SaltWire E-Edition

Keeping history intact for the next generations

Old homes tell stories of our past, connecting the past to the present

ANNE CROSSMAN news@saltwire.com @SaltWireNetwork Anne Crossman is a former journalist and media manager. She now does volunteer work in her community of Annapolis Royal.

It was the lilacs that had thick gnarly trunks and suckers coming up everywhere outside the front door that gave away the age of the house when we looked at it all those years ago. Living in a house with lots of age gives only some of its stories away no matter how much is required to live in it in today’s world.

While we have moved on, our story has become part of that house now and there are new chapters being written.

Houses tell stories of the people who lived there. While there aren’t exactly ghosts (some may disagree here), it seems sometimes that there are shadows of fun times and sad times. There are the faint smells of cooking a special dinner for a special occasion and there are smells of the woodstove keeping the kitchen warm while baking bread all those years ago.

When we talk about built heritage, that is what we mean. Buildings that belong to a time long ago when a family lived there. Or the time when a farmer, a widower who lived by himself, looked after the cows and the market garden well after he was blind. And there was a rope taking him out to the garden that needed weeding.

And built heritage says there will be spring bulbs coming up in places where you didn’t know about until spring came along and there were snowdrops by the front steps and the irises are greening up and that patch of crocuses starts blooming in amongst the grass.

Some heritage houses and properties even have family cemeteries with a few markers of various sizes depending on the wealth of the family at the time.

In the countryside, these homes and barns seem to be lasting much longer than those in the cities.

What a shame those city homes are being toppled to make way for rather featureless apartment blocks. Those new places don’t feel like homes to me.

They feel like waystations from a family to the next station in life and onwards towards a home that will last and share its family stories with the next generation.

The people in Nova Scotia are being quite firm in their call for better built heritage protections. The Heritage Trust of Nova Scotia is asking that we tell our MLAs what built heritage means to us. Their website has some guidance on actions that can be taken.

By the way, did you know that the present Nova Scotia Property Act “allows owners of municipally registered heritage buildings to demolish them after a three-year waiting period, a provision that exists nowhere else in Canada.” This is the kind of information you can find on the trust’s website.

People come to this part of our country to see where we started. It is up to us to keep this history “book” intact for the next generations.

OPINION

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2023-03-16T07:00:00.0000000Z

2023-03-16T07:00:00.0000000Z

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