Victoria History

When the Grays bought the house on Heritage Lane in Saanich in 1990, they didn’t know that it came with a few ghosts.  

Emily Carr’s 100-year-old Oak Bay cabin could be yours for $5.5 million dollars! The good news is that it comes with a 10-bedroom heritage house designed by Samuel Maclure. In 1913, Emily Carr paid $900 for a plot of land on Victoria Avenue in Oak Bay. According to a story,* she built a 12 by… Continue reading Emily Carr’s $5.5 Million Cabin

Francis Rattenbury moved to Victoria in 1892. The 25-year-old had beat out 60 other architects to win the design competition for BC’s Parliament Buildings. Although massively over budget, the commission propelled the young architect’s career, and before long he had a slew of buildings after his name including the Empress Hotel, The Crystal Gardens, the… Continue reading Francis Rattenbury: A Halloween Horror Story

You can be forgiven if National Inventors’ Day (February 11) passed you by yesterday, but it gives me a great excuse to write about Barney Oldfield, one of British Columbia’s own treasures. Barney Oldfield: Horace Basil (Barney) Oldfield was a mechanical genius and inventor who lived most of his life in Saanich, just outside of… Continue reading The Marvellous Inventions of Barney Oldfield (1913-1978)

On August 2, 1970 three people died when Russian freighter Sergey Yesenin collided with BC ferry the Queen of Victoria in Active Pass. The freighter’s steel bow sliced through the ferry almost cutting it in half. From Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History Active Pass: One of the highlights of taking a BC… Continue reading Russian Freighter Collides with BC Ferry

On May 26, 1896, 143 people crammed onto Streetcar No. 16 to cross the Point Ellice Bridge. It was Queen Victoria’s birthday and they were on their way to attend the celebrations at Macaulay Point Park in Esquimalt. They never made it. The middle span of the bridge collapsed under the weight and the streetcar… Continue reading The Point Ellice Bridge Disaster – May 26, 1896

We probably have more monkey puzzle trees in BC than in all of their native Chile. The quirky trees started arriving in gardens in the 1920s. In 2012, I wrote a book called Sensational Victoria and one of my favourite chapters was Heritage Gardens. I visited and then wrote about large rich-people’s gardens like Hatley… Continue reading Vancouver’s Monkey Puzzle Tree Obsession

Name recognition: Her name adorns a university, a school, a bridge, and a library. She is the subject of several documentaries, museum exhibits, books and plays. In 2009, her painting Wind in the Tree Tops sold for more than $2.1 million, one of the highest-priced Canadian paintings ever sold at auction. Tourists visit her family… Continue reading Emily Carr’s James Bay

The Fireside Grill is situated on a ley line that runs down West Saanich Road, through Wilkinson Road, toward the Four Mile House—a reputedly haunted inn—to the Portage Inlet and Esquimalt Harbour. This story is an excerpt from Sensational Victoria. Tim Petropoulos, co-owner of the Fireside Grill since 2000, is a self-described skeptic when it… Continue reading The Ghosts of the Fireside Grill

Stephen Joseph Thompson was a photographer working mostly in Vancouver and New Westminster between 1886 and 1905. I’m obsessed with a photographer named Stewart Joseph Thompson. I first heard of him a few weeks back when I saw a photo he’d taken of Georgia and Burrard Streets in the 1890s. Last week, I found a… Continue reading Stephen Joseph Thompson, photographer (1864-1929)

Robert Ashton kindly sent me this photo of hundreds of Chinese men standing on a hill with rows and rows of white army bell tents in the background. He also found a 1920 copy of Pacific Marine Review with this story. “During the last five months, almost 50,000 Chinese coolies have passed through the port… Continue reading The Chinese Labour Corps: One of BC’s Best Kept Secrets

This is an occasional series that asks people who love history and heritage to tell us their favourite existing building and the one that never should have been torn down. Patrick A. Dunae is a Victoria-born historian. A past member of the City of Victoria Heritage Advisory Panel, he is currently president of the Friends of the… Continue reading Heritage Streeters from Victoria (with Patrick Dunae, Tom Hawthorn and Eve Lazarus)

For my last post of the year, I’ve chosen the top 10 Facebook group pages. This list is highly subjective and based on a loose criteria—they have to deal with some aspect of the history of Greater Vancouver or Victoria, and you have to be able to see the posts without having to join (I’m… Continue reading Top 10 Facebook Group Pages for 2016

I was so sad to hear of Jim Munro’s death last Monday. Jim was a huge promoter and lover of books, heritage buildings, art and authors, including of course, his first wife the Nobel prize winner Alice Munro. He was also a lovely man. I had the pleasure of meeting Jim a few years back… Continue reading Jim Munro (1929-2016)

The following story is an excerpt from Sensational Victoria: “Murders in the Capital.” A few years after the Bests’ bought their James Bay home, a young woman knocked on the door and asked if she could come and take a look inside. She told them that her grandparents had lived in the cottage in the… Continue reading Murder in James Bay

Here are five of my favourite eccentric BC houses that still stand (or did at the time of research). 1. The Hobbit House(s) There are two in Vancouver and one in West Van designed by Ross Lort in the early 40s, and against all odds, all survive. Hobbit house at King Edward and Cambie is now… Continue reading Five Eccentric B.C. Houses

It’s been incredibly exciting seeing Sensational Vancouver claim the top spot on the Best of BC list for the past four weeks, and it’s made me pay close attention to the book section in the Vancouver Sun. What I’ve noticed is that M. Wylie Blanchet’s The Curve of Time, has ranked in the top 10… Continue reading The Curve of Time: national bestseller after more than 50 years

The Tilikum lives at the Maritime Museum in Victoria and it’s well worth the visit. At 38-feet long it looks like a flimsy thing to take out in Victoria Harbour on a windy day, let alone around the world, but in 1901 Captain John Voss and Norman Luxton, a reporter from Winnipeg, intended to do… Continue reading Captain Voss and his Venturesome Voyage at BC Heritage Week

In 1912, when it was tough for a woman to make a decent living, Christina Haas arrived in Victoria and bought herself a brothel. Thomas Hooper once had the largest architectural practice in Western Canada. He designed hundreds of buildings including the Victoria Public Library, the Rogers Chocolates and the Munro’s Books Building in Victoria.… Continue reading Christina Haas’s Cook Street Brothel

To mark the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, this week’s blog is a story about Mabel Fortune Driscoll who survived the disaster, moved to Victoria and lived there until her death in 1968. The full story appears in Sensational Victoria. Mabel Helen Fortune was 23 when she set off for a tour of… Continue reading The Titanic’s British Columbia Connection