Edward Code – Furniture apprentice in Carleton Place

In 1872 Edward Code moved to Carlton Place, Ontario to learn the trade of cabinetmaker, entering the shop of William Patterson where he served his apprenticeship.

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176 Bridge Street Carleton Place

The present building stands on the site of former William Louck’s trading store (1824), Caleb Bellows’s store from 1825 and the post office from 1830, until destroyed by fire in the 1870s. The building we see now has distinctive windows designed with four panes and segmentally headed windows and simple brick transoms. The tin roof has a dormer in the front and the back. This building most notably held by William Patterson and Son’s Furniture and funeral business from the mid-1890s until it finally closed under the ownership of William’s grandson, Gordon Patterson. Here was one of the few businesses in Carleton Place to have operated as a family owned company for more than a century.

The furniture and undertaking business of William Patterson and Son was started in Carleton Place in the 1860s. William Patterson (1840-1908) born in Lanark County at Perth son of Charles. William came to Carleton place at age 22 where he learned the trade of cabinet making under David Hogg. Before the end of the 1860s, William had established his own furniture making business. He served the Carleton Place militia company on the St. Lawrence from under its Carleton Place officers James C. Poole and John Brown during the Fenian Raid periods of 1866 and 1870. In Carleton Place he was the first captain of this community’s first fire brigade.

The Patterson furniture and undertaking businesses in the Riverside Store building were continued by William’s son Joseph and by Joseph’s son Gordon. At the end of this firm’s business life of over a century, it had occupied for over eighty years the site of this town’s original post office and original general retail business establishment. In 1976 Gordon Patterson sold the store to a newspaper and in 1978 they sold it to Robbie Probert a candle maker from Nova Scotia for $42,500.