If there’s such a thing as low-brow heritage, the Port Credit log cabin would be its poster building.
It seems a little odd that so much effort has been put into saving a structure that was erected in Mississauga only in 1967 by the 3rd Port Credit Rovers, until you consider the context, which is what heritage is so often about.
The Rovers were looking for a new clubhouse and a centennial project, when scout leader Bob Collison heard about a log cabin in Mono Mills that was surplus to needs.
McKinley Transport was prevailed upon to truck the logs down to the west bank of the Port Credit River, where the Town of Port Credit had agreed to donate land. Some additional logs were taken from a cabin on land in Hockley Valley that former MP Don Blenkarn had donated to the Scouts and two more courses of logs were added.
The cabin itself probably dates from the 1840s, according to Scott Gillies, long-time stalwart of the Bradley museum. Disassembling, relocating and reassembling such structures is a long-standing tradition. The pioneers thought about log cabins like we think about storage sheds. They certainly did not think of them as something that would stand the test of time. Lots of them ended their days as pig sties, for instance.
The log cabin continued its highly utilitarian existence in Port Credit, hosting the Rovers for many years, then being an anchor spot for the Great Salmon Hunt and eventually ending up as a squat, slightly crumbling symbol of the superannuated in the parking lot near the reconstructed Port Credit lighthouse.
The very plain orphan was an unlikely candidate for preservation.
But that didn’t stop a coalition of interested citizens, hard-working museum staff, and willing corporate citizens (Petro-Canada, St. Lawrence Cement, Fram Building, Friends of the Museums, Community Foundation of Mississauga, The Mississauga News) from joining forces to raise $155,000 to refurbish the 25 by 18 foot, 11-log high structure. It should have stayed in Port Credit, of course, but there was no appropriate venue.
The Bradley Museum makes a perfect host because the cabin is the missing link for visiting students, demonstrating the initial era of settler life at Merigolds’ Point. The original Bradley House and The Anchorage fill out the retro-roster.
In a wonderful speech that ended this morning’s festivities, Museums Manager Annemarie Hagan warned, “We do need to be careful about romanticizing the past and the log cabin. It’s easy to look back through rose-coloured glasses and see only a nostalgic gentler, simpler time — to forget that a life with a high-infant mortality rates, back-breaking hard work, a rather uneven application of democracy and human rights and a lack of cold and hot running water for such luxuries as regular baths — was not necessarily gentle or simple or sweet-smelling.”
The former fish-cleaning station certainly isn’t sweet-smelling and it’s more mongrel than mansion, so it makes Hagan’s point perfectly.
History is rarely nostalgic if we look at it carefully. The coming of the settlers meant the dislocation of indigenous peoples. Ironically, many of them ended up living in the Credit Mission, where the Mississaugua Golf Club now stands, in log cabins.