Maddox Media
6090 County Rd. 50, Campbellford, Ont.
Asking price: $2,995,000
Taxes: $10,671.00 (2024)
Land size: 51 acres
Agent: Fionna Barrington, Chestnut Park Real Estate Ltd.
The backstory
In 1851, census takers in the town known today as Campbellford, Ont., detailed their visit to a two-storey stone dwelling sitting on 150 acres of land. The officials noted 30 acres of woods, along with fields of hay and potatoes. Also noted were four cattle, 17 sheep and one hog.
The human residents were two family members and one servant, the census shows.
What may have stood out to the census takers at the time is that the owner of the farm was a woman, who had the grand stone house built in 1849 and invited her mother to live with her.
That was unusual at a time when nearly all local landowners were men, notes current owner Anne Coulson.
She delved into the history of the property in the extensive local and family records, which name the settler as Elizabeth Rowed, who arrived in Upper Canada from England in 1832.
That’s around the same time that English sisters Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill arrived in the surrounding area and wrote their respective classics Roughing it in the Bush and The Backwoods of Canada.
The Rowed family prospered in the rolling Northumberland Hills and Ms. Rowed married James Carlow, who was given a 200-acre land grant by the Crown.
After her husband died, Elizabeth was left with a considerable estate. She gave the couple’s home to her sister and had the new one built of local limestone on land nearby.
The house today
Home of the Week, 6090 County Road 50, Campbellford, Ont.Maddox Media
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Ms. Coulson and her late husband, Hugh Coulson, were living in Toronto when he spotted the newly listed property in a newspaper advertisement in 1990.
Mr. Coulson had lived in a stone house as a child in the Montreal area and Ms. Coulson grew up in England, where she lived in London but often visited her grandparents in Cornwall.
“I was used to country life and city life,” she says.
Ms. Coulson’s love of Colonial architecture and her husband’s fondness for stone dwellings and farmland came together and the two put in an offer immediately.
The Georgian-style house with five bedrooms and three bathrooms in 4,600 square feet of living space was well-preserved through the years, says Ms. Coulson.
The high ceilings and large casement windows bring a lot of light and air to the house, she says, and the floorplan has changed very little through the years.
Throughout the home, elements such as the original staircase, doors, double-sided fireplaces and wide plank pine floors are still in place.
The previous owners had taken care of much of the restoration and modernization, Ms. Coulson says, so she painted the dark faux oak grain wainscotting and the interior rooms. The couple also replaced the windows.
Today the living room is the setting for formal entertaining and the dining room accommodates large dinner parties.
“At lunch I can open the casement windows,” says Ms. Coulson. “It’s really lovely.”
The kitchen has a wood-topped island and breakfast bar, large windows overlooking the garden, and an original fireplace that is no longer in use.
The room Ms. Coulson suspects was the original summer kitchen now serves as a casual space for watching television with stairs leading to an office above.
There’s also a main-floor family room.
Upstairs the home has five bedrooms and two bathrooms.
The primary suite includes a bathroom with a stand-alone tub and a walk-in shower.
For Ms. Coulson, who paints landscape and scenes in nature, one bedroom also serves as an art studio.
A few years after the couple moved in, Mr. Coulson decided to demolish the tumbledown barn and replace it with a three-bay garage with living space above.
One bay holds the kitchen and bathroom while the other two provide space for a tractor, lawn mowers and other vehicles.
The new “barn” became a place for casual entertaining, with a large outdoor deck for barbecues and relaxing with a view of the countryside.
Ms. Coulson says her husband often took over the space for watching sports on a large screen with his friends, but it worked equally well for gatherings with the couple’s grown children – including two large family weddings.
Campbellford is one of the towns along the Trent-Severn Waterway that attracts boaters and paddlers. There’s also hiking on a stretch of the Trans Canada Trail. The Coulsons became avid golfers with three semi-private courses nearby.
The cities of Peterborough, Belleville and Cobourg are each about 45 minutes away.
The best feature
The rolling landscape of the property dubbed “Hillside” provides privacy and lots of opportunities for year-round activities, including hiking in the summer and cross-country skiing in the winter.
Ms. Coulson also spent lots of time walking the couple’s two yellow Labrador retrievers on trails throughout the 50 acres.
On returning home, she often stopped to relax on a bench set in a dip in the landscape.
The couple decided to install an in-ground pool, surrounded by a patio and gardens. There’s a cabana and also a stand-alone sauna.
“It was just the place to put a pool,” Ms. Coulson says of the bucolic setting. “It’s very quiet.”