father1

The human losses of World War 1 had a direct effect on local architecture especially in the immediate post war period. Returning soldiers were seen as deserving of private housing but homes built for them were unassuming when compared with all but the simplest Late Victorian houses.All were small, but detached, a little like English cottages.

This porch is unusually placed as it is located on a minuscule Lunennburg Old Town lot.

An unusual development at this time was the mushrooming of a mail-order new housing market.beginning with the year 1905. Eatons is probably better remembered than other retailers for its part in this market, but they operated only in Western Canada during the period 1910 to 1932.

Canadian Aladdin, a subdivision of a Michigan firm, had its headquarters in the C.P.R. building in Toronto and had branch offices in Saint John, Winnipeg, and Vancouver, with mills in Ontario, New Brunswick, and British Columbia. , Canadian Aladdin conducted a coast to coast business from 1905 to 1952.Less well known than Eaton's, they had a much larger share of the mail-order house business.

Canadian Aladdin houses were precut at the factory and shipped to the railway station closest to the customer. A easy matter in the case of Lunenburg and Mahone Bay, where the rail line passed close by. The lumber and materials were accompanied by a detailed set of blueprints and construction manual. Aladdin boasted that anyone who could swing a hammer could build an Aladdin Home and they offered to pay $1 per knot for every knot found in a carload of Aladdin lumber.

In these days, that offer remains impressive!

From the pages of an Alladin Catalogue The bungalow is another small house but its incorporation of the porch roof into that of the main house sets it apart stylistically. Aladdin produced 15,000 floor plans for prefabricated housing during the years it was in business but it was a small player compared with Sear's Homes in the United States.

1. Several different forms of cottage developed but all had a veranda or porch. The main entertainment of the time was watching the passing parade and this area of the home was the center for activities during the warm weather.

2. The framing was simplistic with no decorative moulding except wooden gutters which extended around the broken pediments.. Quite often the windows were fitted with multiple panes reversing an earlier trend to larger surfaces of glass.

3. Siding could be either shingle or clapboard and sometimes the shingles were shaped to give the home a bit of extra character.