KAWARTHA LAKES-Sheila Boyd was Ida Lillian de Grassi and Mossom Martin Boyd’s youngest daughter born in 1894. She did not marry, but instead stayed in Bobcaygeon and cared for her mother. After her mother died in 1942, she lived alone in the Big House, until she too passed away in 1982. She was the last Boyd to live at this estate, and is remembered for her generosity—including donating the Bobcaygeon Library and Boyd Museum. Most Bobcaygeon residents never stepped inside the stone walls while she was alive—Harry was one of the few who had visited.
“She lived in a couple rooms of the house. She had a bedroom, and she had a room she used to sit in at the north end of the building, where she used to paint.” Sheila also commissioned the art room that was attached to the library, across the road, where she enjoyed teaching painting. “There are a lot of her paintings around. She loved flowers and used to have the grounds kept pretty nicely. She would start flowers in her own little greenhouse, and even had them trucked around town, for five other single ladies. Lenny Cross, her hired man, had flats with the flowers on them, that he would bring around to the other ladies when she had extras. She liked to grow cosmos.”
“The kitchen had a stove in it,” with a firebox in it. “It just lasted so long and then it burned through from the wood fires. A couple of times Lenny came down and had me build a new insert for the woodstove. Why did she still use a wood stove? Well, her porridge in the morning had to be cooked on wood.”
“I visited Sheila one time. She collected pictures and so did I and sometimes I had something she didn’t have. She asked me to come over and have something to drink. She had me into the kitchen. That was as far as you would get in the house in those days, but we would sit in the kitchen and she would have a 7-Up or something sitting there for you, and she wanted to show me the flowers. She said I’m going to walk out in the back, and she had a problem in those days because her hips were gone. She said I can walk, but I can’t stand. So, I am just going to walk out there, and I will just fall on the ground, but don’t worry about it. There is nothing the matter with me, but that’s the only way I can stop. So that is exactly what she did. She walked out there at the back and she fell on the ground and she sat there and I sat on the stone, and we talked about the flowers.”
“When she was still fit, we used to see her going out in her Ford station wagon with the wood panelling on it, with her palette in the back. She would go out there someplace and sit in a farmer’s field” or some other place that caught her eye to paint.” When she came to the point of getting rid of it, I had my own garage, and she phoned me and she said Harry I want you to look this thing over and I’m going to give it to a nephew of mine. I put a new battery in it and made sure that everything else was in perfect order. She wanted to know that it was in perfect order—that’s the kind of woman she was. She gave a lot of money—in fact the whole Boyd Family did—to the Anglican Church. It’s worth going in there to see that big stained-glass window and the other things that the Boyd family donated.”
This story is part of our partnership with Maryboro Lodge, The Fenelon Falls Museum and was written by Glenn Walker.
If you want to make a donation to the museum, you can e-transfer to: curator@maryboro.ca or mail a cheque to :
