Apple preserves Hand house, barn, history

May 23, 2013 · 0 Comments

Even as the controversy over restoration of Win Hand’s 1863 Stanton Hotel refuses to go away, Dave Apple has been quietly living in Win Hand’s 1867 Orangeville home along with some Hand artifacts, and extensively researching the background of Orangeville’s first constable.

The Hand home on Parsons Street stands as the brick structure stood 136 years ago, with its only visible modification the removal of a second-floor exterior deck and a door where there is now just a window.

Mr. Apple sits at a round wooden table from a former era as he displays a half-inch-thick folder of the Win Hand history and points to a Victorian-era upholstered chair and a small foot locker inscribed with the initials “W.H.” He can tell you the name of the Broadway craftsman who made the box.

The interior structure has not been altered, but the rooms are not used for their original purpose. Constable/bailiff Hand’s office is now a kitchen. The long-ago summer kitchen is now a bedroom.

Mr. Apple pauses by the former summer kitchen to point to a spot at which a former owner of the house, a Mr. Sanderson, is purported to have died suddenly without having told anyone he had stored some rugs and things in the attic and sealed it up.

Mr. Apple discovered the items when he opened the attic to perform some kind of maintenance.

Apart from a few artifacts and the recorded history, there is nothing visible about the house to suggest it was built for an important person in the origins of Orangeville.

Nor has anyone apart from Mr. Apple taken a serious interest in preserving a rare and possibly unique structure – at least for a residential part of any town — that remains standing in excellent condition to the rear of the house – the original barn, a smaller version of the traditional family farm ones.

Living in the ancient Hand Orangeville house and researching the history of the man has Mr. Apple ever more convinced that the Hand Stanton Hotel should be preserved, as should the Orangeville house.

He doesn’t criticize the naysayers but does say that anyone involved in the preservation of history “has to have a feeling” for history and the importance of things. He recalls that it was Joni Mitchell who penned a song to the effect that, “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.”

Win Hand’s history contained in Mr. Apple’s file is of a giant of a man, for his time, at 6’ 5 ½” who emerged from an obscure part of Ontario to become noteworthy wherever he went throughout the province and into Michigan.

Win Hand’s direct descendant Anne Fisher of Michigan will be visiting Orangeville and Stanton at mid-June to explore the earliest stomping grounds of her ancestor and to relate additional information about his life.

By Wes Keller