Here's a fun old foto for anyone who lives or has lived in either Cardinal or Rothwell Heights. Embiggen as much as your browser permits to admire the crispness of this 1933 aerial image.
I've marked the points at which Mowat and Seguin now join Blair Road (then "Skead") and where Elwood runs south into Cardinal Heights, Beckenham Lane into Rothwell. Notice how Beckenham drops sharply into a pit in the limestone bedrock — Karst or quarry, I wonder.
The yellow "S" shows the present position of the silver ball sculpture, visible from Montreal Road just West of Blair, while the red circle encloses an old stone farmhouse, still standing on the NRC property, on the north side of Montreal Road.
The orange circle marks the quarry just off Davidson Drive, now a park. The quarry seems to be only slightly excavated in this photo. In a 1928 photo, it appears as a simple outcrop. At 113 metres above sea level, Quarry Park is one of the highest elevations for several kilometres in any direction.
I take the feature boxed in green to be a stable of some sort. It would have stood on Seguin, at the top of Elvina, just uphill from from a fairly steep hill.
My favourite find on this map is the little house in the blue box. Its' a small, two-storey thing with three rear-facing dormers. It's still there, numbered #13 Seguin, set well-back from the road. Given the date of the photo, it has to pre-date the development of Cardinal Heights (early 1950s) by at least twenty years. Indeed, it may be the oldest house in the neighbourhood.
The purple line divides the historic Skead (on the left) and Rothwell properties. The Belden Atlas (1879) indicates them as Lot 20, 300 acres, Robert Skead, and Lot 19, 300 (?, ink is smudgy) acres, B.&S. "Rathwell". I haven't sort that family out yet, but "B." would be one one the Bens, and the Rathwell spelling occurs often enough in older records that it was likely valid at the time Belden's maps were prepared.
