Loonie Family Day at Bell Homestead

Celebrate Family Day at the Bell Homestead National Historic Site! On Monday, February 21 bring your family to the site of Bell’s most famous invention—the telephone—for the special price of $1 per person (children 6 and under are free.)

Enjoy a pre-booked, guided tour of Alexander Graham Bell’s home and Canada’s first telephone office. Located at 94 Tutela Heights Road, tours of the Bell Homestead are available between 9:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m. (closed from 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m.). To book your tour, please call 519-756-6220 or e-mail bellhomestead@brantford.ca. The Exchange Café will also be open to purchase delicious baked goods and hot and cold drinks.

About Bell Homestead National Historic Site

Bell Homestead National Historic Site is the former home of the great inventor, Alexander Graham Bell. It was here on July 26, 1874, where Bell grasped the principle in which his most famous invention, the telephone, would work.

Bell moved to Brantford with his family in August of 1870, when he was just 23 years old. He was very sick and his parents believed he had a lung infection known as Tuberculosis. His brothers had died from the same illness, and the Bells hoped that the clean Canadian air would help to get him well. After just eight months on the farm, Bell, finally healthy again, was offered a teaching job in Boston. He came back to Brantford to spend the summers and holidays with his family at their home on Tutela Heights, and it is here that Bell made his most important discovery. Nearly two years later, in August 1876, Bell made the world’s first successful long-distance telephone call between Brantford and Paris, Ontario. It is for these amazing reasons that Brantford became known as “The Telephone City.”

Between 1881 and 1909, the Bell Homestead, as it would become known, had six other owners. The Homestead was donated in 1909 to the Brantford Parks & Recreation Department, so that it could be opened to the public as a parkland and museum. Today, the Homestead looks very much like it did when the Bells lived here, with their original furniture, belongings, and models of Alexander Graham Bell’s first telephones.

Bell’s father, Melville, and a close friend, Reverend Henderson, started the Bell Telephone Company in Brantford in 1877 and the two men ran the company until 1880. The Henderson home is next door to the Homestead, with the original telephone office and other telephone displays for visitors to see.

Queen Elizabeth II declared the Bell Homestead a Canadian National Historic Site on June 28, 1997.

We encourage you to visit the Brantford home where Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone and see how the Bell family lived and worked. On this tour, you will learn about how Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone and see how the telephone has changed since then.

Bell Homestead National Historic Site
99 Tutela Heights Blvd.
Brantford, ON
519-756-6220