You Asked, We Answered! Summer 2023 Edition

By Lisa Terech, Community Engagement

While on tour, our Visitor Hosts are often asked questions that they may not be able to answer in that moment. However, we take note of the questions and try to find the answers afterwards. Here is a sampling of the questions our Visitor Hosts were asked through the summer of 2023!

The mesh hanging piece in Henry House kitchen (by the summer kitchen) and what it was used for?

This has “bee”n an object featured in our popular What is it Wednesday series because it truly is a curious piece. “Bee”-lieve it or not, it’s a bee trap or fly catcher. The idea is the pest can fly in (and adding some fruit or another lure would help as well) but cannot fly out.

Wire fly/bee catcher, Oshawa Museum collection (961.1.10)

What did Thomas Henry farm?
The 1851 Agricultural Census gives us insight into this answer. That year, it was recorded that the Henrys has 120 acres, 90 of which were under cultivation.

57 acres were under crops, broken down as follows:

• 40 acres wheat
• 1 acre peas
• 14 acres oats
• 2 acres potatoes

83 acres were under pasture, and 15 acres were under wood or wild. Now, I realize that adding all these numbers together don’t add up to the numbers above, but this is how it was recorded in 1851.

In addition, he had livestock on his farm, including:

• 4 bulls, oxen or steers
• 4 milch cows (a cow in milk or kept for her milk)
• 3 cows
• 3 horses
• 27 sheep (with 100 lbs of wool)
• 7 pigs

Finally, it was noted that the farm had 10 bundles/tons of hay and 100 lbs of butter (and with cows being kept for milk, a good amount of butter makes sense)!

What is the tool on the wall beside the oven in Henry? Looks like a carpet beater?

It is a carpet beater!

Carpet beater, Oshawa Museum collection (X92.48.1)

When was the Lady of the Lake statue put in?

The Lady of the Lake was controversial in the 1959 when she was unveiled in Lakeview Park as many didn’t like their tax dollars being spent on a statue who was not wearing any clothing! To learn more about the statue, the controversy, and how it’s moved around in the park, please visit our online exhibit about Lakeview Park: https://lakeviewparkoshawa.wordpress.com/2020/05/21/the-lady-of-the-lake/

Was the well ever too dirty?

Excellent question, and, sadly, not one we can answer with certainty. We don’t have information in the archives about the state of the well, and we have yet to determine where the family would have had their well. We’ve been lucky to host students from Trent University Durham on three occasions. In 2018, the archaeologist, Dr. Helen Haines, felt confident in saying we likely found the midden (garbage pit), found just to the north of the house. Still to be found are the locations of the (probable) well and the location of the privies. So, we cannot say for certainty whether or not the well was ever unviable. Luckily, the family did live within a stone’s throw of Lake Ontario!

What can you tell us about the light fixture in the dining room of Henry? And, another visitor asked, Is the chandelier original?

None of the light fixtures are original to the house. In fact, the light fixture in the dining room, many years ago, would have been a gas fixture. It has since been retrofitted to electric. And, of course, all of the electric lights are our modern convenience for Henry House, one that the Henry family would not have enjoyed when they lived in the home in the 1800s!

Light fixture in the Henry House Dining Room

Light fixture in the hallway of Henry House

An Evening Tea at Henry House, 1867

When reading through old newspapers, mentions of familiar places and names are always exciting. The following appeared in the Oshawa Vindicator, 22 May 1867:

Social – On the afternoon of the 24th inst., a social in connection with the Ladies’ Aid Society, of the Christian Church, will be held at Elder Henry’s, Port Oshawa. Tea will be served at six p.m. A programme has been prepared for the occasion, one item of which is an essay from the pen of Mrs. P.A. Henry.

An evening spent by the lake listening to the writings of Polly Henry sounds like a lovely way to have spent and evening, almost 156 years ago.

Henry House, Summer 2016

Polly Ann Henry

You Asked, We Answered: 2022 Round-up

By Lisa Terech, Community Engagement

While on tour, our Visitor Hosts are often asked questions that they may not be able to answer in that moment. However, we take note of the questions and try to find the answers afterwards. Here are a few of the questions that we were asked throughout 2022

Is John Henry, former Oshawa Mayor and current Durham Regional Chair, related to the Henry family?

We asked His Worship this question upon his first election as Mayor in 2010, and he claimed that there was no connection.

What year is the Fire Insurance Map from?

In Robinson House, in the Leaving Home, Finding Home in Oshawa exhibit, there is a large map showcasing a neighbourhood in Oshawa with many landmarks of significance to the eastern European community. That map dates to 1948, and you can read more about it in a previous blog post!

Did the Henry family know how to speak French?

As far as we know, it doesn’t seem to be a language that was spoken at home. The 1891 Census has a column for ‘French Canadian,’ 1901 has a column for ‘Mother Tongue’ and 1911 has a column for ‘Language Commonly Spoken;’ the Henry siblings all indicate English in these columns.

In 1960, Thomas’s Granddaughter, Arlie DeGuerre, shared family history in The Life and Times of Thomas Henry. When recalling Thomas’s War of 1812 involvement, she stated,

“Thomas Henry… was employed to attend this new Judge on an official trip to Montreal. He remained in Montreal a month and learned something of the French language” (page 2).

A grain of salt is always taken when using this source as there are some inaccuracies within.

Did the Henry family have a cat/have pets?

This was one I was also asked on a tour this fall. The 1851 Agricultural Return tells us that, for livestock, they had:

• 4 bulls, oxen or steers
• 4 milch cows (a cow in milk or kept for her milk)
• 3 cows/heifers
• 3 horses
• 27 sheep (with 100 lbs of wool)
• 7 pigs

There is no apparently mention to pets in the Memoir of Thomas Henry, nor any mention in Arlie DeGuerre’s writings.

What year was the music box in Henry House made?

For this answer, I’ll direct you to a post written by Kes back in December.

995.1.1 Inside top view.

When did someone last live in Henry House?

The last Henry family member to live in Henry House was William. He lived there until the 1910s. Between 1917 and into the early 1920s, the Mackie family called the house home. It was used for a time as a ‘rest room’ for mothers, a place to rest while their children were playing in the park. It was home to Nasion and Emelline (Ned & Lina) Smith from the 1930s to 1942, and Harry Smith, a Parks Board of Management employee and in charge of Lakeview Park maintenance, lived in the home into the 1950s.

The Mackie Family and friend outside Henry House, c. 1920; from the Oshawa Museum archival collection (A983.3.8)

In 1959, the Oshawa Historical Society received word that they could use Henry House as a local museum. Doors opened in 1960, and we’ve welcomed thousands of visitors every year since.

Opening of Henry House, May 1960; Oshawa museum archival collection

Thank you for visiting!

Joseph Smith and Thomas Henry

By Jill Passmore, Visitor Experience Coordinator

Joseph Smith Jr. was born in 1806 to Joseph Smith Sr. and Lucy Mack. Their family travelled and frequently moved so that Smith Jr. would think nothing of his long journeys as an adult. Around 1816, the Smiths were part of “a New England exodus across the Great Lakes region in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, children of the decaying utopia of Puritan New England following paths since wrenched askew from those of their ancestors.”¹ After the Revolutionary War, many American Loyalist families chose to leave New England, making Upper and Lower Canada their homes. Analogous to this were John and Nancy Henry, who immigrated from Ireland in 1811, landed in New York City, and slowly made their way to East Whitby in Upper Canada.

Joseph Smith’s religious journey is oddly similar to Thomas (son of John and Nancy) Henry’s. “Joseph embarked on his usual religious inquiries when he was barely an adolescent”² just as Thomas Henry was “when very young, the subject of religious impressions.”³

Before becoming a Christian, Thomas Henry explored Episcopalianism, Methodism, and Calvinism. Then, in 1825, he met a Mr. Blackmar, an Elder that had “‘taken his life in his hand,’ and gone forth to preach the gospel, relying for support only on Him who feeds the ravens, and marks the sparrows fall.”⁴  These ministers took only the name of ‘Christian’ as their religion.

The Christian Church (also known as the Disciples of Christ) rejected all denominations during the Second Great Awakening (1790 – 1840). Alex Beam, author of American Crucifixion: The Murder of Joseph Smith and the Fate of the Mormon Church, describes the Second Great Awakening as “a breakout period of radical, passionate rethinking of traditional Christian worship…new doctrine was everywhere.”⁵

On April 30, 1830, Smith “announced the formation of the Church of Christ…converts came from evangelical Methodism and from the followers of evangelist Alexander Campbell, who, like Joseph, was preaching a primitive Christianity, calling for a restoration of Christ’s church on earth, in anticipation of the Second Coming.”⁶ Then, on December 31, 1831⁷, Alexander Campbell and Barton W. Stone came together and officially merged their beliefs to form the Disciples of Christ – also known as the Christian Church or Church of Christ. Mr. Blackmar, whom Thomas Henry met in 1825, was an early Disciple of Christ missionary.

On September 4, 1825, Thomas Henry

was at work alone in the field. I wept and prayed and again reviewed my past life: again my sins stood in dark array before me. My eyes were bathed in tears and my heart was ready to break; and there, alone in the field, I confessed my sins, and promised to obey God in all things. Bless His name! He not only humbled, but exalted me then and there! A great light broke into my mind; I forgot all my trouble, was strongly relieved of every burden and all distress, while my whole soul seemed full of bliss; my tongue was loosed, and I cried, “Glory to God!’ Then I sat down and asked myself what this meant.⁸

Seven years later, Sidney Rigdon, an “urbane and erudite Campbellite preacher”⁹ and his congregation (Disciples of Christ/Christian), joined Joseph Smith in 1830. “Joseph admired Rigdon, famed for his fiery, revivalist preaching, and often deferred to the older man on theological questions or when it came time to deliver an important speech. The two men shared a famous 1832 vision, staring into the sky for over an hour while receiving a revelation of the three-tiered stratification of heaven.”¹⁰

The above comparisons will become part of further research on the E.S. Shrapnel print entitled “Mormons attempt to raise the dead.” Thus, there is finally solid evidence that Joseph Smith did visit Oshawa in the early days of this new religion and made some converts from this and surrounding areas of the Home District. Please visit https://oshawamuseum.wordpress.com/tag/es-shrapnel/ for updates and to see other prints.

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1. Bowman, Matthew. The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith. Random House, 2012. 6.
2. Beam, Alex. American Crucifixion: The Murder of Joseph Smith and the Fate of the Mormon Church, Public Affairs, New York, 2015, 15.
3. Henry, Polly Ann, Stoney Kudel and Laura Suchan. The Annotated Memoir of Rev. Thomas Henry. The Oshawa Historical Society, 2017, 30.
4. Henry, et al., 32-34.
5. Beam, 15.
6. Ibid, 19.
7. Davis, M. M. (1915). How the Disciples Began and Grew, A Short History of the Christian Church, Cincinnati: The Standard Publishing Company.
8. Henry, et al., 37.
9. Beam, 24.
10. Ibid.

An Introduction to the Henry Grandchildren

By Jill Passmore, Visitor Experience Co-ordinator

Father Henry was very fond of children, and his grandchildren will carry to their graves pleasant memories of ‘Grandpa’s Parties.’ These parties were given on the 24^th of May, and the grandchildren were all invited. The children were all welcome if they came, but the grandchildren were the honored guests. We shall always remember the long table, surrounded by children, with grandpa at the head dispensing the good cheer provided for the occasion, was a face scarcely less bright and happy than the children around him.

~Polly Ann Henry, Stoney Kudel, and Laura Suchan, The Annotated Memoir of Rev. Thomas Henry (Oshawa Historical Society, 2017), 115-116.

Why them? Why was it important to me to document the lives of Thomas Henry’s grandchildren? This project began a few years ago when we decided to host an event we called Grandpa Henry’s Picnic. After a few years of hosting this event, I realized that we weren’t offering any information to the public about our guests of honour! I quickly printed out some pictures and did a few brief biographical sketches. Later I began to wonder which of the grandkids attended these Grandpa’s Parties. There were so many of them, I began to lose track of who was who.

A991.5.11

My next step was to create an Excel spreadsheet that included columns to denote their names, year born, age at death, occupation, where they lived, did they live while Thomas was alive, who were their parents, are there any photos of them, and did they have any servants. From here I could manipulate the columns to see the grandkids from oldest to youngest, according to who their parents and siblings were, and were they alive while Thomas was.

In total, Thomas and Lurenda had 54 grandchildren. Thomas’s first wife Elizabeth never met any of her grandchildren, dying when her oldest son was only nine years old. For sake of ease, my research has not included any step-grandchildren, nor infants whose information I could not find.

Bertie Vasbinder,Hazel DeGurre, “Aunt Eliza Henry,” Arlie DeGurre, Elva Lorbeer, Jennie McGill (A017.20.14)

Ambrose Henry, son of John and Elizabeth, was the first grandson born in 1847, and Ida May McGill, was the youngest granddaughter, daughter of John and Jennie, and born in 1890 – 43 years apart. To give you some more perspective, Ambrose was born before his youngest three aunts and uncle were born: Clarissa in 1848, William in 1849 and Jennie in 1852. In another interesting tidbit, the oldest granddaughter Edna, daughter of John and Elizabeth was born in 1855 and Thomas’s youngest daughter Jennie was born in 1852.

Now that you’ve gotten a taste of the information, which I personally find fascinating, I hope you’ll continue reading as I introduce Thomas Henry’s Grandchildren.