The Rotting Mouldering Heap of Decay

We have bylaws to prohibit residents from storing car wrecks on their own property. It's alright though for the municipality to despoil the countryside for six years with impunity.

I've been out there three times this week. I trespassed. I found the gate open and went through
to see the rear of the building.

I went down Leslie and turned around, so that I could see its south elevation.

I sat for a bit and tried to imagine what Mr. Petch might think of the town contemplating spending half a million dollars to rehabilitate this derelict rotting relic for a contrived purpose.

When The Queen's Hotel was still at the corner of Wellington Street and Yonge, Council was invited for a visit. Jimmy Murray, a former Mayor and current councillor and his wife Florence owned the building.

He had brought the bar back into the "saloon" to show and tell. He also had some early hand written minute books . They recorded approvals for accounts in sterling in small amounts of shillings, mostly for road repairs. The minute book was a note book of about six by ten inches.

Those minutes might very well have dated back to the time Mr. Petch was building a home for his family.

A considerable part of the town's business, was providing hostelry services and accommodation for travellers in horse-drawn coaches. Roads were rough. They ran up and down and around hills and crossed streams. Early roads were corduroy. Constructed of logs cleared from the land . Some were still down there, forming the base of county gravel roads in the sixties.

The journey from Lake Simcoe to Toronto was long and jarring. There were frequent stops.

Taverns and hostelries were necessities. Aurora had several. Some of them still survived in the sixties.

The Queen's hotel might have been one of them. I'm not sure of that though.

Life in the early days was not easy. A visit to a Pioneer cemetery tells all. Farmers sometimes had several wives.A mother and child lost in childbirth was not uncommon.

Infectious diseases swept through. Children's graves mark such an event.

A developer asked me once what I thought of people spending thousands of dollars to restore an old farmhouse. I said if the old farmer didn't see any merit in spending his resources on restoring an old farmhouse, then it seemed not to be such a good idea.

I've been in a few. In Black Creek Village, Upper Canada Village, in some with people living in them, while the old farmer lived in a modern bungalow closer to the road.

They were not adequate when they were built and they're not adequate now. People built what they could afford at the time and no more and considered themselves well-off under the circumstances.

There's a shoemaker shop in Black Creek. The lasts for adult shoes are so small .the shoes would hardly fit the feet of a modern ten year old.

In 1967, the Ontario Museum had a display of clothing from a hundred years ago. People were tiny. They were not huge robust specimens of humanity.Their frames were the result of centuries of poverty and deprivation.

Only their courage, determination and strength of endurance were monumental.

Their intent was to give their children something better than they had.

And they did. We are the beneficiaries.

I think Mr. Petch would consider it sheer lunacy to contemplate spending half a million dollars to save a humble building which saw its share of joys and sorrows and undoubtedly served it's purpose many times over.

The building owes us nothing.

There are people in our community who need food banks to keep body and soul together in this age of affluence

What would Mr. Petch think of that?

That we should give a second thought to spending half a million tax-payer dollars on that rotting relic is an insult to the memory of people who struggled to survive and make things better for their children and those who came after.