In contrast to the countryside, communities more directly mirrored changing European, British and American architectural fashions. From the county seat at Lindsay to the smallest hamlet, community (i.e. urban) architecture reflected a very different social world preoccupied with commercial and transportation functions. These communities also served as a focus for cultural, religious and governmental building. But in this section we are principally concerned to examine the closer imitations of architectural styles demonstrated in individual family homes and in commercial architecture; two areas that most effectively illuminate men’s materialist aspirations.

One of the more curious ‘styles’ of nineteenth century architecture was the mid-century fashion of building octagonal houses. This fashion was begun by an American phrenologist, O.S. Fowler, who wrote a book on the advantages of grout wall construction (i.e. poured lime mortar) and the greater interior space available to a circular building. This is true in that the circle contains the greatest amount of space within the shortest perimeter. Fowler’s book, if not his experiments in actually building houses, was a great success. John Remple, author of Building in Wood, has documented over two score of such buildings in Ontario. These are concentrated in the Niagara Peninsula and along the north shore of Lake Ontario; areas most in contact with the United States.

These two interesting examples of early building, however, are atypical of the area’s overwhelmingly solid Victorian building. This, of course, is to be expected since those surviving stone, brick, and a few of the once numerous frame, houses were only built in the 1850s and 1860s. Victoria County was, for Ontario, a lately settled region where even in the 1850s log and frame buildings outnumbered the more permanent brick by a ratio of ten to one. Because of this relatively late period of permanent building construction, we are only concerned here in tracing out the styles that evolved from early Victorian to pre-World War One and a number of vernacular variations in builders’ architecture. For other areas of the province that experienced earlier growth, there were homes built in the English Georgian style. But in Victoria we begin with Early Victorian.

The first early Victorian houses in Victoria were Italianate, a transitional style from early to high Victorian. As A. Gowan has pointed out, early Victorian architecture usually restricted itself to reproducing the details of one fashionable style at a time. Italianate was the first of these early styles that allowed a mixing of fashions since it had no fixed criteria, as neo-classic did, that would subject it to purist academic criticism.

Among the villages there was a far plainer style of building that concentrated more on an expression of materials than of any ‘town’ style. In most cases the villages were intimately tied up with the countryside’s economic concerns and this is reflected in the predominance of brick buildings in such agricultural villages as Oakwood, Little Britain and Woodville and in the predominance of frame houses in such lumbering villages as Bobcaygeon, Fenelon Falls and Coboconk.

Thus there are a number of conflicting aesthetic experiences being expressed in Victorian urban building in the county. The play of greater commerce, wider cultural contacts with the outside (symbolized by the building of the Academy Opera House in the 1890s (Plate 92)), and the distinctions of class in the workplace, served to create a more sophisticated and, in general, a richer display of architecture in urban areas than in rural areas. This greater sophistication was a measure of Victoria’s growing prosperity and, with this prosperity, an indication of growing social complexity.