Who shot the Rose Cottage Books floor?
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It is not every day you get a message that during a renovation of a downtown store, bullets were found in the old floor.
Now doesn’t that just conjure up visions of an old saloon that had the big bar room brawl where guns are fired and the big mirror over that bar always gets broken? What? You don’t think Tillsonburg was part of the Wild West? Just remember Canada West was once the western frontier!
My curiosity was piqued so I hustled downtown only to discover my over-active imagination was not correct. The slugs in the floor were not from and old .45 Colt but the little shot from a shotgun.
That was okay though, I can imagine a lot of scenarios for a shotgun, like store owner scaring off a would-be thief by shooting him in the butt! Or a philandering husband, but no, that would have been the rolling pin. But you get the idea. What would this section of an old building have been used for that someone would use a shotgun?
The first step to the past is the present. So I popped down to see Mike O’Grady of O’Grady Insurance who now owns the building between Coon Alley and the Royal Bank. He is renovating the store that was most recently Rose Cottage Books and transforming from the present to the past. It was here when the modern flooring was removed that shot was found in the now exposed beautiful beech wood floors. They also removed the interior west wall (by alley) to expose the old yellow brick.
Ahhh, a clue! Yellow brick for many of the town’s buildings was from the VanNorman/Tillson brickyard which was once near where Tip Top Cleaners is today. But we don’t know if the time period is right for that yellow brick, yet.
Michael was able to give some more recent history to start the search back through time. His father previously owned O’Grady building which now goes from 16-20 Brock St. W. and before him, Mike’s grandfather Len Owen. He knew of a few former stores which had been in the block, like grandpa W.L. Owen’s Union Bus Terminal; Western Tire store and a lady’s fur coat shop.
Betty Lou Ireland also recalled some business in the building and some with extra clues, like Western Tire being run by Peter Napron; a Sports Store; Mooney Insurance; a Hairdresser; Health Food & Reflexology and of course, Penny Esseltine's Rose Cottage Bookstore.
Unfortunately it is a pretty short list when you consider there have been five stores sometimes more if you include second floor and basement businesses for how many years? Decades? A hundred?
Well I am fortunate to have some old insurance maps; one from 1938 which showed from the alley: CNR Ticket office; J. Hunter Shoe Repair; Owen Auto Parts; Bus Office; Brumwell Mill? (Millinery?); a set of stairs; and then came the Royal Bank which was separate from the O’Grady building.
The 1909 maps showed: D.G. (dry goods); Tailor; Barb? (Barber?); Office; (plywood?), and stairs, then the bank. Now I am not sure what plywood means for a store/business, unless there was lot of it in the store for the fire department to know about. I didn’t think there was plywood back then but evidently it was re-invented in 1850 but manufactured initially in 3500 B.C. in Egypt! Who’d have thought it?
Now I didn’t have an earlier Insurance/fire map but we are fortunate to have an 1881 Bird’s Eye View Map of the Tillsonburg.
The whole town was drawn by hand and from high up like a bird would see. The perspective is amazing and the individual rendering of each building is actually quite accurate. Now this map takes us back to when the Queen’s Hotel sat where RBC is. From the alley you can see a small out building or tiny house on corner then a couple of out buildings to the back of the property with green courtyard area to the Queen’s hotel. There is also a covered veranda across the back of the Queens Hotel which seems to go around to these out buildings. They could be chicken coups and or small stables for horses etc. It is hard to tell.
But it does tell us that the building there today came after 1881 and before 1909. Not bad for a beginning but it needs to be narrowed down a bit more. Unfortunately the Tillsonburg Architectural Conservation Advisory Committee (TACAC) hasn’t got a file on this building so if anyone is going to do a Land Title search could you check out this building out, please?
The Tillsonburg brickyard could have put out the yellow bricks in the 1890’s so that is another little piece to the puzzle that would fit, but there are so many more missing.
I need people in Tillsonburg to get out those photograph albums again and see if you have any photos of this block, I don’t care what decade you took them.
Everyone else needs to start jotting down the different businesses or proprietors and if you can remember about when those people had those businesses there, that would be a bonus. With your help we might just track down who shot the floor!