by Heather Linda Young for the Sarnia Observer
Mulberry House was built by Alexander Mackenzie and home to Mayor Marceil Saddy
(2011) If you go to visit Adele Walsh at her downtown Sarnia home, you won’t just press a button for the bell to ring. Instead, you’ll have to turn a 150-year-old knob to get it to sound. And forget knocking with your fist – you’ll have to clank the head of a brass wolf against its aging body. To get to the door, you’ll have to climb the old stone steps. They were meant to be headstones over a hundred years ago, but their maker – the original inhabitant of the house – made mistakes on them and used their undersides at his front door instead.
And as you enter the house, if you look up, you’ll notice the old stone carvings, reputedly created by Canada’s second Prime Minister, Alexander Mackenzie. There’s the Tudor Rose and the laurel wreath and the little boy who’s said to be blind. “It’s got a lot of history,” says Walsh of her house – 150 years of history, to be precise.
Walsh lives at the Mulberry House, which is also known as the Saddy House, since former Sarnia mayor Marceil Saddy occupied the house for almost three decades.
She points to some of the other details that remind her of the house’s history – there are the original doors, the original floors, the original beams on the ceiling and the fireplaces in each room. There are also the notches in the stone windowsill where inhabitants used to sharpen their knives, the plastered-over hole in the ceiling of the front foyer where the potbelly stove would have released its fumes, and the boards hanging behind the doors of the upstairs bedrooms where residents would have hung their clothes.
“I guess I love history,” says Walsh, who adds that she tells everyone about her house’s story. She says she used to walk past the house every day as a little girl and think about how much she’d like to live in it. “I used to call it my secret garden,” she says.
So, when she heard the house was up for sale in 2007, she moved back to Sarnia from Mississauga just so she could fulfill her dream. When she moved in, she discovered she wasn’t the only person who secretly admired the house.
“I’ve had so many people knock at the door wanting to see inside the house,” she says. “I always tell them to come on in.” She’s also watched a number of passersby stop to take pictures from all different angles.
So does she feel like a celebrity? “I don’t know, but the house probably does,” she says with a laugh. The house now features some items that weren’t included in its original construction – there’s a large master bedroom upstairs (two bedrooms were combined), closets and a pool. “It even has a dishwasher,” says Walsh.
There isn’t as much work to do on the house as one might expect, she says, especially since the owners who bought the house in 1999 put in a number of upgrades. “This house is probably the strongest around.” What takes the most time and energy is maintaining the extensive gardens, says Walsh. And it’s those gardens that are forcing her to put the house up for sale.
“I still love the house. I just can’t do the work,” she explains, adding that she sustained a shoulder injury that makes gardening difficult. She thinks that the person who will buy the house will be “interested in history and old things.” When the house sells, the new owner will be just its sixth.
Sarnia Heritage Committee believes that Alexander Mackenzie (and likely his brothers) built the house for a local tombstone maker, James Rogers, and his family in 1861 – just five years after Sarnia became a town. For committee member John Rochon, it’s the construction of the house that makes him suspect it’s Mackenzie’s work. “The fact that it’s yellow brick – he built almost everything in yellow brick,” he says. “And the amount of elaborate carving,” he says, indicating the stone carvings over the windows and doorways.
Rochon adds that Mackenzie, a stonemason, built a number of houses and businesses along Christina St., including the Mackenzie House and Sarnia’s first courthouse. At that time, Sarnia, with a population below 3,000 according to census data, “would have been like the wild west,” he says – complete with mud streets and wooden sidewalks.
The first owners of the Mulberry House, the Rogers family, stayed in the house for 99 years until Saddy bought it in 1960. Between 1905 and 1910, it is believed that they operated a candy shop out back, which is when the windowsill would have acquired its markings.
While the Mulberry house is important to Sarnia’s history, there are a number of heritage buildings in the city that all ought to be remembered, he says. “We should all know our history and culture,” says Rochon, who maintains a 3,000-member-strong Facebook group dedicated to places in Sarnia that no longer exist.
“Without those examples, we really can’t imagine what the culture was like back then.”