magickcanoe.com Blog

Yesterday, I took robin’s good advice and stayed indoors to scan more photos. I decided to start working on a project that I’ve planned to do for some years. The scanner now makes that possible.

In 1993, while completing a degree in Art History at Carleton University, I spent a couple of months researching the history of the Boyd Brothers Company in the nearby town of Osgoode, Ontario. The company manufactured what were once referred to as artistic stone, or imitation stone blocks from 1907 until the mid-1950s. Although the topic probably sounds a little dry, it was anything but that. Boyd Brothers was quite the going concern and built hundreds of houses throughout eastern Ontario during the first half of the century. You can barely drive down any road, pass through a town, or journey down a street in the older section of the city of Ottawa, without seeing at least one or two “Boyd block” houses. When we first moved to our farm, I was intrigued by the large number of such houses in the nearby village. Of course, with so many of the town’s inhabitants employed at the factory, or on the masonry gangs that traveled around the countryside, it’s only logical that a large number of them would build Boyd block houses. The neat part is that the blocks and the house styles changed over the half-century of production, so a walk around the town is a little like a life-size museum exhibit. When it came time to write a research paper for a course in Canadian architecture, what better project than to research the history of the Boyd Brothers Company?

I began my research at the Osgoode Township Museum, and located some interesting materials. However, the real motherlode was to be found at the Public Archives of Canada which, rather fortunately for me, is located in they city of Ottawa, which is just a stone’s throw from where I live. The archives had *several boxes* belonging to the Boyd Collection in storage up at their other storage facility at Renfrew, so I just had to file a request and wait about a week for the materials to be shipped down. When they told me there were boxes, I thought they meant something like shoe boxes. Imagine my surprise (and glee) when the staff rolled out a little cart laden with three big filing boxes! I was in heaven as I sifted through all of the many records. It turned out that the owner of the company, Harry Boyd, kept very interesting ledgers on which he entered things that you don’t normally see on such sheets. Early pages recorded how many blocks he and his brother made each week, how many bags of cement they used, when they bought a gun (presumably to shoot at varmints), and when Harry bought his first Indian motorcycle — obviously a major event as he appears with his motorcycle in a photo on a concrete trade magazine of the time. Anyhow, it was great fun going through his papers. His book collection, consisting of a good number of Radford Company house design books are also stored at PAC. The books proved to be like catalogues of the houses in Osgoode. I can just imagine someone coming by Harry’s office and flipping through them to order Design #1130. I found close matches for just about every one of the older houses I had photographed around town.

So, well, before I bore everyone to tears, why am I writing about this today? Well, I guess it’s mainly that I wanted to explain how a few bits and pieces of technology have made it possible to put historical documents in a place where others might be able to study or enjoy them.

First, the new scanner has made it possible to scan all of the photos that I’ve taken of Boyd block houses in Osgoode and around the region. Further, last night I gave the OCR (optical character recognition) program a shot to see how well it can read scanned pages, and it works like a charm. I won’t have to re-type all of the pages of my rather lengthy research paper. And further, I decided to experiment with using a blog format for laying out and archiving the material as I get it scanned. I have a ton of unused server space that I’m paying for each month, so I may as well use it to put this material up online to make it available to anyone who wants to know more about Boyd Brothers, or the ubiquitous concrete houses of this region. For anyone who is curious to see how I’m doing this, here is the site. I’ve just got the first 3 sections of the research paper up, but there’s more to come. Section One would probably be of interest to anyone who likes reading about local history. Section Two and Three are sort of dry, technical stuff about block designs, but I’ll soon be doing some sections on architectural styles featuring photos of houses from Osgoode and beyond — those sections should be of interest to just about anyone who likes heritage architecture. I’ll post a note here on Burning Silo once I get those sections up and running.

Although I’ve only completed a little of this project, I’m finding that a blog format works quite well for archiving material. I’m hoping to use it to archive some of the geneaology research that my Mom has been working on. I can see other applications as well, so I’ll be doing more experimenting with some of these ideas over the next while. What is especially nice about a blog format is that it’s quick and easy to pick a “theme” that gives a neat look to the project, and also that it allows for comments from visitors. I can see that being a huge plus in the case of a local history or geneaology type of project where visitors might be able to post bits and pieces of information.

By the way, I should really add a note about the photo at the top of this post. In Ideal Ideas, a turn of the century concrete block trade journal, it’s identified as the Brownlee House, built in 1912. It’s on Clemow Avenue in Ottawa, or at least it was there when I photographed it in 1993. It seems to be included in a story on the Boyd Brothers Company featured in that issue, and I believe the Boyds made all of the blocks from which it’s built. I’m not sure if their masonry gang was involved in construction though… I think it may actually have been built by a contractor such as McDiarmid & Tyndall who may also have been building concrete block houses in Ottawa around that time.

Tags: Boyd Brothers Company, Osgoode, concrete block architecture, online archiving