The Duncan McFarland Home in Port Robinson is a treasure that the Thorold Heritage LACAC committee had wanted to see protected for a very long time.
“We just didn't know how to go about it,” said chair Anna O’Hare.
At the same time, Madeline Zeller, who owns the home with her partner Brian Mann, had the same idea but she wasn’t sure what could be done, either.
“Ever since we obtained the home, we wanted to do something to preserve it,” Zeller said, adding thought had been given to obtaining a heritage designation for the home. “I didn't think it would stop someone from tearing it down, so we didn't pursue it at that time.”
But when she learned more about the protections offered through a designation of the home, Zeller and Mann decided to go ahead with it.
That officially happened on Sunday where at a brief ceremony on the home’s expansive front porch, the home was designated under the Ontario Heritage Act’s section 4. That designation will protect the property from being demolished. Any alterations to the property would require approval from the Ministry of Heritage, Sport, Tourism and Culture.
O’Hare said it’s estimated that the home was constructed in 1860, replacing a previous house built by McFarland that was lost to a fire sometime in the 1850s.
“In the early 1830s, Duncan McFarland started to buy land in Port Robinson and eventually founded the Village of Port Robinson,” O’Hare said. “He built a house, possibly as early as 1832 on this site.”
O’Hare said the committee has been able to narrow down the date through searches of records, including the 1861 census which showed McFarland living in a home at the site.
The home, O’Hare said, “is built in a hybrid style of Italianate and Neo Gothic, and … It's obviously a very grand house and very typical for Port Robinson.”
O’Hare was happy to finally see the home designated.
“We are about preservation, especially when it's a beautiful, elegant and so historically important house like this,” she said. “We want to make sure it doesn’t get lost.”
McFarland was the son of John McFarland of Niagara-on-the-Lake, whose home also still stands today, more than 200 years later and is operated by Niagara Parks as a tourist attraction.
Sunday’s ceremony marked the 55th heritage designation in Thorold.
