History
Brown built the Second Empire-style home, which he named Lambton Lodge, between 1874 and 1876. In 1880, he died in the house after having been shot in the leg by a disgruntled employee at The Globe newspaper which he founded.
Between 1889 to 1916, Duncan Coulson, president of the Bank of Toronto, lived in the house with his wife Eliza and three children. Following Coulson's death, the Canadian National Institute for the Blind obtained the house in 1920 and used it for office space until 1956. A school for the blind was attached in 1920, which was later replaced by a school for developmentally-challenged children, and demolished in 1984.
George Brown House was designated a National Historic Site of Canada in 1976, but was then in a bad state of disrepair. Threatened by demolition, the Ontario Heritage Trust intervened. The agency restored the house and re-opened it in 1989 as a conference centre with tenant offices on the upper floors. Archaeological excavations conducted in 1987 and 1988 revealed over 5,000 artifacts. These artifacts have provided insights into the construction of the house as well as the landscape surrounding it and include a collectible pint corker containing the letters “William Robertson”, a silver ring and amber bead attributed to the Coulson period, and a St. George penny token from the 1850s. The house has also been featured on the HBO series Ghost Trackers.
Read more about this topic: George Brown House (Toronto)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“The basic idea which runs right through modern history and modern liberalism is that the public has got to be marginalized. The general public are viewed as no more than ignorant and meddlesome outsiders, a bewildered herd.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)