85 Navy Street - Glen Prossen

This house was built about 1849 by George King Chisholm where he lived with his wife Isabella Land Chisholm and their family.

George King Chisholm was born in 1815 at Nelson Township. In 1840, he married Isabella Land, granddaughter of Robert Land, the founder of Hamilton. They had eight children, five of whom survived to adulthood.

The family moved back to Oakville in 1847, and in 1848 purchased the lot on which this house stands from the Gore Bank.

The house was built about 1849 and was one of the first brick houses in town.

In 1857, the year in which Oakville became a town, and George King Chisholm its first mayor, he sold the house to Dr. Elwy J. Ogden and his wife Mary, and moved to a new home which he had built at his farm west of the Sixteen.

Ogden, in turn, sold the home in 1868 to Richard Shaw Wood and Isabella Wood. Wood, a native of Bermuda, had come to Oakville in the 1850s and founded the Oakville Oil Refinery on Trafalgar Road across from MacLachlan College. Wood added an addition to serve as a bank, though there is no evidence that it did.

The home was sold again in 1878 to Mary Ann and Thomas Patterson. Mary Ann was a milliner and Thomas a tailor. Thomas Patterson became mayor of Oakville in 1894. In the early part of the twentieth century the house became the home of Captain Maurice Fitzgerald who became a coal and lumber dealer in Oakville. He lived in the house until his death in 1931.

Some time after that the house became known as "Glen Prossen".