Blaikie’s Bluff
It sits atop a slight rise in the land along the east side of Nassau Point Road. There is a small sign that identifies it as “Blaikie’s Bluff.” It is the only home on the bay side of Nassau Point that sits so close to the road...so close in fact that it doesn’t look like it has any bay front real estate.
Many may think that the bluff refers to the slight rise of land that the house sits or the bluff overlooking the road or the bay, but there is more to it than that.
The house was built in the late 1860’s or early 1870’s with the same exterior, a board and batten style, of the old Crestwood Hotel on Vanston, which was erected a few years earlier.
The house was part of the Edward White Burr estate. Burr owned most of Nassau Point along with several others, including a man named John Carrington from which we get Carrington Road. Burr built himself a grand home in the late 1860’s on the corner of where Wunneweta, Bridge Lane, Bayberry and Nassau Point Road come together.
Later, the mansion was turned in to a hotel and it thrived for many years but burned down in 1927. Blaikie’s Bluff was built as the residence for Mr. Burr’s personal physician. It was separated from the hotel by a large carriage house and stable across the street but when the property became a hotel, it was used by a Ted Horton as the caretaker’s cottage. This is the same Ted Horton who owned the Skunk House profiled in the Fall Newsletter. (More about the hotel and carriage house later).
The land area is of a size typical to the east side of Nassau Point, stretching back to a bluff overlooking the bay. The property passed through several hands after the demise of the hotel. In the early 50’s Alfred and Jane Blaikie bought the property as a summer home. Over the years they expanded the number of buildings and made modern changes and built up the waterside property which has eliminated further erosion.
Above the garage, is an attic which doubles as bedroom space for any of the Blaikie children. At the far back of the property, overlooking the water is a small building, really a studio apartment completer with kitchen and bath. The senior Blaikies would retreat to this unit when the house filled up with family visitors.
Hidden behind the bushes at the left front of the main house is a rustic wooden fence. It was, when the hotel was in existence, a gateway to a driveway that led around the house from the left side to the right. Guests would drop off their luggage here before proceeding up the hill to the hotel itself.
Jane Blaikie died recently at the age of 98 and the house has passed on to Mary Jane James and to her three brothers.
And the name Blaikie’s Bluff? It was named not because of the bluff overlooking the bay nor the slight bluff that the main house sits on overlooking Nassau Point Road. When Alfred Blaikie bought the house in the 50’s, he was stretching his finances and had some doubt if he had enough money for the mortgage payments, so purchasing the place was his private joke about whether he could pay for it. It was Blaikie’s bluff.
Jack Barthel, NPPOA Historian September 2012
(Many thanks to Mary Jane James and to information in “The History of Nassau Point” by Katherine Newell Mayne)