A visit to the Kawartha Lakes Museum & Archives to see the John McCrea Model Collection

Two examples of John McCrea's work. Left: Pioneer Shanty | Right: Pioneer Squared Log House

If you're a long time reader here you may recall that I'm interested in folk artists of the past who've made their art building miniature buildings. A few of them worked in model railroading, like E. L. Moore, others went in different directions in accordance with their own natures. You can find all my posts, along with this one, on the subject under the 'Folk Roots' tag.

I've been looking into Ontario folk art buildings artists and stumbled across the work of a gentleman named John McCrea, whose models are archived and on display at the Kawartha Lakes Museum & Archives in Lindsay, Ontario.

Apparently the scale of McCrea's large models is 1/2" = 1'

I've been meaning to get out to the museum for awhile and this week I had my chance.

In a nutshell, John McCrea was born on 16 April 1865 in Omemee, Ontario, and died on 19 April 1957 in Toronto. Recall that E. L. Moore was born on 14 March 1898, so McCrea was of an earlier generation, but both Moore and McCrea were born into rural life: Moore to farming, and McCrea to cabinet making, a skill which he apparently learned from his father as a child.

There's an interesting biography of McCrea here, but one thing I will note is that he didn't start building the models in the collection until 1935 when he was 70, and continued until is death in 1957 when he was 92.

The collection consists of models he made of the buildings, structures, and accoutrements of pioneer life in Ontario. I asked one of the staff - who turned out to be the managing director - if she knew why McCrea built these models? Was there some ulterior motive like building up a collection for a public display? She said there didn't appear to be any. He simply wanted to capture the physical reality of the objects that comprised Ontario pioneer life. E. L. Moore had much the same attitude for a lot of his work: he wanted to capture his early life in model form for his daughter. 

Before I go much further I should note that the museum's managing director, Barbara Doyle, generously answered all my crazy questions and provided lots of great background information I hadn't considered. She and the gentleman at the front desk - whose name I unfortunately can't remember :-( - were very friendly, enthusiastic, and knowledgeable and made our brief visit quite enjoyable.

I believe the scale of this model is the same as the house

McCrea was a fine craftsman. As an example, take a look in the photo below at these models of farm implements he made in 1952, especially the blade and teeth on the cross cut saw.

Some modelled farm implements

Although there were only two model buildings on display I'm told the collection is quite large and numbers in the hundreds of items. As well as being large in number the models are also large in size: they're built in scales ranging from 1" = 1' to 1/2" = 1' to the smallest ones being 1/4" = 1'. Different models are rotated in and out of the museum display as different thematic presentations are created. When you visit you may see different models than I've shown here; however, whatever is there you'll no doubt get a good sense of McCrea's high level of craftsmanship.

If you want to see more of these fine models there's a booklet you can buy called History in Wood: The John McCrea Collection. Once I've studied the book a bit I'll probably follow up with a post on tools, materials, scale, and other such model making related things. 

Before I wrap up I should mention that there's much more in the museum than this one collection, and lastly mention the museum building is a repurposed 19th century jail that performed said function from 1863 to as recently as 2003 (!).

So, if you ever find yourself in or around Lindsay, drop by and have a look.

A little more on the Peter-Austin Building Set Mystery

Left: Set# 502 (purchased 2021) | Right: Set# 500 (purchased 2025)

If you're a long time reader here you may recall that back in the fall of 2021 I did a few posts on a building construction toy manufactured in the early 1960s by Toronto's Peter-Austin company. It's a toy that seems almost identical to the famous Girder and Panel toy manufactured by Kenner in that era.

