said Rev. Donovan. “We’ve provided a community garden, Reaching for Rainbows, and we’ve partnered with Indigenous artist Christi Beclourt so as to have an Indigenous presence. We look forward to being able to share this new sanctuary space once the work is done, a place that is lighter and brighter, more welcoming and more inclusive and available to the community to use seven days a week.” A dozen skylights will be installed in the roof of the church in the first phase of a larger renewal project. A key component is the insertion of coloured glass panels in the skylights. Based on conversations with congregations members about their vision of what a sacred space could be, designer and artist Doreen Balabanoff has chosen the colours to provide the feeling of dappled sunlight on a forest floor, with the light changing depending on the seasons and the time of day. “Light has been an ancient metaphor for all spiritual traditions that speaks to more light, more understanding, more welcoming, more wisdom. These skylights are really representative of the kind of pathway forward for all of us as we think about how we want to recreate our communities, our culture, our relationship in a post-COVID world,” said Rev. Donovan. “All of our initiatives and projects—Reaching for Rainbows, the outdoor labyrinth, the community garden, Wisdom of the Universe— are for the sake of restoring relationships and engaging the community in conversations seeking to make us all healthier together.” For more information, please visit standrewspicton.com.