HomeMy WebLinkAbout2271Text regarding the Bentley-Gibson House, taken from Kim Ondaatje and Lois Mackenzie. Old
Ontario Houses. Scarborough: Gage Publishing, 1977. B12.
“It is unusual to find as colorful and imposing a home as the Bentley house built in the early
1850s, at the main crossroads of as small a village as Brougham. The main attraction in
Brougham, a farming community a few miles north of Lake Ontario, besides the mill,
smithy, and paint shop, had been the “beef ring” to which neighboring farmers brought their
cattle to be slaughtered. That is, until William Bentley established a patent medicine factory
sometime in the late 1840s and then built his house directly opposite it.
Patent medicine was a lucrative business in the nineteenth century when medicine was still in
the Middle Ages. There wasn’t much difference between a distillery and a patent medicine
factory and both were usually located beside the grist mill. With the exception of molasses and
sulphur purges sold to ease the “straining of a fundament,” virtually every nostrum and
soothing syrup which promised relief (from dysentry and typhoid to chronic fatigue and
indigestion) was lashed with alcohol or hard drugs. The amounts ranged from a ladylike 18
per cent alcohol in Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound to a 21 per cent jolt in some
cough syrups.
Like his elixirs, Mr. Bentley’s house is a florid melange but capped by a particularly grand
belvedere. The porch, which is a late addition, almost obscures the fluted and free-standing
columns of the Greek Revival entrance door. It also detracts from the “fifth window” in the
upper storey, the three-part window which became one of the basic features of Georgian
architecture and was supposedly the most emphatic element in the facade.
The three-part Palladian window traditionally found above the front door of Georgian houses
has a central round-headed window flanked by two smaller flat-headed ones. This Bentley
window is a regional style and can be seen in wood, stone and brick houses in the
Brougham-Markham area. Its windows are pointed Gothic Revival style and very attractively
set in an ellipse, emblematic of Neo-classical forms.
Belvederes became part of the architectural scene in the 1850s and were a feature of the
Italianate style. They were often placed on the roof of large bracketed houses for interest
rather than to illuminate the attic or a central hall. This one is particularly grand with its multi-
paned windows scaled to the six-over-six Georgian windows in the rest of the house.
The house works (with the exception of the front porch) because each component is of high
quality. One historian has called this house “a simultaneity of styles.” Like their clothes, the
people in Ontario never, or rarely, discarded an architectural style they liked.”