What got me started on those posts was a paragraph in a book called Architecture on the Carpet: The Curious Tale of Construction Toys and the Genesis of Modern Buildings by Brenda and Robert Vale. The authors assert the Kenner toy "appears to be a commercial rip-off" of the one by Peter-Austin. Here's the complete paragraph so you can see for yourself^*:

"It was not until 1956 that a toy appeared that imitated the construction of modern tall buildings, with a frame cladding. The manufacturer was the Peter-Austin Manufacturing Co. of Toronto, Canada. They made two different sets, the No. 500 Trans-Canada Highway Bridge set and the No. 510 Building Set. These sets comprised columns and girders made of rigid red polystyrene.¹¹ The columns were pushed into a baseboard of Masonite (hardboard) with holes to receive them, and they were then connected with the horizontal girders to form a building frame of any desired height, which could then be clad with lightweight panels of thin, vacuum-formed plastic, the simplicity of the system allows for a variety of building forms. A year later, in 1957, Kenner Products of Cincinnati, Ohio produced a more or less exact copy of the Canadian sets under the names 'Girder and Panel' and 'Bridge and Turnpike' in what appears to be a commercial rip-off. Certainly pictures of both systems show remarkable similarities. As might be expected, the Wikipedia entry for Girder and Panel does not have the full story.¹² It describes how it was invented by the president of Kenner, Albert Steiner, after he saw a new building being constructed in Cincinnati, but this appears to be contradicted by the pictures of the Canadian sets, which predate the Kenner product.^13"

As a child I owned a Kenner Girder and Panel set and loved that toy. So, being born and raised in Toronto, I was quite surprised by the authors’ assertion that the toy was actually something invented and manufactured in my home town and possibly 'misappropriated' by Kenner. That seemed a surprising thing to say so I did a little digging to see if I could confirm or deny their assertion, the result being the posts. If you're interested in my 'investigation' from a few years back all the posts in the series, including this one, are tagged with 'Peter Austin Mfg Co'.

Investigations hit a dead end around late November 2021 with the mystery unresolved and no definitive answer in sight. However, after Vince stumbled across a Kenner set at a Toronto thrift shop earlier this summer the investigation was briefly rekindled. 

Here's the side of Set# 500: Was the original selling price $1.98CDN?

Back in 2021 I was able to buy a beat-up Trans Canada Highway Bridge Set (Set# 502 as it turns out). It had only a few parts inside, no instructions or associated advertising material, and the box was in very rough condition. This summer another bridge set for sale on eBay was brought to my attention. It looked to be in very good condition so I went ahead and bought it. I was pleased to find it was in nearly pristine condition with a near perfect box, a complete set of parts, and instructions. 

But that wasn't the most surprising thing.

I didn't expect the box to be much smaller than the one I had and have a different, and smaller, product number: 500 on this new one and 502 on the one I first bought. So, it appears there were at least two boxings of this toy. I'll assume 500 was released before 502, so given 502 is in a bigger box, did 502 contain more parts? Was the bigger box just a ploy to make it seem like there was more inside? When did 500 and 502 appear on store shelves? 

You might think the questions end there, but no, there're more.

Instruction sheet found in Set# 500. Reverse side is French version.

Above is the instruction sheet included with 500. It looks good.

Cover page of project booklet from Set# 500. Arrows I've added to point out Kenner-ness.

However, things start to look a little odd once we have a look at 500's project booklet that shows a few of the bridges you can build. Its cover page tells the tale: it looks like the components used to build the bridges shown in the booklet are made from Kenner components! Inside is no different. All the projects appear to have been built from Kenner parts. 

The giveaway is the crown-like connector used on the vertical pieces (I've noted them with red arrows in the above photo of the cover page). Those crowns are what Kenner used for its connection technology. Peter-Austin used a lug and loop system. You can see the difference in this comparison photo of the two products that I showed in this post.

So what's up with this? It appears that drawings of Peter-Austin parts are used to illustrate the instruction sheet, and photos of completed bridge projects built with Kenner-looking parts are used to illustrate the project booklet.

Now, as they say on tv: "But wait, there's more!"

Page 1 from project booklet, Set# 500.

Ok, so let's look at the pages in the project booklet. It's just a folded sheet of paper, so this won't take long as 'booklet' is an exaggeration on my part.

Page 2 from project booklet, Set #500.

