8 Leonard Road: The James Steward Leonard House

Architecture Style: Gothic Revival/Greek Revival

Built: 1870

This house overlooks the old “landing at the head of the tide”.   In 1778, Jonathan Leonard of Granville Township, a New England Planter, built a sawmill and inn on the eastern bank of the Landing [Leonard] Brook. His estate inventory indicated a large inn: nine beds, four dining tables, twenty-four chairs, storage chests, kegs and crocks, serving dishes,  fireplace cookware, and one large coffee mill.  Sarah [Dodge] Leonard served her cider, cheese, and blood pudding to travellers, including the future King, the Duke of Kent.  While generations of Paradise Leonards savoured the royal praise he gave Sarah’s pudding, she and other innkeepers petitioned the Assembly in 1805 for the expenses incurred by billeting his troops.  Their appeal ended the burden of enforced billeting.

Jonathan- Miller, housewright, and militia captain- restlessly sought new enterprises, and incurred debt as the economy crashed. He still hoped.  In 1802 the House of Assembly accepted his property as the site of the first bridge over the river. But when he died that year the grant was given instead to Bridgetown. These disasters and lost opportunities were overcome by the next generation.  Seth, or “Squire Leonard” was a respected magistrate, and he bought up land to the very top of the Leonard Rd. He joined in creative economic ventures, and he and Elizabeth [Merry] ran the mill and inn. The children of the house served supper, recalled an 1829 traveller [George Head, Esq.]. In the morning, the horses stamped in the December frost as the coachman lit his pipe, awaiting the journey.

Around 1870, James S. Leonard and his wife, Annie E. Morse, built a new home on the hill: a rural Victorian beauty with Gothic Revival arches and gables, but also the black shutters on white, and the columned pilasters, brackets, and recessed entry of Greek Revival homes.  The shed behind the house may be of Planter origin, possibly part of an earlier Foster home.  James ran a co-operative store in it for the Paradise Union Cheese Manufacturing Co. Robie and Ruby were elegant, educated, and desperately hard-working farmers. Mark Leonard’s son Larry was the last Leonard to own this property.  Nancy, Brenda, Karen and Greg, the eighth generation, grew up here. Since its sale out of the family in 2000, it has been enjoyed by new families, as below.