9752 Main St, Canning, NS B0P 1T0

Known as The Old Place, the Sir Frederick Borden House, built in 1902, was designed by the renowned architect, William Critchlow Harris, and consists of over 6,000 sq. ft. on a gently sloping riverside site of 13 acres with original stable and ice-house. Harris's design is in the classic East Coast Shingle Style with its strong asymmetrical Queen Anne form strongly influenced by the British Arts and Crafts. The remainder of an earlier Gothic Revival house fronting on Main Street, built some 40 years earlier, presents a very different façade - absorbed by the newer, grander, unembellished style of the turreted, rambling mansion facing a one hundred year old garden to the southwest. Sir Frederick Borden owned a spur of the railway from Kentville to Canning and earned his fortune from shipping and food production. As Canadian Minister of Militia under Sir Wilfred Laurier, Borden would take leave of his stone residence in Ottawa, the former home of Sir John A MacDonald, and travel in his private railway car to Canning where upon his arrival his carriage and driver would be waiting to deliver him to the front door of his summer house. Sir Frederick Borden, like his peers, took his leisure in the grand manner. This rare Canadian survivor is very much a man's house with its simple design, panelled ceilings and walls, wide moldings, and grand wooden staircase. Some may use the term 'baronial' entering the large central hall, but most would find a general atmosphere as warm and enveloping as a grand parent's arms. The house features a public living-room with coffered tin ceiling, a room which would have served as ballroom in the day. The family living-dining room incorporates the second level of the southwest turret. Below the rounded walls of the dining area is a lower level gentleman's games room, and above the dining room a master suite with private bath, sitting room and balcony. Additional servants' quarters in the attic and an unexpected surprise in the turret... 2020-09-10