and round of cheese the local market could provide. The finest linen cloth was retrieved from the old trunk, what silver the family had was polished, the best china, though old and chipped, was pulled from its felt wrappings and set on the table. The Davises arrived. Warm greetings were exchanged. Convivial conversation ensued. Dinner was enjoyed. Impressions were made. By the late afternoon, when the party dispersed, Mr. and Mrs. Davis were entirely admiring of Mr. and Mrs. Brady; Mr. and Mrs. Brady were entirely admiring of Mr. and Mrs. Davis; Jack and Jesse Brady were each in love with Louisa Davis, and Louisa Davis, after three months of knowing Jack and only just having met Jesse, was smitten with them both.
Two months later, when formal declarations of love to Louisa had been made confidently by Jack and regretfully by Jesse, when it was clear that Louisa could not decide which Mrs. J. Brady she preferred to be, and when it was equally obvious that Jesse and Jack could no longer work under the same merely framed roof, let alone live under another fully constructed one, Jesse left for the ports of Liverpool and thence for America. For six long weeks he lay in the bowels of the steerage compartment as his vessel was blown off course down to the Bay of Biscay before righting its course and crossing the Atlantic to its intended destination in Nova Scotia. Jesse Brady, just twenty-two years of age, contemplated all he left behind: a loving mother and sister, each of whom begged him to stay; an aging father and business partner, clearly resentful of his decision to leave; an aggrieved brother who considered Jesse’s feelings for Louisa to be a conscious attempt to usurp him; a woman whose eyes he could not stop his own from seeing, whose laughter he could not banish from his ears, whose scent he could not rid from his memory. What lay ahead of him? He did not know.
Jesse spent a night in Nova Scotia before devoting nearly all of his remaining funds to the purchase of a ticket on a schooner that would take him east to the City of Toronto. The trip was providential, as on the first day of the short passage, Jesse befriended a successful builder named Nelson, returning to Brampton, a small 1,500-person village northwest of Toronto. On the second day, Nelson hired Jesse as one of his builders and convinced a middle-aged couple to follow them to Brampton. As the foursome completed their journey, the middle-aged couple hired Nelson to build their new homestead.
It was a testament to Nelson’s marketing skills that he was able to convince not just one person but three people to follow him back to Brampton. But Nelson understood the promise of the small village that had recently been connected to Toronto and markets all over the world by the Grand Trunk Railway. The railway was revolutionizing the village that only ten years earlier had a population of just over five hundred, roads that were nothing more than mud tracks, no post office to its name, no local government, and few industries.
For the next two years, Jesse worked tirelessly with Nelson as they built custom houses for the new settlers or for farmers just outside of the village who were ready to replace the log cabin homes, built when their land was first cleared. Nelson’s instincts about young Jesse’s talents were confirmed within a day of seeing him work. Nelson was impressed by the boy’s knowledge not just of masonry and carpentry but all trades involved in the construction of a house. His work ethic was obvious from the start, but Nelson could quickly see that Jesse was also conscientious about the quality of his work. Over the course of those two years, Jesse rose from being one of Nelson’s crew of regular or occasional labourers to his second-in-command.
Nelson’s credo was to build to his customer’s specifications. As most of his customers were English immigrants, most wanted Georgian English country-style homes, albeit on a smaller scale. Though his customers were well off enough to pay for a home a British squire may have occupied, they were generally not affluent enough to have a home such as that of a British lord. Accordingly, Jesse and Nelson built one or one-and-a-half-storey mini-Georgian-style homes, each covered in a plaster-like mixture called “roughcast,” with a front door centred below a peaked roof and two large first-floor windows, one on each side and each equidistant from the door.
Though he worked hard by day, Jesse spent most of his evenings in his small room above the local tannery. He had only two pastimes aside from attending and singing in the choir of the Wesleyan Methodist Church: writing and drawing.
On Jesse’s arrival in Brampton in 1857, he sent two letters to England. The first was to his mother, letting her know where he was settled. That letter was easy to write. The second letter was to Louisa, apologizing for the way in which he left (he hadn’t even said goodbye) and wishing her well in her life with Jack. That letter was hard to write, and though he knew he should not do so, he added in a hastily written postscript: if she ever wanted to see him again, she need only write, and he would come for her.
Within two months he had a reply from his mother, advising him that a wedding date had been set for Jack and Louisa and that the two had decided to immigrate to Australia following their marriage. His mother begged Jesse to return to England to resume business with his father, the cause of his dissociation soon to be removed. Jesse’s reply was immediate and firm: he would not return to England, and he begged his mother never again to mention to him either Jack or Louisa. With that behind them, mother and son engaged in a monthly exchange of letters that would carry on until her dying days.
When not writing to his mother once a month, Jesse spent most of his evenings drawing pictures of the homes he dreamed of building. He had a strong hand and could make a piece of lead flow like ink. A blank page could be brought to life with his swift strokes, hard lines, and soft shading. Within minutes the intricate ideas in his mind became a picture, with every detail clear for those who might look on. Unfortunately, at least initially, few did. His drawings stacked up one on top of the other in various piles in the room he rented above the tannery.
The homes Jesse drew were not mansion homes, like that of George Wright, the successful flour miller and retailer whose palatial home known as the Castle was near the village’s centre. No, Jesse dreamed of building homes for families of more modest means. Each had three bedrooms, a kitchen at the back, numerous large windows to let in the sun’s warming rays, and various roof lines, abandoning the confining design limitations of the symmetrical houses he and Nelson built. Each had a front door a full four feet off the ground, far above the snow in all but the worst winters. Most importantly, each front door was accessed from a wide verandah, which ran all the way across the front of the house. Jesse envisaged a Brampton where families would have leisure time they could spend in these outdoor parlours, watching their children play and socializing with their neighbours. He envisaged houses of brick with distinguishing characteristics, turrets, and small towers.
Jesse knew that his dream could only become a reality if these houses were affordable. To accomplish that, he proposed to build his houses fairly close together and to build them in unison so that efficiencies could be realized in the purchase of supplies and in the construction process. He also proposed that each house have similar, though not identical elements.
Nelson suggested that Jesse’s time would be better spent looking for a woman with whom to share a house of his own than dreaming of houses for others. But since he could not convince Jesse to abandon his dreams, Nelson listened cheerfully as Jesse shared his development ideas. Nelson promised that one day, when they had met the demand of all of those who had money to purchase custom-built houses, they would look at building in the less conventional way that Jesse suggested. But Nelson chuckled as he said this. The way the little village was growing, he didn’t think that Jesse would be building the houses of his designs anytime soon. Only the death of Nelson in 1859 by a massive heart attack meant that he did.
Nearly immobilized with grief over the loss of his closest friend and mentor, Jesse took stock of his situation. In the two years he had been in Brampton, he had developed a name for himself as an excellent builder. He was known and liked by the local tradesmen and suppliers. He had a vision of what he sought to build. Though he was just twenty-four years of age, he resolved to turn down all offers to work for other builders and to forge his own path. With the small amount of funds he had accumulated, he could afford to spend a few months seeking the land and the capital to build the homes of which
