A tiny historic room perched atop the house, the widow's watch provides a wonderful view of the lake and features
original stained glass windows and stained glass rose
medallions on three walls, a child-sized doorway leading to the
attic, and is accessed by a small scale curved staircase on 2nd
floor. This room is guaranteed to capture the imagination of young and old alike!
Wikipedia states that "A widow's walk is a railed
rooftop platform often with a small enclosed cupola often found on 19th century North
American houses...Widow's walks are...a standard decorative feature of Italianate
architecture, which was very popular during the height of the Age of Sail in many North
American coastal communities. The widow's walk is a variation of the Italinate cupola.
The Italianate cupola, also known as a "belvedere", was an important ornate finish to
this style. Beyond their use as viewing platforms, they are frequently built around the
chimney of the residence, thus creating an easy access route to the structure. This
allows the residents of the home to pour sand down burning chimneys in the event of a
chimney fire in the hope of preventing the house from burning down."
Note that the Kane House
belvedere is indeed next to the chimneys, features a flag pole proudly displaying the
Canadian flag, and faces the lake, which is now dotted with sailboats and other pleasure
craft in summers but in the late 1800s was busy with incoming sternwheelers full of
hopeful silver miners.
The widow's watch would have provided the Kane family with
an excellent vantage point from which to watch the
sternwheelers docking, full of men hoping to strike it rich in the
area's new mining boom. Some of those men purchased
building sites from the lots the Kanes created from part of the
80,000 acres they'd pre-empted along Kootenay Lake, and the
town of Kaslo was born. The sternwheelers were enormously
important to the development of the entire Kootenay Lake
area, and modern day tourists are able to step into the past
and learn about that importance when they tour the SS
Moyie, beautifully restored and docked at Kaslo as a National
Historic Site.
By the time it was retired, the Moyie was nearly 60 years old: a very
long life for a type of vessel that seldom survived beyond 25 years of age. The Moyie
outlasted all other passenger sternwheelers operating in Canada and the western United
States and enjoys the distinction of being the world's oldest intact sternwheeler.
The little Kane daughters, Mavis, Marcia and Mona, loved
playing in the diminutive room atop the narrow staircase. The
current owner was told that they took turns sleeping there in
the summer, and it isn't hard to see how it must have captured
their imagination.