We're already at page 2 with just one more to go.

Page 3 from project booklet, Set# 500.

At the top of each page you can see a set number called out. The implication being that there are 3 bridge sets, each with more parts allowing the construction of more complex structures. Or maybe they are just expansion sets that build on previous ones? I can't say for certain.

Questions, questions, questions. They seem never ending in this dig.

Is Set# 500 the same as Set No. 1 referred to in the project booklet? Is Set# 502 the same as the project booklet's Set No. 2, or maybe Set No. 3 (implying that 502 had a bigger box because it had more parts as I alluded to earlier?)? Were any of the sets implied by the project booklet ever produced? Again, I have no answers, just more questions for the greater mystery.

It seems the story behind this toy is more complicated than I thought. If anything more turns up you'll be the first to know, so stay tuned :-)

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Digressions

*The Vales include 3 notes in this paragraph: marked with the superscripts 11, 12, and 13. 

11 says: "All information from http://www.girderpanel.com (viewed 18 November 2011)", and 13 says: "1956 Trans Canada Bridge and Pam 'n' Andy Structural Building Sets manufactured by Peter-Austin Manufacturing Co., Toronto Ontario Canada described at http://www.girderpanel.com."

girderpanel.com no longer seems to be active, but a search of the Wayback Machine turns up snapshots for the site from 2011. The Wayback link to the Peter-Austin building sets is here, but below is a small snapshot of what I believe is the page in question:

Yes, it's basically unreadable so go to the link instead.

Yes, the site does state the Peter-Austin kits were released in 1956, but frankly, I can't find documentation to support that date. So far I'm thinking that the Peter-Austin sets appeared later, maybe 1961 or 1962, but I don't have a solid document trail for those dates either.

The same page in the Wayback Machine shows entries for the Kenner sets and the entries state an initial release date of 1957; hence, the Vale's assertion.

I had a look at entries for later years and they don't appear to have changed up until the site disappeared.

Note 12 says to refer to the wikipedia entry for the Kenner sets. Here's the link. You can see there's still no mention of the Peter-Austin product.

It might be needless to say, but I'll say it anyway, there're a lot of contradictory factoids circulating about these products, and they don't stitch into a coherent story. Given the dates associated with these products the true story may never arise; however, I'm glad I stumbled across that paragraph in the Vale's book as I probably would have never heard of the Peter-Austin building toy and I'm glad they introduced me to it.

Power for the Mountain

I've had the parts for the power controller kicking around the workshop for awhile. Being the last piece of infrastructure I decided to go ahead and build it.

Basically, I followed the steps presented in the following video. It's in Japanese, but it isn't hard to figure out what's going on. The device is simple and is based around a PWM unit for controlling power to the trolley.

As far as the guts of the thing are concerned the only major difference between theirs and mine is I use 2, 9v batteries connected in parallel for power. I was chatting about this project with a friend who's an expert in things electrical about my concern regarding draining the battery rather quickly given the grades on the layout. He suggested using two batteries in parallel to achieve longer life, so that's what I did. I haven't yet done a longevity test, that'll be for the winter.

The electrical access opening has always been a weak spot in the layout's design. By weak I mean visually weak even though it's structurally strong. It's just been a big opening for wiring access covered over by a piece of styrene velcroed to the layout with a power jack sticking out.

After some thought I decided to go with a homebrew '70s look by building out the opening with foam, blending it into the mountain with CelluClay, and velcroing on a control panel that reminded me of my '70s slot car setup, complete with advanced Dymo labelling technology :-)

The trolley runs quite smoothly and I'm happy with the controller's performance.  So happy I'm thinking of building a second trolley for double the fun!

Building out the mountain under the observatory

Rock work at Observatory Peak is finished

I can't help but start this post with a weather report as all my modelling these days is quite weather dependent: yesterday, 38°C on the deck, 34°C in the garage, 31°C in the shade, 25°C in the basement. The heat is predicted to remain for a couple more days. What all this adds up to is a bit of subterranean modelling time at higher elevations where it's a pleasant 25.

