Cooper’s Falls

Exhibition of Muskoka Heritage

October 4, 2010 By Michelle Hendry

Saturday, October 9th 2010 marks the opening of “Legacy” at the Auburn Gallery of Fine Art in Gravenhurst. It is an exhibition of portraits, paintings and photographs depicting the people and places of 19th and 20th century south Muskoka and some of their stories. The artists participating are Helene Adamson, the late Henry Fry, and myself. Everyone is welcome to drop by and see us from 1-3pm on Saturday, October 9th. The exhibition runs until October 22nd.

Helene Adamson took on the challenge of painting famous industrialists from Gravenhurst’s past often working from very small and often grainy black and white pictures. Some of the oil portraits are of A.P.Coburn, founder of Muskoka Navigation Company; Tom Greavette; Dugald Brown, hotelier and owner of Brown’s Beverages; Dr. W.B. Kendall, physician-in-chief of the Muskoka Cottage Sanatorium and Muskoka Free Hospital; Mary McBride, one of the town’s earliest school teachers; and others, seven in total.

Finding photos of my subjects wasn’t easy. Cyril and Marion Fry at the town archives were wonderfully helpful. […] It was sometimes a guessing game when it came to eye or hair colour, but happily folks were pleased to share what they knew about their ancestors.

~HA

The late Henry Fry was the town’s first real documentary photographer with many of his photos stored in the Gravenhurst archives. The current location of the Auburn Gallery was Henry’s home and darkroom where many of the images on display were first developed. A relative of Henry’s, Nancy Lynch, is doing a special project in fabric using Henry’s images. This project is a must see!

My paintings and photographs are from my explorations of Uffington, Cooper’s Falls, Gravenhurst, Bracebridge and other south Muskoka and north Simcoe locations over the last two years. I shot hundreds of photographs in search of the right places, the right light for the series in which the current paintings are a part. Each location inspired me in some way and that inspiration led to research that was like a treasure hunt into the past both beyond and informing the work.

When I paint a chair by an old window, I wonder who may have sat there and what their lives were like… When I first entered the Livingstone/Stephens house, there was a feeling, as if the walls whispered to me. Something about that house drove me to discover its history, a process that took months following one clue after another until a chance conversation led me to the daughter of Richard and Belle Stephens, now 90. She shared stories of life on the farm and the tragic tale of Neil Livingstone, the house’s builder. The place touched me, and now I feel a part of its history too. I invite the viewer to step into that world.

~ MB

The histories of the people and the properties in this exhibition have been researched and documented. Michelle searched land registry records, interviewed family members and combed libraries. Included will be the full story of the Livingstone/Stephens house and it’s legacy of gold in Bracebridge; the award winning “Everything But the Bathroom Sink” from the Heal house in Gravenhurst, currently under renovation; the story of the Fleger/Veitch-Marchildon House, also being restored; and the fate of the St. Paul’s Anglican Church in Uffington. Many of these stories will be the foundation of my 2011 book.

More at the General Store

December 5, 2009 By Michelle Hendry

The first floor of the building was split between the Store and the main living quarters which contained a back kitchen, a parlour, two hallways and a more recent bathroom. One of the hallways was more like a room from which every other part of the house was accessed. In this dark and low lit room was a big chair, a credenza full of pictures and a organ piano. With only a couple of incandescent lights burning, I took photographs the credenza with pictures of Frank in his military pilot’s uniform, his mother’s parents, him as a child with a fish and a friend and his daughter. The piano was on the opposite wall with the door to a bedroom which was once part of the Store, but, was taken over as living quarters as the needs of the Store become less.

I never played it. My Mother played just a few hymns.”

Down at the end of the hall was the parlour with an old TV and another fabulous stove. The ceilings on this floor were all tin and the parlour had windows on three sides. The walls were covered with paintings of the type of bomber that Frank flew in Burma during the war.

I was so excited to see the inside of the old General Store. Frank closed the doors in the early 1960’s and left everything pretty much in place – an old sock mender still in its original box, the old weigh scale, the cheese cutter, the paper rack – even the old postal boxes still hang on the wall. It is like stepping back in time to the days when the store was on the road to Muskoka and bustled with life. Frank gave me the tour and talked about what each one of the tools above were used for an how. Frank said there is a woman in Gravenhurst who still knows how to use the sock mender.

Frank said his mother was so good at measuring cheese, that she could cut the weight almost exactly. The cheese cutter was both cutter and storage. She barely needed the weigh scale. There is a meat cutter as well – and it is mechanical as opposed to electric. Frank wound it up and showed me how to get the blade going.

The Store was both post office and hardware store and grocery store, therefore was the social center of the community. There is an old folding seat that was attached to a support pillar inside the store near the door, where Frank said an old Boer War veteran used to come in and tell him stories.

There is an old hockey trophy made from a sap bucket that Frank’s team won from Washago in 1929. Frank told me about how hockey can make friends, rivals and competition was stiff!

As I looked up the ceiling toward the hanging bare bulb, I realized as I followed the wires along and around insulators that I was observing old knob and tube electrical. The room was chock full of goodies, including the old sales slips, one of which I have here.

The first room and the last room I visited was the kitchen. It was a ‘newer’ part of the building built by Frank’s brother, but it still pre-dated Frank. One of his earliest memories took place in the kitchen.

We sat next to a window that looked over the garden. The window was flanked by two electric lights designed to look like lanterns, lanterns which would have hung there originally. The water pump used to come in where the couch I sat on while we talked now sits. Frank recalled to me his only memory of his Father. When Frank was 2 years old, only months before his Father died, he remembers him standing in front of the window sharpening his razor blade on one of those long belts like you see in a barber shop while he shaved.

