Eight Mile House
As written by Thomas H. Raddall
From his collection at the Dalhousie Archives, Halifax, NS
The content on this page has been compiled by Linda Rafuse and will be available for reading in the December 2024 issue of Queens Crown.
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When I came to Queens County in 1923 a small farmhouse and barn stood in a field on the west side of the road at Eight Mile. It had been built by a man named Wentzell, from Beach Meadows or further “up the shore” in Lunenburg County some time before 1876. It was a lonely spot in a long stretch of woods, and Wentzel must have chosen it because he wanted solitude, for the land was poor and rocky, suited only Nature’s own purpose, the raising of trees. The house was a wooden one of the familiar storey and a half type. Of frame and shingle construction, with an ell that ran parallel with the highway, making it a house of three gables.
One gable faced the road, with two small windows in the upper storey; below was the front door and a small window lighting the parlour. The side of the ell1 that faced the road had a single small window in the middle, and a door at the southeast end. The house was well built, had a stone foundation, and more traces of white paint. It stood in the midst of the clearing, about 100 yards from the road, surrounded by old apple trees.
At Eight Mile the highway appears, to the stranger, to be running through dense forest and nothing else. Actually, here it passes between two lakes, each within a mile of the house. The lakes were named after the milestones which happened to be opposite to the points where the lakes lie closest to the road – Seven Mile Lake and Ten Mile Lake. (Ten Mile Lake runs 3 miles southward from the point where the pioneer road cutters skirted it.)
It was a such a lonely spot that Wentzel’s family left it after his death (1887). For many years the house stood empty, with its doors and windows covered by nailed boards. The woods were creeping up in the old clearing, making it smaller every year. Once, in the early 1920’s, a poor family named McKenna moved out there from Milton, tore off the boards, and “squatted” in the house for a few months. They then went back to Milton.
In 1927 the old house had new occupants, a mysterious couple from the State of Maine, middle-aged people of small education. They kept a cow, had a horse and buggy, but made no attempt to cultivate the field. Occasionally they drove in to Milton to buy groceries; but they got no mail and apparently sent none. They were closed mouthed, and nobody remembers their name – if indeed they gave any name at all. Travelers on the highway sometimes saw the man in the clearing. The woman was rarely visible.
The Eight Mile region had long been a favourite hunting ground for men from Liverpool and Milton. They soon had to stop the practice of parking their cars in the Eight Mile Clearing. Strange tales filtered back to Milton and on to Caledonia. If a car or horse team stopped for any reason at Eight Mile, the man would come out of the house armed with a shotgun and order them to move on. Some tried to reason with him but got nowhere. The man revealed to one or two that he had fled here from the state of Maine to avoid some mysterious persecutors, and he was afraid they might follow him.
He never revealed how he came to know about the Eight Mile House, and that it was empty and available to any squatter. From scraps of conversation, conducted under the menace of the gun, which was always in his hands, it was clear that the man was suffering from delusions and in fact was dangerously mad. His wife seemed to be the same, but ready to go along with his whims and keep her mouth shut. They seemed to have a supply of money, not only for food but for repairs to the house.
Suddenly the man declared that his persecutors from Maine had tracked him down and were lurking day and night in the woods about the clearing. He got boards and shingles from Milton, and with quite skillful carpentry closed up the back door and the door at the end of the ell. This left only one door, the one in the house and facing the road – in other words the front door.
Then he announced to some passing woodsmen that his enemies were climbing the old apple trees to peer in the upper windows, so he sawed off the upper trunks, leaving stumps about four feet high. He and the woman lived in a state of siege, day and night.
