![]() The house remained in the Runciman family until 1978 when it was transferred by the Misses Runciman to the Heritage Canada Foundation. After the death of the rector, Girvan Bank became the home of the Runciman family, leading merchants of the town and operators of Glasgow House at Runciman Corner. The hip roof and wide eaves, in the picturesque fashion of the day, enhance the low Regency cottage look Millidge wanted. The rest were dismissed as “generally old and decayed”! Named Girvan Bank by Millidge, the home owes much of its lightness of design to the influence of the Boston architect Charles Bullfinch, and is unusual for the semicircular bays with eyebrow windows. In 1826, it was one of only two houses in Annapolis Royal singled out for the approval of the Acadian Magazine, the second being the Grange, home of Judge Thomas Ritchie. Luke’s Anglican Church from that date until his death around 1830. The Runciman House was built in 1817 by the Reverend John Millidge, rector of St. Entertainment House is currently operated as a bed and breakfast. There they built the inn known as Commercial House, a business that mirrored their enterprise on the Granville shore. By the late 1830s the Hall brothers had acquired property opposite the ferry slip on the Annapolis shore in the Lower Town. With a livery stable and post office on site, Entertainment House became a stop of the “Pony Express” that carried news from Halifax to Victoria Beach and the crossing to the telegraph office in Saint John. In addition to being farmers, they were wholesale merchants of wine and spirits, and provided the garrison at Fort Anne with both meat and drink. The Halls were multi-faceted entrepreneurs. The cobblestone basement contained a wine cellar. The kitchen was behind the taproom, with their fireplaces back to back, having separate flues. The taproom of the inn was at the front of the house to the right of the entrance. The elegant two and a half storey house is unadorned but for the sidelights on either side of the front door and a classical entrance porch with delicate columns supporting a simple pediment. At that time, the Hall brothers were operators of the ferry between Granville and Annapolis, and their ferry slip was across the main road on their waterfront lot, just a few steps from the inn. Built as an inn about 1812, Entertainment House was owned in the early 1830s by the partnership of brothers Harris and Lawrence Hall, grandsons of a New England Planter of the 1760s. The village of Granville Ferry was, and still is, the only river crossing in the twenty-eight miles between Digby Gut and Bridgetown. Sold again in 2000, it was restored in 2001 and is a private residence. In the 1960s it became the home of Emma Francis, whose superb cakes and doughnuts were famous in the town, and Foster Stevenson, whose landmark taxi service operated out of what is now the Sinclair Inn National Historic Site. The house remained in the Riordan family until 1919, when it was sold to the Devany family. That would account for the change in value of the lot for which Cornelius Riordan, a tailor, paid Thomas Ritchie 40 pounds in 1864, subsequently conveying it the following year to his daughter Catherine for $1000. The original house may have acquired its Victorian renovation when it was moved to an existing foundation at St James Street to make way for railway line construction to the wharf. Latremouille attributes emergence of the ‘working class’ architectural style in Nova Scotia in the 1850–60s largely to the pattern books of American Andrew Jackson Downing. These characteristics include a third gable at the front on the ridge side of the house, with a second story window of unusual shape, a steep roof pitch and windows with larger individual lights arranged in a two-over-two pattern. Its current mid-Victorian style is classic ‘carpenter gothic’ or ‘gothic revival’, architectural characteristics identified by Joann Latremouille in Pride of Home (Lancelot Press 1986) and Allen Penney in Houses of Nova Scotia (Formac 1989). The Annapolis Royal municipal heritage citation dates the origin of the house to circa 1800 however, renovation in 2001 suggested an earlier date for the original house, possibly mid-eighteenth century.
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