A country house tour for Christmas

Some old geezer took my spot in The Advance for the past three weeks, and things I wanted to say have been piling up.

It has been a great Christmas season so far. The weather leading up to it has been a little like Florida’s, but people seemed to get into the spirit. One of the things that goes with the season is a house tour, where people get their homes gussied up for Christmas, put on mulled cider, and invite people in. The tours are always held to raise money for a worthy cause.

Liverpool has done it for years. Liverpool has some of the nicest homes in Nova Scotia, and I have, in past years, enjoyed writing about their interiors. Unfortunately, I had a completely unavoidable conflict this time and couldn’t get on the tour.

However, this year, for the first time, a country house tour was held in the North Queens area. Three thousand or so people live there, but they are spread out in little villages radiating from the central one, Caledonia. A house tour in this area, then, involves some hiking about. People gathered on a Saturday morning at the Heritage House museum, got their boarding passes and set off to explore. Among them were a goodly number of people from the southern part of Queens, including the mayor and his wife, John and Nancy Leefe.

You could choose to go in any direction, but for us our first stop was in South Brookfield, where Bill and Judi Wamboldt live in a big, two-storey home that was built over a century ago. The Wamboldts have renovated it completely so that now it is a gracious, comfortable home. Judi showed people through the main floor, while Bill held court upstairs.

From there we went to the home of Peter Rogers and Judy Flemming, located near the exhibition grounds in Caledonia. Out front was the much-photographed Christmas decoration featuring a red canoe carrying Santa and his presents, appropriate given the fact that Peter runs the canoe concession at Kejimkujik. Inside a crackling fire was burning and Peter and Judy showed everyone the changes they were making to the house, built in the early 1900s and operated at one time as a bed and breakfast.

The next stop on the tour was Aunt Nettie’s, a bed and breakfast owned by Cindy and Cameron Lewis. The house was lived in for many years by the late Nettie Benedict, about whom I’ve written in these pages as the truest fan the North Queens Spartans basketball team ever had (she was given one of the gold medals when the team won the provincial basketball championships a few years ago, and died a few days later).

Cindy and Cameron have done a lot of work to the house and one of the things I liked best was the kitchen, clad in local hemlock, which gives it a warm, rustic look. Just outside the back door is Cameron’s workshop, where a wood fire is always burning, and where local people often turn up in the mornings to sit around the fire and drink Cindy’s coffee. Cindy is chair of the North Queens Board of Trade and had a lot to do with organizing the house tour.

The final house in the village itself was that of Terje and Barb Rogers, at the north end of community. This is a lovely, low-slung house that was built over a century ago and once lived in by Herbert Annis, the grandson of first settler William Burke. It has the kind of restful living room that makes you want to settle down and stay a while. Another of the features of the house is the verandah. I once came across a note in the Gold Hunter newspaper of June 24, 1921, that H.S. Annis was improving the appearance of his residence by the addition of a verandah along the front and the south side.

The house tour went on to the northern part of the county, where we stopped in at the home of Win and Lauren Seaton, who have the art gallery and craft shop right in the middle of Kempt, across from their house. They too have been renovating and among the features of this fascinating house are the flooring, made of hardwood set in patterns, and glassed-in doors and cupboards.

Our final stop was at the home of Howard and Anna Ford, in Kempt, the house a hundred and ten years old now and set in the trees a distance back from the highway. Being among the trees makes the house peaceful, with large windows bringing the outdoors inside.

The house tour ended at the Kempt Baptist Church, celebrating its 150th birthday. The church section smelled wonderful with a huge Christmas tree and a fir garland around the walls, while in the hall were sandwiches, cakes, tea and coffee. It was a nice way to end a tour of country homes and people, between sandwiches, were already making plans for next year.

Tom Sheppard can be reached at tsheppard@tdcmailbox.com