Leander Lawlor House

The Leander Lawlor House is a substantial

early-twentieth century frame house on a large urban lot in the Village of Kenton, in the R.M. of Woodworth.

The municipal designation applies to the building and the lot on which it stands.

The Leander Lawlor House (now Woodworth Millennium Museum) is one of the few well-preserved

buildings remaining from the village's Establishment-era history, when Kenton was one of three business

centres in the Rural Municipality of Woodworth after the Canadian Pacific Railway built a branch line

through the district in 1901. The original owner, Leander Lawlor, was a longstanding Kenton businessman

and built many local residential and commercial buildings between 1904 and 1917. For his own house, Mr

Lawlor constructed a large and impressive building, distinguished with a fine verandah. The six modest

bedrooms in the second storey, which has a fairly good level of physical integrity, help tell the story

of its time as a boarding house. This type of housing was important to the development of early-twentieth

century prairie towns, where a boarding house provided a temporary or longer-term residence for those

newly-arrived or in transition. Single men often found homes for years in such residences, which provided

meals and social contact as well as a bed. Today, the house is valued as the site of a community museum.

Source:

Municipality of Woodworth By-law No. 5/2014, 12 August 2014

Key

elements that define the site character of the Leander Lawlor House include:

- its placement, set back

on a large, open village lot, with mature trees

Key elements that define the exterior heritage character

of the museum include:

- the L-shaped plan, consisting of an oblong with a shallow projecting wing at

the left (south) side

- the overall massing, with two storeys and a medium-pitched, truncated hipped

shingled roof, with a gable roof over the projecting front wing

- the hipped-roof front porch, sheltering

the door and the area to the south, supported by four decorative turned wood columns and two half-columns,

with decorative brackets consisting of sawn wood and small spindles, and a tongue-and-groove painted

wood ceiling

- the size and shape of the openings: mostly rectangular, vertical window openings, with

wood frames and wood sash windows; a horizontal rectangular window in the rear south room, and a small

elliptical window in the upper storey north side

Key elements that define the interior heritage character

of the building include:

- the basic plan: on the ground floor, four rooms and a central hall with stairwell

to the second storey; a large room on either side at the front, and smaller rooms behind; on the second

storey, the bathroom at the top of the stairs, with three bedrooms on either side of the stair hall;

the back stairs at the northwest corner

- the original wood main staircase, with its turned spindles

-

the stained-glass transom in the left (south) front room on the main floor

- on the second floor: the

surviving original trim and most original wood doors and their hardware