Tuesday, July 9, 2019

Toolsday-The Honey House

Hello readers! I’m Carlie, and I’m the Agricultural Exhibit Designer at the Backus-Page House Museum. Throughout the summer, I'll be sorting through various tools in the barn to get ready for the exhibit! Every Tuesday I’ll be sharing some of what I learned on our blog!

This week it was way too hot to be going through the barn, so I decided to talk about a 'tool' that doubles as one of my favourite buildings on the property-the Honey House! 

The honey house was originally built between 1828-1831 on William Pearce Farm, where it stayed until 1967 when it was willed to the Elgin County Pioneer Museum. A year later, it moved again to a new home in St Thomas. On April 1st, 1978, tragedy struck. A group of vandals burnt the Honey House to the ground! However, years later, a group of students from Parkside Collegiate Institute in St Thomas built an exact replica of the Honey House. We want to give a huge thank you to the teacher who led the project, Mr Thomas and Mr Hatherall!

It wasn't until December 2006 that the Honey House moved to it's current location at the Backus-Page House from the former Pioneer Museum.

Now that I've explained the history of the house, it might be worth mentioning how this would have been used as a tool. 

A descendant of the original owners of the house, Rebecca (Pearce) Waite (1909-1994) explained that Honey House would have been used to attract bees in the hope that they would make their honey inside the house. This would be a huge convenience, so settlers wouldn't have to look for hives. In the settler times, people would have put containers of honey around the house. If they were lucky, wild bees would come to the house, crawling through the holes in the side. Then, they would create honey inside the boxes stored within, which would later be collected. 

This wasn't exactly a safe procedure. In fact, children were often warned to stay away from the Honey House to lessen the chance of being stung. This was especially important because there wasn't the same information about allergies back then as we have today.

So there it is, a brief history of the Honey House! If you're interested in seeing it for yourself, then come to out our Civil War Reenactment on July 27th and 28th.  See you then!










No comments: