Although not the most appealing image of a room in an abandoned log house, it is quite common for many deteriorated abandoned houses. What you see here is one of the rooms on the upper floor of the Petch Log house back in April of 2011. At that time this house stood alone on a piece of land beside the entrance to the Flying Club on Leslie Street, South of Wellington Street East. Today the Petch Log house is restored and resides at the Aurora Community Arboretum next to the Aurora Seniors Centre on John West Way.
This photo shows how badly the log house deteriorated when it was abandoned for many years until the decision was made to fully restore it. Critters lived there, day and night. Moisture, water leaks, winds, warm and cold weather over the years caused a lot of internal and external damage to the log house. On the inside, with time passing by, the wallpaper was peeling off the wall unveiling the next and then the next layer of wallpaper, until the logs or wood planks were exposed. It was very typical in the old days to decorate over existing wallpaper. One of the heavily stained wallpapers hanging loosely on the wall I photographed was an equestrian hunting club theme wallpaper.
It was a vintage looking wallpaper with a few different equestrian hunting scenes. There were men riding horses in red jackets. There were American foxhounds running beside the horses. Perhaps there were foxes running away, but hard to see. There were men with horses jumping fences. Not shown in this image, there were also scenes of ladies in dresses riding side-saddle. Perhaps this wallpaper does tell the story, the story of a community where horse shows and hunting clubs were very much part of the social life of the people of Aurora.
I have searched for the existence of this vintage wallpaper and have found the same theme with different artwork.
Photo Taken: April 21, 2011