Stones glued in place to form boundary around the initial CelluClay application

After an initial application of CelluClay to build out the DAS base holding up the observatory some stones were glued in place to provide a boundary and add some natural shape to the feature.

Mountain extension before painting

When I bought my bag of CelluClay back in October 2021 it was so big - the 5lb bag was all that was in stock at my local store - I thought it would last the rest of my life. Well, it turns out with this little project I'm now scraping the bottom of the bag, so to speak, but I feel I have lots of years left in me, although my ability to estimate CelluClay usage is clearly impaired :-)

Moon Mail Madness. Lunar surface is 1/8" thick layer of CelluClay

On a side project I used a considerable amount of CelluClay to create a lunar base for my Moon Mail Madness diorama for an upcoming model show here in town. More on this in a future post.

Mountain side facing the Circular Bridge

Well, further progress in the short term will likely continue to be weather dependent, but I will say I've had to start making some more trees because although I thought I'd made more armatures than I thought I'd need, I realize I need more. More later.

A problem in composition

The mountain top observatory

As I was adding trees to the layout I came to realize that the sight lines they formed drew the viewer’s eye up to the mountain top, but upon arriving, there was nothing there to see. I couldn’t just add another tree or two, that would be rather anti-climatic. 

Sight lines lead to nothing to see at the mountain top

I gave this compositional problem some thought and decided to add a small observatory on the mountain top somewhere near where the tree sight lines met. The Mt. Lowe Railway had a large observatory along its right-of-way, so I thought some sort of observatory was a good addition: it solved a compositional problem, and introduced a feature I admired from the prototype. 

I built a close approximation in N-scale to the actual Mt. Lowe Observatory many years ago. At that time I was still in the dreaming stage about what a Mt. Lowe inspired layout would be. Back then I thought I’d land on N-scale, so, being intrigued by the observatory, I went ahead and built one.

I played with the idea of incorporating the N-scale one on this layout as part of some sort of forced perspective scheme, but the upshot was N scale was too small, and even HO seemed difficult to adopt. Eventually I figured I’d build an observatory in S similar in size and proportion to one of the small ones on the grounds of Ottawa’s Experimental Farm, but in Mt. Lowe style.

The Photo Equatorial Building at the Experimental Farm

The Farm ones are built from stone, but I thought something inspired by them in the Mt. Lowe white wood theme would be possible. At one time I was going to place one of these small observatories on the Centennial Experimental Farm layout, but after producing some HO scale drawings I thought they’d be too small and fiddly to build. In S scale though, a small observatory was quite doable.

The building was designed around the roof from the N-scale Mt. Lowe observatory

Composition in general is a topic I’ve been thinking quite a lot about lately along with light & shadow, impressionism, structure & construction, and streetcar potential. I’m considering exploring these topics here at the blog as they relate to my work. They’re becoming more important to me, and writing about them will help me understand them better.

Well, that’s for the future, let’s get back to the observatory.

I decided to build the S-scale observatory around the roof of the old N-scale one. In N, the roof fitted over a large telescope room, but in S it would cover a smaller structure whose size was more inline with the other structures on the layout. So, the old roof established the width of the building. The height was decided on by some trial-and-error until I settled on a dimension that looked right and didn't overshadow the other structures.

The 8 walls are laid out in a single, contiguous strip of Bristol board.

The building is quite simple as far as construction goes. The only slightly tricky part is laying out the walls so that the resulting octagonal footprint will allow the roof to sit on top. 

The building's 8 walls were laid out in a contiguous strip on a piece of Bristol board (much like was done with Cal's Cabbage Co.) in accordance with this formula:

wall width = radius of the roof dome / 1.307

For this model the radius of the roof dome is 1-1/4 inches, and after a little arithmetical handspring, the wall width works out to be 24.3 mm.

I should also note that the door opening is a scale 3' x 7', and the foundation is 3' tall. 

