If you’ve visited Georgian Mall, Barrie City Hall or Innisfil Town Hall over the last 25 years, you’ve likely seen one of Don Houghton masterpieces.
Now 87, the Barrie native has been building models of ships for as long as he can remember, telling BarrieToday it's a hobby he picked up as a child from watching his father make model airplanes.
“My dad built airplanes and explained to me how to look at drawings and interpret them into the physical thing,” he said.
However, it wasn’t something the local senior started to do until he was older.
“You didn’t touch his tools or anything. I think when I first started watching my chin was barely above the work table," Houghton said.
Watching his father manoeuvre the intricacies of building a model from scratch — and the joy it brought him — stayed with him over the years, Haughton acknowledged.
It was during his time in the Navy that he really started to focus on the hobby.
“I spent quite a bit of time creating models while I was onboard the ship," he said. “I should have had a good collection by now, but before I even got back to port, the guys pressured me into selling (the models) to them."
Unlike the models he builds now from kits, Houghton told BarrieToday all of the large models were built from scratch.
“I would buy whatever I could use for material for the ship,” he said.
The structure of the models are mostly wood.
“I feel like these give the trees another life,” said Houghton, while pointing to the seven-foot long model currently on display upstairs near SportChek at Georgian Mall in Barrie.
Built in 1998, after being commissioned by the mall owner at the time, the model took him approximately 3,700 hours to complete, Houghton said, adding the original boat was the only one that got an official name. It was christened Mariposa Belle.
“I had the original drawings from Don Hunter, who was the son of the owner of Hunter Boat Works in Orillia that built the original (boat). During the war, they built nine of them and they sailed down the Trent (and the) St. Lawrence to Halifax,” said Haughton.
He worked aboard a boat very similar to the Mariposa Belle as part of a pool of utility workers.
The largest model Haughton ever built was the Emily May steamship, which measures in at just shy of 10 feet long. It is currently on display at the Town of Innisfil municipal offices.
“What’s unique about that one is I had no drawings,” he said. “All I had was a picture and a newspaper article from 1861 saying how long it was, how much it was drafted, which means how much it sat in the water. From there, I did a conversion of scale.”
In addition to those two models, Houghton also built a replica of the HMCS Barrie, a “flower-class corvette" built in 1940 by the Collingwood Shipyards Ltd.
The model, which is currently on display at Barrie City Hall, is a replica of a ship that served with the Royal Canadian Navy during the Second World War and was named after the city, he explained.
Knowing these models, which he put so much heart and soul into — along with thousands of hours of labour — are still being enjoyed by so many people around the region is an honour, Haughton admitted.
“I’ve always been amazed that something that I did, people want to see and take value in it,” said Haughton, who spent some time after having his photograph taken chatting with passersby about the model after they learned that he was the one who created it.
While he no longer has the same workshop he previously had, Houghton still builds the odd plastic model, but says he’s relegated to having to build from a kit on a much smaller scale than he used to.
“I am actually assembling someone else’s work. I always like to keep busy and keep these going and keep this going,” he said, pointing to his hands and to his head. “I’ve always been the type to push myself."
In addition to “just working towards 88,” Houghton says he’s currently working on a plastic kit of the Japanese battleship Yamato.
“It was one of the largest battleships in the world,” he said.
While Haughton admits building from a kit simply "isn't the same," he says the most important thing is that he still takes joy in seeing his hard work come to fruition in the form of a complete model, and finding joy in the little things is the most important part of life.
He intends on continuing to do it for as long as he can.
