By Nathan Cox for the Tillsonburg News, originally
published July 27, 2011.
Special thanks to Annandale House for their assistance.
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Although Annandale House has not been
home to any Tillsons for over 100 years, the
house has been restored to the way it was when
the family lived there. The house was built in the 1880s, and the Tillson family moved in 1883. The house was meant to be modern and new, so the interior decoration was quite different from the average household. Today, it is described by the National Parks service as “the best surviving example of the aesthetic movement in Canada.” The Tillson family sold the house in 1911, and it was inhabited by various families until 1983. The Tillsonburg community museum was opened in 1973 in the old community centre near Lake Lisgar. In 1983, with Annandale House up for a sale, a fundraising committee bought the house, with the proposal to use it as a museum. The municipal council felt that Tillsonburg was not large enough to support two museums, and eventually an agreement was reached to move the museum to Annandale. The house was restored to the way it had been in the 1880s when it was full of Tillsons, and in 1989, the Annandale House museum opened. In 1998, then-Heritage Minister Sheila Copps announced that Annandale would be designated a National Historic Site. The official plaque was unveiled two years later. Annandale has over 18,000 items in its collection and gets between 8,000 and 10,000 visitors per year. “Those are very good numbers for the area,” acting curator Patricia Phelps said. “We get visitors from not only Tillsonburg, but from many countries throughout the world.” |
 Annandale House in 1887. It was later restored a hundred years later.  The front hall of Annandale House. |