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Riverside Bead and Breakfast, Robinson Street, St Marys, Ontario 96 Robinson St
This house was built around 1875 for Leon Clench and his wife Eunice Cruttenden.   It is now the Riverside Bed and Breakfast.   The original verandah was a smaller rectangular structure with cast-iron supports.

Clench was a lawyer and also a builder, inventor, violin-maker, musician and furniture-maker.   He is said to have designed this house as well as 24, 28, 60 and 104 Robinson.  


In front the the house is a plaque for daughter Nora Clench erected by Heritage St Marys in 1999 that reads:
96 Robinson Street, St Marys, Ontario

"Esther Leonora Clench was born in St Marys, May 6, 1867.   A child prodigy, she was first taught the violin by her father, Leon Clench.   Encouraged by the eminent violinist, Eduard Remenyi, she studied at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Leipzig, Germany from 1884 to 1889.   Here she won the gold medal for her performance of J.S. Bach's Chaconne and Beethoven's Violin Concerto in D Major.

In 1883, she gave a command performance before Queen Victoria in Balmoral.   This was followed by further study of in Berlin with Joseph Joachim, the greatest violinist of his time.   By the late 1890's, Clench had achieved an international reputation as a concert violinist.   In 1904 she started the Nora Clench Quartet in London, England.   This ensemble premiered works by Debussy, Wolf, and Reger.   With her marriage to the Australian landscape painter, Arthur Streeton in 1908, she gave up public performance. She died in Melbourne, Australia on May 17, 1938."

108 Robinson St
This house was built in the early 1870s for retired Irish farmer John Henry Clark.

The building at the back was originally a stone barn and is now a house at 107 Ontario St. North.
Robinson Street, St Marys, Ontario
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