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Hinton Antiques © 2012
About Us: Hinton Antiques - Tangible History
If you want to be able to touch history, visit an antique store. So says Stephen Hinton, a history teacher and an antique dealer for twenty-two years. Examples of your country's earliest furniture may reveal solutions to mysteries of your heritage. Touch these pieces - pieces fashioned of wood from the bountiful forests that first covered this land and you'll touch their makers, the pioneers.
French King Louis IV was among the first to see Canada as a place of settlement. In 1663 Louis proclaimed Quebec a royal province of France. Blue and gold were the French royal colours. Is it any wonder that so many French armoires were painted blue? And those carvings that look like shells on early French cupboards? They were sunbursts carved in remembrance of the sun king, across the sea in France.
Following British conquest in 1759, New France ceased to exist as a political entity, but it wasn't until after the American Revolution that the English, in the form of United Empire Loyalists, began to place their English-American stamp on the land.Look at their furniture and it will tell the story of that wave of settlers. They were prosperous. They knew who they were and what they believed in. They were well rewarded for their loyalty to Britain.
Stephen's own hometown is Atherley, where Hintons have lived since 1870. To the east lies Mara Township. In 1847, two years after the great potato famine struck Ireland, a hundred thousand Irish settlers arrived in Canada. Many of them settled in Mara Township. If we study their furniture, we can better understand the struggle they faced. They built practical, multipurpose pieces such as dish dressers that stood by the hearth and held everything the family owned: dishes, pots, pails~and under the high-cut bottom doors there was even room for a nesting hen! Irish tables had double stretchers underneath so that things could be stored across them. Before a burial, the coffin would be placed here. Settle beds served as benches by day and beds at night. Such furniture illustrates that practicality ruled.
To the west of Stephen and wife Wendy's home once ran the "Ridge Road" joining Barrie to Orillia. Along it English soldiers who had distinguished themselves in the War of 1812 were given land grants. To the north of Atherley, the Scottish settled. Antique buffs who collect this country's historical artefact should remember that settlement in each area of Canada was distinctive. There are rare and beautiful things to be found in every region.
Stephen and Wendy Hinton are adamant: in Canada, we have a unique country furniture tradition. We don't have to take a back seat to anyone.
A bow-front corner cupboard (late 18th century) from Quebec
Obvious Pennsylvania German influence exudes from this early 19th-century dish cupboard
Favourite references:
65 Tivnon Lane
Orillia (Atherley)
ON L3V 1B8
Port Carling
Main Street Hwy 118 "at the locks"
Phone/Fax
705-325-9666
'The Early Furniture of French Canada ’ by Jean Palardy
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The Heritage of Upper Canadian Furniture’ by Howard Pain
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‘The Painted Furniture of French Canada ’ by John A. Fleming
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‘Folk Furniture’ by John Fleming & Michael Rowan
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'All About Ontario Tables, All About Ontario Chairs, All About Ontario Desks and All About Ontario Beds & All About Ontario Chests' - a series of booklets about Ontario furniture, by Elizabeth Ingolfsrud
Taken from the book the Antique Mystique, guide to Southern Ontario, by Kathy McCleary ©1994
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