Pride Of Puslinch - The Caulfield /Carter House

With the picturesque Eramosa River, a branch of the Speed, running through it, the land designated as Lot 2, Con. 9, Puslinch Township has not diminished in value through the years.

Since it was first cleared and settled, it has supported a pioneer farming family , prosperous saw and grist mills and most recently a highly productive dairy farm. Today much of the land has been returned to thick plantings of trees. Purchased by the City of Guelph in 1983, but not annexed from the Township of Puslinch, the treed land is now being used to protect Guelph’s water supply. A long lane lined with giant fir trees leads to the small clearing where stands the house built and cared for by generations of the Caulfield and Carter families for more than a century and half.

The first to recognize the land’s potential was a tall, gaunt Irishman, John Caulfield. Born in Ireland in 1793, his life in Canada began earlier perhaps than any other Arkell settler. It is said he worked as a stone mason on the Rideau Canal before coming to Guelph and that he first bought land in Guelph from Captain Poore, a militant Tory famous in the Guelph of his day. But Caulfield was certainly located in Puslinch by 1831 when he took up all of lot 2 in the ninth concession. His name appears on the 1831 Survey map commissioned from the surveyor David Gibson by John Arkell, the founder of Farnham Plains/Arkell. In an 1831 note in his own hand, Caulfield himself confirms his purchase of the lot. In 1833, the Arkells referred to Caulfield as "a good settler and a man worthy of his land." His Crown Patent arrived in 1843 and with Deed in hand this may have been the point at which John planned to erect a permanent dwelling.

Possibly married first to a woman called Mary, it was with his second wife he made his life in Puslinch. In Ireland in 1826 died a man of the name Aeneas Clarke. He and his wife Jane had had two children but when their breadwinner died the widow Jane made her way to New York where their last child was born that same year. Sometime in 1830 the widow and her family crossed into Canada and very soon Jane became the wife of John Caulfield. Together they had four children: William (1832-1909), James (1835-1903), John Robert and Mrs. Anne Lilwall. John took his three stepchildren into his care as well. One of his step-daughters, Eliza, became the wife of Frederick W. Stone, a noted stockbreeder, upon whose estate much of the University of Guelph is located. Another, Anne Jane, was given a permanent home with James.

Like most of his neighbors, John no doubt began life in Puslinch in a log house. Sometime before 1851 he built or caused to be built an L-shaped stone house on a hill about a quarter of a mile back from the road (now Victoria Road). This first stone house, recorded in the 1851 Census, still stands. One of its most outstanding features was its windows consisting of the rare 12 panes over 12 panes which can be seen in photographs as late as 1936. Some time after, the family was ready for a larger home and another stone house was built incorporating the original humbler dwelling. It may be that the mortgage John took out in 1855, and discharged in 1864, was to cover the cost of his new residence. If the enlarged portion of the main house was built between 1855-1860 as suggested, it may have been due to the boom in the wheat market after the Crimean War (1854-1856).

The style of the new house was, apparently, very much in fashion at that time. Gordon Couling in his study of the stone houses of Wellington County has this to say:

The square 2-storey house with a hipped roof

appeared to have developed in 1850 and was

popular until about 1865. . . Whole houses of this

type might be built in either town or country; in

the rural areas of Wellington County they were

limited to Guelph and Eramosa Townships with

a few in the northern sections of Puslinch .They

are seldom found in other parts of Ontario.

The house possesses many architecturally and historically valuable features, beginning with the great wooden front door, paned sidelights and transom. The stone in both sections of the house is in excellent condition. Inside, although many things have of necessity changed, some things remain: the wooden floors upstairs and the old door between the main house and the summer kitchen.

Caulfield was a useful member of the growing community. He is recorded as having been an enumerator, a teamster from Guelph to Hamilton and by 1861 merited the title of Gentleman, as opposed to Farmer, in official records. His Will tells us that he not only farmed but was astute enough to invest in Town Lots in Guelph (Piper Survey) and in Mount Forest. But one of his main occupations from the beginning of his tenure was the building and operation of Caulfield Mills, both saw mill and grist mill, on the rear half of the lot. No business was more important to the pioneers who depended on such mills for lumber, flour and food for animals. The mills burned sometime before 1880 but were continually rebuilt by subsequent lessees until the Cook family took over the mill site in 1896 and Caulfield Mills became Cook’s Mills. (All of the old mill buildings were swept away by a 1920 flood, but the name survives in the name of the road and houses growing up around the mill site.)

John Caulfield died in 1871 and the farm and mills were run by son James until1879. By then, James was ready to move on and sold all 198 acres to William Haines. The lot was finally divided into front and rear in 1885 when Haines sold the front half to Alice and Thomas Petty who also had a farm just south of lot 2. By 1897, the Pettys had vested this land in Thomas Carter, Jr., the grandson of James, one of the earliest settlers in Arkell. Thomas’ older brother William Henry took over the homestead while Thomas Jr. began farming on the old Caulfield place. Here, he and his wife Robina Topping, also of Puslinch, prospered and raised their family.

Thomas Jr.’s son Earl and his wife Lillian Billings inherited the house and land in 1920 and built up a fine Registered Holstein Dairy herd. Their children remember the garden and the garden gate, the unusual barn, the very old oak trees, the burial site of loved horses and dogs and any number of incidents that stay in the memory. One stormy day, despite his best endeavours, Earl had to depend on little Winnifred to lead Nettie, a horse with a particular fondness for her, into the shelter of the stable. The Carters today, into the present generation, revere this lovely house and farm.

In 1971 Earl retired and built a red brick house on the northern corner of the lot. He continued to rent the Caulfield farmhouse to a tenant until 1983 when the City of Guelph purchased the property. The city rented the house to tenants and planted the trees while maintaining and servicing the wells on the property.

Unlike so many other pioneer farms which are transformed into sub-divisions, industrial parks, gravel pits or dumps, the Caulfield/Carter place has been lucky enough to be returned to the treed state. It can only be hoped that the house too will be regarded as the irreplaceable treasure it is.

With special thanks to:

Joy Carter Beaton

Winnifred Carter Leather

Merry Gordon of Arizona, great-great- great- grandaughter of John Caulfield