The house was so full of memories and seemed to almost have a life of its own. It is a comfortable place, in spite of the fact that so many of the comforts with which I am familiar are absent from this house. All of the lights were warm, the rooms welcoming. Frank was a most gracious host. I bid my farewell and I promised to visit again. It is a promise I intend to keep.

See part one – “Inside the General Store”

Inside the Old General Store

December 1, 2009 By Michelle Hendry

Recently, I had the privilege of visiting Frank Cooper’s General Store. The store has been closed since the early 1960’s and Frank, grandson of Thomas Cooper the founder of the community, operated his Excavation business from the location. Frank is still a busy man at 87 years of age. During my visit, he was on the phone arranging and coordinating gravel deliveries to places all over the area. He is slowing handing the reins over to Darren Bunker. Darren and his father were both long time employees and now own and run the business from the Court House building across the road from the General Store.

A beautiful string of Christmas coloured lights span the road between the old store and the court house, so that it is impossible to miss the remains of the town even at night. The Court House was long mistaken for a blacksmith shop, which it never was, and considering its construction, it is difficult to understand how that mistake might have been made. The section of the building most likely misleading other authors was not constructed until the 1940’s for the excavation business. In fact, the building acted as a community hall but was primarily where Thomas Cooper held court as the town’s magistrate. Thomas Cooper would hear cases on the second floor of the building and kept detailed records of each case in his diaries. These diaries were also the record of the earliest days of the community. Unfortunately, when Thomas retired, he had the diaries burned for the privacy of the town’s citizens. It’s a shame because most of those cases would have little consequence to the people now and would have made an extraordinary history of the place.

Frank was gracious enough to give me a tour of the entire General Store and the living quarters. As we moved from room to room, he would give me little anecdotes about life in the house.

Frank was the youngest of the children in his family and because of his low position on the totem pole, he got moved around from one bedroom to another. His favourite room was in the front corner (SW) above the Store. It had two windows and the sun would always pour in the afternoons. When Frank was a boy, he could often hear the howls of wolves in the bush at night. They would howl in the fields off toward the Muskoka border. He and his brothers would sit crouched and quiet wondering if the wolves were looking for them… His Grandfather’s experience losing a cow to wolves while on the road with supplies one night would certainly have been a part of his family mythology and influenced his childhood fear.

The other front room belonged to his mother. His father passed away when Frank was 2 years old, so his most of his memories are of her. Once, Frank told me, his mother was away and he was minding the Store when a fire broke out in the stove pipes that snaked throughout the house and acted as a radiator of sorts. They ran horizontally along the hallway on the second floor and through his mother’s bedroom.

The pipe running through Mother’s room was red. I couldn’t believe that it has not exploded in flames. I ran down the hall and got water to pour on it and it never burned. I had to replace the pipe.”

The pipe he refers to is the only silver coloured pipe in a house filled with black ones.

The stove pipes also acted as a great way to dry laundry. There is a clothes line crossing the hallway at the top of the stairs that was always full of clothes. One night, Frank was returning late from a date after his mother had gone to bed. Not wanting to awaken her and face up to the late hour of his return, he snuck upstairs in the dark and tried to make his way to his room, which, at that time, was at the back NE corner of the house. He had to get past the clothes line.

I became entangled in the clothes and couldn’t find my way out to my room!”

Frank ended up spending part of the night in the hallway…

The bathroom was added to the second floor out of part of a utility room in the 1940’s. The pink tile is reminiscent of many city bathrooms I have seen. It is no longer in use due to damaged pipes, but all the hardware is original. There is an old light that reminds me of one I had in the 80’s from the 1950’s. There was no window in this room, so its warm light would have been all that was present during that winter bath.

Frank had to go back into the office and left me upstairs on my own to shoot some photographs. In spite of my wide angle lens, many of the narrow rooms were difficult to photograph. The lights were dark and yellow and, in spite of the fact that heat was no longer being sent to this part of the house, it felt warm. Frank had opened a tiny window at the end of the hallway, casting a bit of cool late afternoon sunlight on the pale teal blue coloured wall – a colour I was becoming accustomed to seeing in buildings where the walls were not lathe and plaster, but tongue and groove. The photograph makes it appear a bit grayer than it actually is…

When Frank returned, we headed along the sloping floor to the stairs were he mentioned how he loved to slide down the banister and bounce off the stairs, making such a terrible racket that his mother would tell him to get off the railing and close the door of the stairs behind him.

More on the inside of the General Store

And the Newsletter is finally nearly ready. I delayed it to include my interview, last Friday, with a 90 year old past resident of the Yellow Door House. Apparently there was GOLD in its history… Everyone on the sign-up list should receive it sometime on Wednesday! Sign up using the link on the right column if you want to receive the newsletter!

Cooper's Shed

November 28, 2008 By Michelle Hendry

Cooper’s Shed is the first in a short series of paintings I am doing on the small, nearly ghost town, of Cooper’s Falls. I introduced Cooper’s Falls and the grandson of it’s founder Mr. Frank Cooper to you in August. This is a shed that sits behind the old Community Hall across from Mr. Cooper’s childhood home and the old store. The building is nearly absorbed by the forest behind it, but still stands strong – much like the town it resides in. I hope to share the paintings with Mr. Cooper when they are all complete.

It is so hard to believe, now that the snow has already fallen, that summer was just a short time ago. I sat by the Falls that run behind the old store at the end of Lover’s Lane, when the air was still so warm. I hope this little painting is a reminder of summers past.

Exhibition of Muskoka Heritage

More at the General Store

Inside the Old General Store

Cooper's Shed

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