Bowron house (circa 1865)

This house is one of Minden's oldest surviving buildings. It was originally located on a 111-acre homestead at the corner of Bobcaygeon Road and Highway 35, where Minden Home Hardware is now. When the building was relocated to the museum in 1988, a kitchen extension was added to the back of the building for running cooking demonstrations on the real woodstove.

Fred Haultain was one of Minden’s earliest settlers. He built this house in the 1860s and obtained ownership of the land in 1864 through a free land grant, a government scheme enticing farmers to move here by giving away land. In 1872, Haultain sold the property to Francis and Mary Bowron for $95. The Bowron family moved here from England in 1860 and Francis Bowron became Minden’s first school teacher in 1861. The family had four children. The youngest, William, was born in Canada - or ‘Canada West’ as it was known before the Confederation. The house was lived in until the 1980s and it was moved here through the hard work of volunteers and the community to preserve Minden’s history.

The logs used to build this house tell a story of their own. They were all forested locally and hewed by hand, then chinked with mud, sticks and other natural plasters. When European settlers came here in the late 1850s, the trees they cut down to build their homes were hundreds of years old. This area’s ancient forests were clear cut and have since been re-planted. Today’s log homes are built with much smaller and younger trees. You can tell a house is old by looking carefully at the logs. In most cases, the bigger the logs, the older the house!