Random Access

Former Ward 6 Councillor David Culham wants to correct the record as to how the acquisition of the Adamson-Robinson house, known as The Grange, built around 1829, came into public ownership.
In a previous entry about the heritage award recently presented to former Credit Valley Conservation Authority Chairman Grant Clarkson, it was incorrectly stated that the City of Mississauga bought the property in the mid-1970s.
In fact, the property was given free of charge by the Cadillac-Fairview Corporation following a lengthy series of negotiations that involved a number of people, including both Clarkson and Culham.
In the accompanying photo, you can see Clarkson at the far left, with long-time Peel County Historical Society stalwart Russ Cooper, second from left. Jerry Sheff, centre, is the guy who doesn’t look as happy as everyone else, probably because his company is giving away the house, which was refurbished by the municipality in 1981. It subsequently became the Boy Scout centre for many years and is now the perfect host for the Mississauga Heritage Foundation.
Culham (dark glasses) is to the right of Sheff beside Margaret Lawrence, the then-president of the Township of Toronto Historical Foundation. She got the ball rolling on acquisition with private meetings and a follow-up letter to the inaugural council of the City of Mississauga in 1974. Far right is then Recreation and Parks Commissioner, and later City Manager, Ed Halliday.
Culham says he arranged a deal where Cadillac-Fairview not only donated the house but a one-acre surrounding parcel that was superfluous to the subdivision that the developer was processing at the time.
“As previously agreed, Cadillac Fairview held a press conference and a community meeting, and publicly gave the house and the land over to me on behalf of the new City in the spring of 1975,” says Culham.
No matter the details of how the house came into public hands, the end result is something to be applauded.
In his book titled Looking For Old Ontario, Professor Tom McIlwraith of the University of Toronto at Mississauga talks about Adamson-Robinson as a fine example of the Regency style of architecture.
“The Regency is the one gracious dwelling type clearly associated with Great Britain and has been the architects’ means of entering Ontario’s domestic landscape. It is also a rare type in Ontario, and this is an ambiguous house — horizontal in mass, yet vertical in detail. The cottage roof (that is, four surfaces) squashes any feeling of tallness induced by the long chimneys and French doors that extend from floor to eave,” he writes.
“The Regency cottage is a fancy humble house — the icon of an insecure colonial elite whose members were as inadequate as the humblest settler in coping with the raw environment. Anything plainer and more modest would vanish into the misty beginnings of all housing — the very world that aspiring settlers were striving to leave behind.”
Of Adamson-Robinson and other examples of the Regency cottage in Ontario, the former chair of the Local Architectural Conservation Advisory Committee, says, “once stripped to their functional bones, these high-art structures pointed a way for a new generation of domestic building to rise up in sensitive response to the needs of a distinctive society emerging from the Ontario woodland.”
So Adamson-Robinson is a vanilla, bourgeois way-station on the way to building a better Canadian house. And a valuable reminder of the stops we made on our trip to today.