Dromore

Thomas Dumble was a native of St. Neot in Cornwall and became a Captain in the Royal Engineers. He was stationed in Northern Ireland when he was called out to Canada to help settle a boundary dispute between New Brunswick and Maine - the Aroostook War. He remained in Canada, starting his own business surveying railways lines from Cobourg to Montreal and beyond. Thomas and Eliza built their home on an acre of land in Cobourg and named it "Dromore" for the town in Northern Ireland where she grew up and they were married. The high-pitched gable roof is unusual, but the Gothic architecture incorporated was just coming into fashion. Still seen woven into the brackets with their gingerbread trim is a motif combining a “D” for Dumble with the Irish four-leafed clover. 

 

Two years after the death of his first wife, John remarried Harriet Edgecumbe. They both died in 1883 when the house was left to John’s eldest son, John Henry Dumble, who took on the lease of the Cobourg & Peterborough Railway and attracted the interest of George K. Shoenberger of Pittsburgh. Shoenberger is remembered in Cobourg as one of the Americans who transformed the town into the “Newport of the North” and the father-in-law of Charles Fitzhugh, another American, who built Ravensworth and East House.

 

J.H. Dumble was married twice and had eleven children who grew up at Dromore. His second wife was Sarah Georgina Chatterton, the niece of Richard Dover Chatterton (1802-1885) who founded the Cobourg Star. Their eldest son, Lt.-Colonel Wilfred Chatterton Dumble became the third husband of Mrs. Mary Estelle (Brown) Speer of Pittsburgh who owned The Lawn which then became known as the “Dumble Estate”. 

 

Dromore is thought to have been passed to one of Colonel Dumble’s nephews: Cyril Dumble, John H. Capreol, Thomas Dumble, or Brigadier (Brian Mortimer) Roger Archibald (1906-1993). How long it remained in the Dumble family after this period is not yet known and it may have been used a summer residence for several members of the family. One way or the other, it still stands today and is still a private residence.