Article by J. Patrick Boyer

Can a building designed for one purpose be used for another?

Certainly, many are pressed into service for unrelated urgent needs. Pioneer school instruction and religious services began in Muskokans’ log homes. Early postmasters provided service from their cabin or place of business. General stores sold such variety of goods they were an entire street’s worth of shops in a single building. During the First World War Muskoka church halls became enlistment centres for soldiers. In the Second World War Muskoka’s airport was a Norwegian air force training centre while a Gravenhurst sanatorium held prisoners-of-war.

Yet those examples differ from Muskokans buying liquor in a former post office building or dining in a made-over gas station or revamped railway station. Beyond temporary improvisations, Muskokans have been endlessly busy seeking new roles for empty buildings of every shape, size, location and purpose. Revamping catches attention and stirs controversy, especially when it involves the fate of large public-use buildings.

While it is fascinating how old buildings can find new life and continue to serve the community in different ways, many lessons have been learned in Muskoka along the way. There is no easy transition for most single-use structures when their mission is complete or the building itself has become obsolete.

Railway stations, for instance, were central to Muskoka’s egalitarian life, open to all, providing primary travel service for people, shipping freight, moving mail and sending and receiving telegrams.

When VIA Rail and Ontario Northland ended passenger service, the stations were no longer needed. Whether in villages or towns, dramatically different fates awaited these once pivotal places. Gravenhurst and Huntsville assumed responsibility for theirs. As a result, the station central to flatlands Gravenhurst between Gull Lake and Muskoka Bay receives high quality maintenance and repair and is leased to various enterprises using portions of it – an enduring attraction for the townscape.

Hilly Huntsville’s train station sits well below Main Street passing above. Closer to Hunter’s Bay, the station’s location enabled thousands of summer vacationers and tons of freight arriving by train to conveniently reach the nearby wharf and waiting steamships. With its station neither visible nor central, Huntsville first tried new uses for the heritage building by leasing sections to civic, cultural and educational entities but then sold it to a consortium currently leasing it to a ranch-style barbecue eatery.

Though Gravenhurst and South River up the line both keep their stations in beautiful condition, the provincial government, recently announcing the reinstatement of Ontario Northland passenger service, intends to by-pass them and build bus-stop type waiting areas instead.

Post offices are also owned by a distant entity which designed and built them for a specific role in local communities across the country, then later made decisions rendering them functionless oddities. Prior to the First World War, the post office department bought land in Muskoka’s three towns but only in Bracebridge did the new federal building get completed at that time. The Bracebridge red-brick structure at a principal downtown intersection a block from the train station became an immediate town centrepiece. Besides moving letters, parcels and the district’s weekly newspapers, the post office department offered banking and money order service and Muskoka’s post offices, reflecting the district’s vacation economy and Bracebridge’s action especially, generated more revenue than any other centre in Canada. As a federal building, the well-built structure also included armories and a Canada Customs office.

However, just four decades later, it closed and was declared surplus by Ottawa because a new federal building had been built just a block north. Bracebridge, a red-brick town supported by four local brickyards, received a structure of grey stone slabs squatting bunker-like beside the town’s majestic red-brick Carnegie Library. Upstairs, it housed federal employees dealing with unemployment insurance, job placements and passports. The municipality, so proud of the “old post office,” took a pass on acquiring the community’s landmark asset. With ownership passing to the limited resources of an individual private owner, eventual financial support to maintain the place came from provincial authorities in exchange for the stellar post office gaining protected status as a heritage building.

Four decades later, when Ottawa started removing postal operations from its buildings, it began declaring post office buildings surplus. That led Bracebridge council to envisage demolishing the building to ground level and erecting above its fine basement a sister library structure to match the Carnegie library, enshrined in the town’s official plan as permanently being on the main street. The architect’s drawings showed a matching building that doubled existing library space, the roadway between them an attractive pedestrian walkway.

