Niagara-on-the-Lake entrepreneur Peter Donato has a mystery he would like solved.
Donato, owner of Niagara Cycling Tours, was on a bike ride recently and saw an interesting square stone on a property under development on the river side of the Niagara River Parkway near Queenston.
“I saw this stone sort of by fluke, caught out of the corner of my eye,” said Donato. “It was one of the rare moments where I was just enjoying myself, minding my own business, and I just happened to be looking in this spot.”
Donato said that the stone would normally not be seen from the pathway in the spring, summer or fall, when foliage would have covered it. He happened upon it on a day without snow cover.
Thinking it was an ordnance boundary stone, Donato sent pictures to local resident Ted Rumble, who, with Richard Larocque, an Ontario land surveyor, last year discovered ordnance boundary stone #1 on the Niagara River Parkway near John Street.
Ordnance boundary stones were used to mark the boundary between town land and military reserves almost 200 years ago. To date, 19 of the 37 stones have been found.
Rumble, board member of the Niagara-on-the-Lake Museum, said the mystery stone is not an ordnance boundary stone. It doesn’t follow the pattern of the others, which are nine inches square, made of white limestone with a broad arrow marking it as British property. Nor does this stone have the initials B.O., which stands for Board of Ordnance, carved on it, or a number indicating which of the 37 stones it is.
It is also “in the wrong place,” said Rumble.
The stone Donato is curious about is “roughly a foot and a half wide but longer in length and all around not square, and possibly much larger in depth as it’s covered by dirt and I can’t tell what, if anything, it’s built on,” said Donato. It also appears to have a manufactured indent carved along one side.
“It has very faint markings,” said Donato. “If you look carefully at some of the close-ups, when I brought a little ruler, it definitely looks like there were some markings but they’re heavily faded.”
Donato noticed a sign for a contractor on the property, reached out to the company and was given permission to approach the stone to take measurements and photographs.
“It’s an empty lot,” Donato said, adding there probably was never a home on this site. “The builder suggests that 25 years ago the lot was purchased and now, after all these years, the owner is going to build. That might explain why that stone has been there for a long time and explain why it’s gone unnoticed.”
Donato hopes to find other stones like it. “Where there’s one, maybe there’s another one. Finding one more would really help.”
Perry Hartwick, chair of the Niagara Geopark, said it’s difficult to identify what kind of stone it is. “It’s hard to tell because it has moss on it, and it’s sitting in leaves, but looks like it could be a granite of some kind.”
Hartwick, working from photographs, noted that the stone “is made up of a coarser grain which doesn’t look like limestone. If that’s the case,” he said, “it didn’t come out of any quarries around here.”
