PEI: The little house on Reuben’s Lane
There’s a small white house for sale on top of a bluff overlooking the Baltic River in Darnley, PEI. The owner is asking $249,900. Now before you plunk down a cool quarter of a million dollars, or something close to it, why don’t we go back in time…to 1956.
My mother’s cousin, Hazel Wall and her husband Reuben, bought what was then a tiny house converted from an old shed for $400. Reuben was fishing lobster and also farming on his father’s land in the Baltic at the time. He came home one day and said he had a notion to move to Darnley, and he had heard that Forbes Thompson had this small place for sale. At the time it was used by the night watchman, who kept the fires burning in the lobster factory. So the young Wall couple plunked down their $400 and went to work.
They had someone dig out the basement using a horse that pulled out dirt one slow bucket at a time. They poured a small foundation and moved into their new home in 1957.
While Reuben made lobster traps in the basement, Hazel was in the attic hammering nails into rough boards over two-by-fours to make a floor, all the while hunched over and crawling on her hands and knees. The only place she could stand up was the exact centre of the house.
The shed’s windows had been insulated with old jeans and rags, so Hazel yanked those out. She also used a fork to claw out the seaweed used to insulate the walls. Over time, it had dried out to the brittleness of potato chips. She hauled out mounds of it and tossed it over the bank. The old seaweed didn’t fall quite far enough to meet the outgoing tide, so remained there for years.
When they could afford real insulation for the attic, up went Hazel again. She remembers one day when her knee poked through the thin plywood floor, damaging their bedroom ceiling. To hide the blemish, they covered the hole with stucco. Lanterns fuelled with naptha gas provided light until electricity came a few years later.
I remember childhood visits to 83 Reuben’s Lane in the mid-1960s. We were always intrigued that they had a Radio Shack VHF radio on the shelf above their bed. They kept it on 24 hours a day to listen for fishermen who might be in trouble, weather bulletins and the occasional police radio traffic. To this day, Hazel has that same radio in her Kensington home. She says it hasn’t been turned off since the day they bought it…more than 50 years ago.
The house is just up the hill from where the old lobster plant stood, which had been owned by the McNutts of Malpeque and the Murphy family of Seaview. For a time, coal was hauled there and stored. My mother remembers working at the fish plant one summer when she was 14. Today the building is gone.
Reuben passed away in 1994 and Hazel stayed in the little house for another ten years. In 2004, a realtor suggested that she list it for the grand sum of $14,000. But no one wanted it. Not even to haul away to another property. Not even to get the acre of land and its panoramic view of the water.
So she gave the house to her family. A grand-daughter lived there for a short time. As did her son. It sold eventually, and in the years since, owners have added a door, laid new shingles, renovated the interior and built long, railed steps to both doors. It makes the 968-square foot house look much bigger than it is.
Now here we are in 2016, looking at the Internet ad for a house from our past.
The small white bungalow at 83 Reuben’s Lane – that was once an old shed, was bought for $400, whose basement was dug by horse and bucket, was insulated by old rags and seaweed, the house no one wanted – can now be yours for a paltry $249,900.
The ad describes it as ‘a unique waterfront home located on a stunning inlet in Darnley, sitting on a large 1.2 acre lot’.
Over the telephone, Hazel chuckles as she recalls the home’s humble beginnings. As she puts it, “Oh I suppose some fool with money will come along and take it.”
In 1956, to a young Island couple just starting out, it was a place to call home and start a family. And how do you put a price on that?
