The Matlock cottage that time forgot

BY KEN GIGLIOTTI / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Enlarge Image

Jim and Nancy Brennan relax at Augdon House from May to October. When it gets chilly, the only source of heat is the fireplace.

MATLOCK -- The joke in cottage country is the cribbage boards are all disappearing from cottages, replaced by satellite TVs.

At Augdon House, a Lake Winnipeg cottage that turned 100 years old this year, there's still a cribbage board on the mantle, and a battered old deck of playing cards not far away.

Enlarge Image

The cottage has five bedrooms and they’ve had 19 people sleep over on occasion. (KEN GIGLIOTTI / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS)

There are Time magazines dating back to 1941 -- one with German Gen. Rommel, a.k.a. the Desert Fox, on the cover -- and Saturday Evening Posts from the 1960s. The old magazines give the cottage a musty smell they would miss if it wasn't there, Nancy Brennan says.

And there's definitely no drywall. Everything -- walls, floors and the high ceilings, and the clapboard exterior -- is the original timber that arrived by boat on Lake Winnipeg a century ago. "Drywall isn't a cottage," Jim Brennan says tersely.

Etiam Hic. "Still here," in Latin. That's what it says on the sign at Augdon House.

And it is still here on the southwestern shore of Lake Winnipeg, 55 kilometres north of Winnipeg.

The 2,000-square-foot, two-storey cottage looks like it can easily last another century. At the same time, it never looks like anything other than a cottage.

It still has the old slide-up, slide-down wooden windows. The walls and floors are painted boards and planks. It's not insulated.

Etiam Hic.

Indoor plumbing arrived in 1984. Before that, they used a two-hole outhouse. Owners Jim and Nancy Brennan only got a modern electric stove in 2005 because they could no longer get insurance with the old wood stove (too close to the wall).

The Brennan family is still here, too. They are big into marking history. There's a plaque on the side of the cottage put up in 1999 celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Brennan family's ownership. They've had baseball hats and other paraphernalia made out for the centennial that say, Augdon House 1910-2010.

They have a guest book with the signatures of more than 2,000 names: "Everyone who's ever visited," Jim says.

There is a 'measuring wall' recording the names and increasing heights of 28 children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Old black-and-white photographs of family at the cottage grace the walls and fill binders.

The cottage was built by brothers Duncan and Neil Ross, local farmers and developers who built apartment blocks on Qu'Appelle Avenue in Winnipeg. They named it the Durness House, after the coastal town in northern Scotland from which the Ross family originated.

The Ross brothers built many of the cottages at Matlock in that period. Augdon house is similar to many older cottages with its long, narrow sunroom in front. A sister of the Ross brothers even died in the cottage, with that room forever dubbed the Dead Room.

James and Florence Brennan bought the cottage in 1949. They named it Brenwick; the second syllable is after best friends the Wicketts who regularly visited. The Brennans are Irish and the next generation changed the name to Augdon House in honour of father James. Augdon is Irish, like humourist poet Ogden Nash, and James' middle name.

Everything says cottage here, such as the Thomas Edison Amberol five-cylinder record player, manufactured in 1885, that still works. There's an ancient T. Eaton Co. shipping crate for dry goods that has served as an end table for more than half a century.

The cottage even has one of those traditional stick docks, more like a pier, that runs 120 feet into Lake Winnipeg, and 15 to 20 above the water.

It has five upstairs bedrooms and sleeps 19, including three pull-out sofas. Grandkids stay every other weekend.

The Brennans use the cottage from about May to October.

Jim, who may have a mischievous streak (he keeps a Sarah Palin in 2012 poster in the garage "to stir things up," he said), even wrote Queen Elizabeth II, inviting her to visit Augdon House for its 100th birthday as part of her recent visit.

He didn't tell anyone and then one day Nancy called him at the office saying a letter had arrived from Buckingham Palace.

She couldn't make it, the Queen's handlers informed.

bill.redekop@freepress

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition July 19, 2010 A6