Heather Wright/The Independent

Evan Abma is getting tired of driving around Lambton and seeing a pile of bricks where an historic home used to be.

Abma, who is the head of the Sarnia Heritage Committee, says roughly 300 heritage homes have been lost in Lambton in the last 15 years – that’s about 20 per cent of the 1,900 homes once lining rural roads. A yellow and red brick home Georgian home on London Line near Fairweather Road, is a good example of the destruction. It was the last heritage home in the Plympton-Wyoming of Oban and only one of eight of its style left in the county.

“Plympton-Wyoming remains asleep at the wheel while its cultural and architectural heritage is obliterated,” he wrote.

Abma says many heritage homes fall victim to farm consolidation. “The majority of the time the properties are replaced with farmland or just left vacant.

“It’s catastrophic in terms of heritage….Basically any physical trace that connected them to that particular farming concession is lost. The architectural legacy of these buildings itself (is lost), the landscape is permanently changed.”

Abma has been collecting old photographs of the heritage homes and detailing their existance on a map he hopes to make public.

He’s searching for photos with old farm houses in them, knowing many of them have never been recorded on satellite imagery.

If you have a photo, Abma can be reached through Facebook messenger.

But he’s also urging people to talk to their local politicians about the importance of heritage.

“All the rural municipalities in Lambton County have zero heritage protections for anything; developers can literally do whatever they want,” he says. Recent changes by the provincial government have made things worse.

“If you share concern about the ongoing destruction of our built heritage, contact your councillors and demand that a heritage register be created, at the very least. A register is simply a list of heritage buildings in the municipality and provides only the most minimal safeguard: a 60-day delay before demolition and an alert to council,” he says.

“None of Lambton’s rural municipalities maintain such registers. They do not even know what heritage buildings they still have.”