Despite its owners' efforts to maintain it, a cottage once called home by a leader of the Rebellion of 1837 faces demolition.

Under a white-on-white blanket of pearly clouds and snow, a cluster of dilapidated farmhouses and sagging split-rail fences north of Pickering are dying a slow death, just as the story of who put them there almost two centuries ago fades.

Most of the residents are gone, and almost everyone has forgotten the feisty role the area's ancestors played in the Upper Canada Rebellion of 1837, which rattled the Family Compact, led to the intervention of Britain's Lord Durham and paved the way for the union with Lower Canada, creating the Province of Canada in 1840.

One family has a particularly powerful reason to keep clinging to its humble but historic home.

Laurie and Gary Barclay and their three children are the last in an unbroken chain of Barclays to inhabit Tullis Cottage, the dower cottage of the Barclay farm from which fiery Scots Baptist preacher George Barclay campaigned against the Anglo and Anglican stranglehold on the economy, politics and religion of Upper Canada in the 1830s.

The cottage and farm were among scores around the Village of Brougham expropriated by the federal government in 1972 in the ill-fated Pickering Airport scheme.

The airport was shelved in 1975, and plans for it remain on extremely shaky ground, but the government kept the expropriated property and became a landlord for those who stayed on.

Today's Barclays have struggled since 1985, when they took over tenancy from Gary Barclay's Aunt Helen, to preserve the home's original character as well as its very existence in the face of the landlord's chronic neglect and repeated attempts to evict them.

They fought an eviction notice and won in 2001 when the government slipped up on the wording. Now they have received another notice.

"This time all the i's are dotted and the t's crossed," Ms. Barclay says sadly.

The family's hopes lie in an appeal to a tribunal under the Ontario Tenant Protection Act, and in a campaign for public support they hope will rival the one that halted the original airport plan.

After the dismissal of the first eviction notice, and in the absence of any certainty about a new airport, they thought they could go on with their lives, walking the same creaky floorboards as great-great-great-great granduncle George Barclay and his wife Janet Tullis Barclay had during the days before reformist settlers marched on the City of York in December, 1837.

"I guess we got a false sense of security because everything just rolled along and nothing happened," Ms. Barclay says.

Then, two weeks ago, with the bathroom in the midst of repairs and the Ontario Heritage Foundation due to assess the cottage for historical designation, the second notice landed.

"The first time we were blindsided, in shock," Ms. Barclay says. "This time I feel calmer. I know what to do."

The eviction notice states that the landlord has determined that the cottage is in need of repairs and upgrades and that it would be uneconomic to pay for them.

"The landlord is now taking steps to obtain vacant possession of the leased premises for the purpose of demolition," it says. It gives the Barclays until June 30 to get out.

Ms. Barclay says she and her husband have done their own repairs for years, since contractors hired by the government showed little respect for protecting the early 19th-century wallpaper or the wooden wainscoting.

"They took a hammer to a plaster and lath wall," she recalls with horror.

"To save the house's charm and quaintness, we do our own work. We just treat it as our own."

This makes no difference to the government.

"We're the landlord; it's our responsibility," says federal spokeswoman Gail Crossman.

Neither doing their own repairs nor obtaining a heritage designation from local authorities, which the Barclays have done, alters the fact that "Transport Canada requires vacant possession," Ms. Crossman says.

"The decision to terminate tenancy and obtain vacant possession and demolish a house is taken where the costs of remediating the dwelling to bring it up to standard is prohibitive and it is determined that potential risks to tenants' health and safety may be high and likely to reoccur even if remediation in undertaken," Ms. Crossman says.

She will not specify what risks are a concern at the Barclay home, citing privacy laws.

On the heritage issue, she says Transport Canada would be happy to speak with heritage groups after the Barclays move out. "If, after vacant possession, a stakeholder comes and says they have a heritage interest, we'll dialogue with them," she says.

But a tenant is not a stakeholder for the purposes of the discussion. "A tenant would have to be represented by one of the heritage groups. There's a process, and the municipality determines that."

Local politicians have taken up the Barclays' cause.

"It's a heartbreaking story," says Pickering Regional Councillor Maurice Brenner, who helped the family overturn the first eviction notice. "They've been looking for a reason to evict the Barclays ever since we stopped them that time."

Tullis Cottage is unique because descendants of the Barclay family have lived there continuously, he says. It has a living history. "The cottage may well be saved [empty] or moved, but what would be the point of that?"

And once it is vacant it's bound to suffer vandalism like other empty homes in the area, including the boarded-up Barclay farmhouse.

"Once you board it up, you might as well throw the gasoline on it and light the match," Mr. Brenner says.

Heritage Pickering, a local committee, recommended designation for Tullis Cottage in 2003 and Pickering City Council endorsed that move the following December.

The Ontario Heritage Foundation has just notified the Barclays it's ready to reconsider an earlier refusal to designate the home, Ms. Barclay says.

But the federal government has said only federal designation is binding, Mr. Brenner says, and if the matter ended up in court, he doesn't know who would prevail.

"The question is, what rules are they operating under? They're constantly changing the rules. . . . The bottom line is, if it's destroyed, there goes the past. There's no way to bring it back."

Ms. Crossman says the cottage would not be demolished without a discussion on its heritage value and a formal application for a demolition permit.

But Mr. Brenner says bulldozers moved in last weekend to demolish an abandoned restaurant in Brougham before a demolition permit had been granted.

Buildings are being destroyed prematurely, even though an environmental assessment about building an airport at Pickering will not be completed until 2009, the councillor says, so that clearance of the land will be a fait accompli when the time comes to make a decision on runways.

"Canadians are not aware enough of their historical roots, and that's why it's so easy for the federal government to sweep them away."

Back in 1837, Reverend George Barclay fought alongside William Lyon Mackenzie and hundreds of other settlers for reforms in land ownership and a more democratic form of government. They lost the immediate battle (the 400 who marched on Yonge Street on Dec. 7 and 8 were routed by British troops and many, including George Barclay and his son, George Jr., were imprisoned), but they won the war.

Laurie and Gary Barclay are facing a war of attrition as they watch their neighbours trickle away in response to eviction notices.

"I'm just trying to hang on to a house that's been in the family for [more than] 160 years," Ms. Barclay says. She hopes Transport Canada will back off again. If not, she fears her teenaged daughter Sara "might just lie down in front of a bulldozer."