The floor was drawn on a scrap of Bristol board using a grade school compass trick.

The other possibly difficult piece is the floor, which was drawn on a piece of Bristol board using a compass trick I learned in grade school.

The wall strip was cut out and the wall divisions were scored with the back edge of an X-acto knife for folding. Along the inside top edge of the foundation, along the wall strip, some thick cardboard pieces were stuck in place to support the floor. The wall strip was then wrapped around the floor.

I should note I used 3M Transfer Tape for all 'gluing' as it's a dry method and doesn't distort the card as the pieces are being put together. It also bonds instantly so when putting together a slightly tricky structure like this one there's no fumbling around getting the structure together due to bonds that haven't set up. 

The wall wrapper gap is fixed by gluing a strip of paper along the inside.

Look at that gap :-( So, even after some careful work to get the dimensions right I still wound up with a small gap at the wall wrapper joint. It's likely due to approximation errors when laying out the wall strip and floor, not properly accounting for the thickness of the card, and 'squeezed' cardboard at the folds that distorted the pieces a little.

Regardless, it was easily corrected. I simply added a paper strip to close the gap. When it came time to panel the wall exteriors I adjusted the dimensions of the two walls bordering the gap by about 1mm. Once they were in place, and with trim glued on, the structure looks perfect and no gap is noticeable. I guess my advice here is: small errors are usually easily corrected and can be made to disappear. 

A thick cardboard stiffener was added to the inside upper edge.

The last step in building the underlying structure is to add a stiffener to the inside top. This provides support for the roof and turns the rather floppy telescope room into a rigid structure. The stiffener is cut from a piece of cardboard and is dimensioned to allow the roof to set easily on top.

From here on the remaining work is mainly decorative. 

Although the structural core is cardboard and paper, the exterior is styrene.

Textured styrene sheets were transfer taped to the cardboard core.

I used textured styrene sheets bonded to the exterior with transfer tape. That's another good use for this tape: sticking together dissimilar materials, especially card stock and styrene.

The foundation is surfaced with the same rocky sheet material I used on the structure at Inspiration Point to produce a family look between the two buildings. When it came to painting, I also painted this one to match the other.

The walls are covered with Evergreen Scale Models #2050 V-Groove.

Trim is strip styrene.

Wall trim is a mixture of 0.020"x0.060" and 0.020"x0.080" styrene strip stock glued to the panels with styrene glue.

The door is just a laminate of two pieces of 0.020" thick styrene scraps. Later a bent wire was added to simulate a door handle. 

Top edge cap cut from 0.020" thick styrene, edged with 0.040" square styrene strips.

The final styrene piece was a cap to fit over the top edge of the now panelled structure to neatly close off the top, and to provide a structure to hold the protruding bottom edge of the roof dome in place. 

Upper styrene cap in place; painted and weathered. Interior is painted khaki. 

The roof isn't glued in place, but has been left loose and removable so I can later add a telescope and let viewers see inside. I'm thinking of a telescope model along the lines of the one I built for the El Camino Estrella.

Now the sight lines lead to something.

After painting and a light weathering I spent sometime playing around positioning the observatory. I'm happy with the new feature and its location on the layout. It seems to take care of a visual dead spot in an interesting way that keeps to the overall spirit of the layout. 

Precariously balanced high above the Circular Bridge.

A piece of 0.100" thick styrene was cut for the structure's layout base - it's the white sliver under the observatory in the above photo. The base is attached to the mountain with a blob of Das. There's still work to be done to build out the mountain ground-forms to blend in the base. For now though it's solid and level, which is a good start.

From above the Granite Gate Pass

As well as blending the foundation into the mountain some extra details will be added to suggest an abandoned trail to the observatory. Probably a couple more trees will be added along with some overgrown vegetation. 

Although, when adding all these extra details I need to be mindful to keep the total height of the layout below 30" so it can be carried sideways through door frames! Right now it stands only 23" tall - so far, so good.