When Gravenhurst’s Carnegie Library beside the Opera House gave up its role to a new public library erected just metres away, it seamlessly became a convenient centre for the Chamber of Commerce and other community support organizations.

Gravenhurst’s post office, built after the First World War at a principal intersection and later expanded with a second storey and clock tower, remains a well-run Canada Post operation benefiting from recent upgrades through extensive brickwork repair and installation of an atomic clock showing spot-on time in all four directions.

Hospital buildings, whose form also follows function, appeared in Huntsville with the arrival of Dr. Howland in the 1870s and Dr. Hart in the 1880s. When their private hospitals with provincial funding closed, several widows of the town converted their residences to nursing homes and carried on. Town councillors refused to support a proposed new hospital, leaving residents without one until after the Second World War when the Canadian Red Cross intervened and the essential building was erected in the town centre overlooking the river.

In the 1890s Gravenhurst’s council voted funds to support construction of Canada’s first tuberculosis hospital locally, near which two more treatment structures were then erected, joined by a fourth that had been a Muskoka resort hotel before its conversion. These vital hospitals were funded by private philanthropists, municipal dollars and tax concessions, Canadian tuberculosis organizations and paying patients.

Bracebridge had no hospital during its first half-century of settlement, with doctor’s clinics and nursing homes the mainstay for care. A Bracebridge widow with a large main street house converted it to such a purpose and doctors supplied it with medical equipment and operated there, where patients could recover. In 1929 another private residence in town was converted to a memorial hospital to honour the community’s war dead and serve its living.

Decades later Muskoka’s MPP Frank Miller, doubling as Ontario’s health minister, arranged construction of a larger Huntsville hospital on the town’s north side, the previous facility becoming repurposed as Fairvern Nursing Home. In Gravenhurst by the mid-20th century, the sanatoriums sat empty on extensive premises until they cycled through a succession of make-use roles – federal prisoner-of-war camp, Ontario Fire College, facilities for provincial social services, treatment programs and police programs.

As for Bracebridge, a substantial red-brick residence for nurses was added beside the 1929 hospital. In time, both structures were demolished and replaced by a new hospital with successive expansions whose current fate has descended into a cauldron of controversy over the prospect of a new round of hospital construction for Muskokans.

Educational facilities share with train stations, post offices and hospitals the characteristic of being hard to use for other purposes once their mission is complete. Early teaching migrated from pioneer farmers’ homes to one-room schoolhouses, then primary schools with separate rooms for each grade, next free-standing secondary schools for Muskoka’s thinning ranks of students continuing after coming of age. With school district consolidation, Muskoka’s scattered countryside schools stood empty as buses daily transported pupils to larger facilities at a distance. Families converted a number of these well-built schoolhouses into unique heritage homes.

Bracebridge added a second public school on Muskoka Road for youngsters in the rapidly expanding Fourth Ward across the river from its cavernous primary school on McMurray Street. When the older school was demolished and replaced on the same site by a new build serving the entire town, the Fourth Ward School closed. In time it was converted to a new community use as headquarters for Canadian Legion Branch 161.

For a Bracebridge high school, in 1924 the municipality bought and demolished the stately wood frame home of Thomas McMurray, a leading figure in his day, leaving only his name on the section of Church Street that would now have two schools as well as two churches. The high school opened that fall and expanded over the decades with successive additions and extended jurisdiction for Muskoka Lakes students.

After a new secondary school was built in 2007 in conjunction with a developer’s large residential subdivision at the north end of town, the Bracebridge and Muskoka Lakes Secondary School – an incomparable structure with so many additions it had 37 different levels with stairs – was demolished, except for the original 1924 section which a condominium developer intended to make into residential accommodation. 

Muskoka’s smorgasbord of built-heritage outcomes includes repurposing church buildings. A block from Gravenhurst’s St. James Anglican Church the repurposed Calvary Baptist Church is now a hair salon. In adjacent blocks at Bracebridge, Knox Presbyterian Church is now a private residence and First Baptist Church a bed-and-breakfast with a sideline counselling service. The Baptist congregation relocated to a building on the town periphery which in turn has been converted to a physical conditioning  space.

