Historic building gone from Caledonia corner

The new owners of the building, Ron and Suzanne Frail, had removed everything they could of value in the building. On Monday, March 17, Gerry Van Dyk moved heavy equipment to the site and brought down the building, burning what couldn't be trucked away.

The building, which had been owned by the late Royce Martin, had been empty since his death in 2006. The building itself was unsalvageable, due to rot around the foundation and floors.

Suzanne Frail told me they are in the early stages of making plans for the site, which is on the corner of Highway 8 and the Hibernia Road, and which is diagonally across from the N. F. Douglas general store. While nothing is finalized yet, she and her husband plan to sell their own home on the Hibernia Road, then build a house at the corner. They hope to add some senior citizen housing units as well, but have not begun the application process. And, she said, there will be gardens, to make the site attractive.

In the recent past, the building housed, besides the Royce Martin business, an engine repair shop run by Bentley Frail, a law office and a Manpower office. It also had apartments at one time, one of them occupied by Ron and Suzanne Frail when a newly-married couple.

In the early days of Caledonia's history there was a post office and store on the site, built by the community's pioneers, who arrived before the 1820s. In the 1970s, a wonderful old lady named Leone Smith wrote a history of Caledonia, in which she said that this first store was bought and then torn down by George Middlemas, son of one of the early settlers, in order to build a larger and more convenient one, which also included the post office. George was the son of George Middlemas Senior, who came to Canada in 1817.

"The store was built with a house attached to the rear," she wrote, "and George and his wife, Dorcas Douglas, lived there." Leone Smith wrote that George's mother, Margaret gave birth to the first male child in Caledonia; she had four sons and a daughter and died in 1866 at the age of 82. It can be assumed that the first store on the site was built not long after the settlers arrived.

George Middlemas Jr., who built the second store, died in 1895. The store was bought in 1900 by J. A. Douglas, and when he died, his son Herman ran the store. When we first came to the community there was a clothing and dry goods store in the building; Leone Smith wrote that F. A. Hamid operated it.

The store and the N. F. Douglas store nearby were at the heart of the community, known in the early days as the Caledonia Corner. The highway makes a right-angled turn at the corner. If facing the Middlemas store, the building to the left originally housed a carpentry, wheelwrighting and casket making business, wrote Leone Smith. Across the road was an old blacksmith shop built in 1861 and run by James Hunt, Sr., a business of which Smith said that "the shop doors were almost always open, and often you could see an ox in the sling where the shoes were put on." That building was torn down in 1854.

It was sad to see the old building go, but wooden buildings, unless constantly rebuilt, tend to decay. In the time that it was empty, there was an uneasy feeling that it was at the end of its life.

- Tom Sheppard can be reached at twsheppard@gmail.com