Proudly displayed on bookshelves and coffee tables across Prince Edward County The Settler’s Dream (1984) is a hefty volume bursting with photographs and historical details about the built heritage of the County, much of which dates back to the 1780s. It is primarily the work of Tom Cruickshank, with editing and contributions from heritage architect Peter Stokes.

This monument represents less than 10 percent of a much larger archive, assembled by Mr. Cruickshank over a number of years, and known as the Historical Architectural Survey of Prince Edward (HASPE).

In 1981, fresh out of the University of Toronto with degrees in geography and landscape architecture, Mr. Cruickshank was looking to get out of the city. 
“I couldn’t wait to move out to a small town. I thought I’d probably have to wait until I was 40 or 50 or something, but I had the chance to move to a small town and I just loved it.”

Mr. Stokes, a member of the Architectural Conservancy of Ontario, and who led the restoration of Macaulay House, offered Mr. Cruikshank the opportunity to begin a County-funded survey of its built heritage.

He found himself an apartment at the Claramount, which at the time, before the Rogers family transformed it into a lovely country inn, was “just some run down apartments, kind of a sketchy apartment house.” 

In an era before the internet, and with no assistance, Mr. Cruickshank found that he “could not do the survey efficiently. It was just me driving around the County making friends wherever I went. I would just knock at random doors! I was never met with hostility or suspicion or anything, but some people were more interested than others, and if I hit on the right person I’d be there for hours. 

“I met a guy named Murray Clapp in South Marysburgh, and he took me to a couple of houses that were in the woods and I probably would have missed them, and he took me to a cemetery, and then it was getting late, so he asked me to join him and his wife for dinner.”

Mr. Cruickshank was discovering that this was as much a social as an academic project. The history of the County’s buildings is also the history of its people, the builders and owners.

At the time he began the survey, heritage was a “cause:” from the 1950s through the 1970s historical buildings were neglected in favour of bigger, impersonal structures unrelated to their context. 

“We lost a lot of that small town ambience.” But “current architecture pays more attention to fit, placement, presence, and context. We’ve learned something.” As a result of decades of attention to local heritage and the need to preserve it, current owners and planners can appreciate the ongoing heritage of a location. 

“Heritage education creates a mindset: these buildings are a valuable asset and  we should adapt them into our modern lives. I’m of two minds about that: I love to see an old building like the Claramount as the centerpiece of a big ambitious development at Port Picton, yet something is lost because the context changes. It’s a double-edged sword. But I welcome the new development in the old setting. It is good because at least those buildings are preserved and, in fact, revered.”

The full result of Mr. Cruickshank’s work is the HASPE, which documents more than 4000 properties in the County. Just 300 of these would appear in The Settler’s Dream. The full survey, a hundred three-ring binders full of pictures glued onto loose-leaf pages and annotated with details of history, ownership and architectural elements, has been stored at the County Archives for close to four decades.  

The Archives is launching an initiative to digitize this collection. To raise funds, Mr. Cruickshank offers a talk at St. Andrew’s Church in Picton, on Saturday, November 2 at 2:00pm. Tickets are $40, and available for purchase here.