Huntsville’s St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church and, across main street from it at the top of the hill, the Gospel Hall of the Christian Brethren Movement, were both repurposed for retail and commercial purposes with the former currently not in use. Around Muskoka’s countryside, many small church buildings have ceased operating, a number boarded up, while others such as Bala’s Presbyterian Church and United Church structures now house retail stores.

The venerable Madill Church near Huntsville was to be demolished by the United Church of Canada. Rob Laverty, executive director of the Ontario Historical Society, suggested the $100,000 budgeted for demolition be donated instead to a local heritage organization he helped incorporate under Ontario law for such purposes, giving a structure embedded in Muskoka history a new lease on life. Currently, complete restorative work is underway to keep it in play for many more generations.

The setup of movie houses suggests little else could operate in them. Yet when the Giaschi Family built its new Norwood Theatre beside Bracebridge’s Memorial Park after the Second World War, the A&P Grocery Company converted the outgrown cinema on the east side of main street to a busy supermarket where a long procession of other retail operations have since operated.

After the Giaschis closed their Muskoka Theatre in Gravenhurst it became an antique store of the Currie Family, while this spring in Huntsville the northern theatre of the family’s three cinema chain, the Capitol, blossomed into a colourful cultural centre of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness.

Muskoka’s 150 or so hotels, resorts and inns run the gamut of conditions but most are perpetually in some degree of make-over mode. A recent example is Bala Bay Inn, a century hotel fully renovated and newly reopened by owner Greg Knight. Among town hotels, the venerable Albion in Gravenhurst and Patterson in Bracebridge have been repurposed for residential accommodation with street-level stores and galleries. Muskoka’s plethora of heritage summer resorts are a story unto themselves, changing character and purpose over time; retaining tradition while expressing modernity.

Of particular importance in conserving Muskoka heritage buildings for their visual pleasure and educational benefit is the far-sighted initiative of Huntsville. Decades ago, the creation of Muskoka Heritage Place assembled in one place buildings of interest and importance as a pioneer village. The buildings mirrored district development but individually were in remote places on their own, until this preservation of built heritage took place.

A variation is elevating the residence of someone famous to shrine-like tourism, most notable for Muskoka being Norman Bethune’s birthplace in Gravenhurst but also the octagonal home of Henry Bird in Bracebridge. The Bethune Memorial House and National Historic Site began as a geopolitical move by the Department of External Affairs in Ottawa when rapprochement with Communist China became national policy. Today it is a prime destination for people who know of Bethune’s importance. Historic plaques of Canada and Ontario adorn the front lawn and the building itself is currently benefiting from restoration.

The near-unique residence of Henry Bird, owner and operator of Muskoka’s major woollen mill, reflected his interest in science and applied technology. Its status as the best remaining eight-sided residence in Ontario is signified by a provincial historic site marker. Bracebridge Rotarians bought and restored the building and deeded it to the town for a museum, on the condition it be run by a local historical society, something which no longer exists. Its fate has been that of a jewel without a crown to hold it. When it was restored under the Ontario Heritage Act at a cost exceeding $1 million, repurposing the tourist attraction faltered. At present the town intends to retrieve the building’s museum artifacts from storage and display them in the decommissioned Carnegie Library on main street.

Muskoka’s mixed experience in salvaging the heritage value in once-prized buildings flows from policies and organizations joined in the tug-of-war between traditional and modern forces. When such buildings outlast their purpose, the diversity of owners combined with the numerous community stakeholders can paralyze decision-making.

The saga of Muskoka buildings portrays what happens when heritage structures face abandonment, demolition, repurposing or restoration. The uneven outcomes in this cultural and economic tug-of-war over structural makeovers mirror the district’s diversity of fates and opportunities as some building remakes sag into forlorn failures like ghastly Frankensteins but others rise to new fame like Cinderellas.