Cherry Cottage, Aylmer, Quebeccollage
very day hundreds of students walk by a quaint and well-hidden bit of the history of Aylmer, Québec.  Located just down the street from a large high school, la Polyvalente Grande-Rivière, Cherry Cottage has seen more than its share of local historical events and personalities.  The modest wood construction was built about 1837 by Charles C. Symmes, a member of one of Aylmer's founding families of businessmen.  It was in this same house that Francis Edward Clark (1851-1927), Charles C. Symmes' son , the founder of the Christian Endeavor (1881) which would eventually become the United Society of Christian Endeavor (1882) and later the World's Christian Endeavor Union (1885) was born.  Years later T.W. Edwin Sowter would live in this home from where he would undertake expeditions in search of the traces of ancient human history of the Lake Deschênes area which lay in front of his hometown, or fossils from distant geological epochs, the evidence for which he found quite literally in his backyard and in the ditches of the streets in his own neighbourhood.

*the historical photographs of Cherry Cottage at either end of this collage were drawn from Diane Aldred's  1989 book on the heritage of Aylmer.  The modern photographs of Cherry Cottage were taken by Jean-Luc Pilon and used with the kind permission of the current owners, Nathalie Huard and Michael Dixon.