The large and impressive red brick farm house, known as “Avonsyde” at 493 Dundas Street East, in the former Township of East Flamborough, is one of the finest heritage designated properties in the Town of Flamborough. The house and associated property is part of Lot 3, Concession 3 of the former township, although now only a very small portion of the original farm property remains with the house. The proximity of the village of Waterdown, having resulted in a gradual reduction of acreage, sold for future subdivision development.
The land on which “Avonsyde” is located was part of a two hundred acre Crown Grant awarded to King’s College, Toronto on 3 January 1828. This lot, like the other East Flamborough properties received at the time was not taken up during the next decade. In 1839, the property which was already naturally divided by Dundas Street into two one hundred acre lots, was officially separated. The south half was sold to Wiliam Smoke, a Waterdown landowner and one of the leaders of the Temperance Movement in the area, and the north half, on which “Avonsyde” was to be built, was sold to John Brown, a Waterdown grocer.
Early East Flamborough Township Assessment Rolls suggest that John Brown may have resided on the property, as a ‘frame home under two storeys’ is listed for tax purposes from 1841 onwards. Brown retained the property for seven years, and then it changed hands several times during the next decade, Richard L. Johnston purchased it in 1846, Joshua Long in 1856, and James Forbes in 1857.
The exact date of the house’s construction and the builder are unknown. It has been suggested that it may have been built during Richard L. Johnston’s ownership of the property, as he purchased the property for £750, and when he sold it ten years later, the price was £1700, a considerable increase, suggesting a more substantial house had been erected. In 1977, student researchers noted that a neighbour, the late James Evans had suggested that the house was built in 1857, the same year that James Forbes purchased the property.
The present house appears to have been built in two stages, the back section being constructed before the front section that faces onto Dundas Street,. This may mean that both traditions are true, the back section dating from Johnston’s ownership, and the front section being added when James Forbes became the owner. The Assessment Rolls record another considerable increase in taxes within a year of Forbes assuming ownership, which possibly confirms this.
James Forbes was a successful, but retired Hamilton business man, with a wife, Jane Little, and a family of five children at the time of his move to East Flamborough Township. Born in Aberdeen, Scotland, he had come to Canada c.1830. Shortly after arriving he founded and operated the Forbes-Fisher Stove Foundry Company at the corner of McNab and Vine Streets in Hamilton. In 1857, owing to ill-health, he sold his business to the James Stewart Stove Company and moved with his family to Waterdown, where he died in 1870. However the house and farm remained in the Forbes family until 1913, when it was sold to George Pearson, whose family have owned and farmed the property since.
Soon after his purchase of the property, George Pearson, together with his sons, Bill and Cuthbert, began a family business known as The Avonsyde Dairy. This operation was the first in the Waterdown area to use glass bottles for delivering milk, and eventually the deliveries were extended to the Aldershot and Burlington areas. In 1940, the Pearsons sold their milk delivery business to the Sunnybrook Dairy, although they continued to supply milk to this company, and later the Oakville Dairy. In 1973, the Pearson Dairying operation finally came to an end with the last of their milk cows being sold.
© The Waterdown-East Flamborough Heritage Society 1992, 2022.
Editor’s Note:Waterdown and its surrounding area has changed a lot since this article was first published. The Avonsyde house now is surrounded by suburban developments. The home was purchased by The Woolcott Team, and after renovation and additions was opened as their office space in 2018.
Found in a 1980 Flamborough Review article was the following. Mrs. William A. Ryckman’s little girls by her first husband, George Forbes, pleaded to have the farm named after a book she had been reading to them. The girls were James Forbes’ grandchildren, and the title of the book was Avonsyde. While the editor has been unable to find a book titled Avonsyde, there was a book ‘The Lady of the Forest: a Story for Girls’ written by L. T. Meade, first published in 1892. Perhaps the book featured as a series elsewhere first, as it was described in a January 1888 edition of The Bookseller and the Stationary Trades’ Journal as such:
“About the lady dressed in sombre garb, a mystery hung, deeper than the green and shadowy glades of her forest home. She carried, in truth, the secret of the Avonsyde succession, and in Phil, her son and the presumptive heir, we have a noble type of unselfishness. Before the denouement arrives the reader has enjoyed a pleasant romance, beautifully illustrated throughout in artistic style.”
Whether L. T. Meade’s story was the one to inspire the name of a farm, and now a street name, we may never know.