In the autumn of 1927, a party of American timber cruisers came to estimate the MacLeod Pulp Company’s holdings near Ten Mile Lake. It was part of t an extensive job, arranged by the Company’s American stockholders, and the cruisers belonged to a professional timber estimating firm in Bangor. As they naturally had a Maine license plate on their care, and they intended to park it in on a short woods road leading from the highway to the north tip of Ten Mile Lake, the manager of the Milton Pulp Mills warned them about the madman at Eight Mile. The cruisers merely laughed, pointing out that they carried something better than a shotgun – each of them carried on his belt a 245-caliber automatic pistol, for shooting wildcats, bear, etc, that they might meet on their travels.
Fortunately, they did not encounter the tenant of Eight Mile House, but apparently, he had seen them, and especially their Maine license plate. His manner was now violent. He would run out with the gun and menace even the casual motorist, out for a drive, who attempted to turn his car at the Eight Mile clearing. Plainly it was only a matter of time before some innocent motorist was shot.
This state of affairs seems strange in modern days, when the country districts are covered by patrols of the RCMP. But there were no police outside Nova Scotia towns until 1929, when a small force of uniformed provincial police came into being. They were too few to be efficient, and in 1932 the government of NS arranged with the federal government for detachments of RCMP. Until that time, law enforcement in country districts was entirely in the hands of local farmers or woodsmen, appointed a “constable” each year, without pay. This system, or lack of system, worked well enough overall, because country folk were law abiding and peaceable; but it was incapable of handling such an affair as the one at Eight Mile. The place was isolated it did not come within the responsibility or even the authority of the village “constables” in Milton and Caledonia, and even if it did these men were not inclined to risk getting their heads blown off “for nothing”.
In the country fashion, people had come to accept this peculiar reign of terror at Eight Mile as one of the curiosities of the road. And in 1929 their problem solved itself suddenly and forever. The mysterious madman and his quiet little woman left the house, presumably at night (for no one saw them go), taking their few sticks of furniture and their belongings in a wagon, and somehow disposing of the cow. The lone door remaining, at the front of the house, was locked.
Before long, hunters were again parking their cars in the Eight Mile clearing, and some broke into the house and used it as a hunting camp. A year or two later some woodsmen building a logging camp in that region stole all the doors and windows from the Eight Mile House. Thus, the weather got in. The roof leaked; the floors heaved with dampness. Hoboes swarmed over the country during the “Depression” of 1930-1938 and Eight Mile house became a sort of wayside hostel for them. They knocked down the plaster to get laths for kindling their fires. They tore down the barn, board by board, for firewood. Then the interior of the house itself began to go.
I have a snapshot of the house, taken on a motor trip to Caledonia in December 1933. It was still standing and outwardly in good condition, although the doors and windows were gone. A year or two later in a Fall gale the upper storey collapsed, and the rest remained, swaying dangerously.
I went inside one Fall day and found utter ruin. All the plaster had gone, but for a patch about three feet square over the old parlour mantel, and nearly all the laths and some of the studding had been ripped out for fuel. On the sole remaining patch of plaster someone had written in pencil THE PEOPLE WHO DISTROYED THIS HOUSE WILL SOME DAY COME TO WANT. The power and economy of the words impressed me, like a phrase from one of the more wrathful psalms, as if the ghost of that bygone madman still haunted the place.
Soon after this nothing remained but a heap of wood and plaster dust. I came by one day in 1938 and found that somebody had trucked the wreckage away, presumably for firewood. Nothing remained but the stone foundation, the small clearing, and the queer polled apple trees.
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The second photo included with this article is Mr. Wentzell’s great granddaughter, Belinda Delong, standing in what remained of the cellar of the Eight Mile House in 2017. Photo used with permission from Belinda.
The Mr. Wentzell that Tom Raddall refers to in his article as the builder of the Eight Mile House, is Frederick Wentzell. He married Elizabeth Gerhart and it was their son Earl who was Grandfather to Belinda Delong.
Source: “Eight Mile House” - Thomas H. Raddall Collection, Dalhousie Archives, Halifax, NS
Photograph – “Eight Mile House” - Thomas H. Raddall Photo Albums, Dalhousie Archives, Halifax, NS.
