A space that’s inviting and clean – and 167 years old

If one can avert their eyes from the tall, majestic, arched window about seven or eight feet away, the photograph applied to the office window is fascinating: on the far left is the former Union Cemetery (now Waterdown Cemetery) up on Vinegar Hill; then, the John and Ada Vance house on Board Street, which became the CPR’s Waterdown South station (destroyed by fire in 1966); moving to the right, it’s the old Dundas Street bridge over Grindstone Creek; and, finally, the 1870 Eager house, which the family owned for three generations.

Walk inside that glass-walled office to that tall window, look out, and the Eager house is about all that can be spotted almost 125 years later in Waterdown, a village about 10 kilometres north of Hamilton. But the building where the office is located, the former East Flamborough Township Hall (known to many locals as the local public library, which occupied the building from 1979-2015), well, it now looks as good as it did on the day it opened in 1857.