This is an excerpt from Sensational Victoria that includes a map of James Bay, then and now photos, and a walking tour of Emily Carr’s neighbourhood in 1913.
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 home, seek out her sketching places along Dallas Road and Beacon Hill Park and walk over the memorial bridge paid for by her sister Alice. Her grave is the most sought-after in the Ross Bay Cemetery.
Emily Carr’s presence in Victoria is pervasive. Yet for most of her life, she was shunned by the Victoria of her day, and for all of her fame, locals still seem a bit stunned by the attention. It wasn’t until the fall of 2010—65 years after her death—that Victoria honoured the artist with a $400,000 statue on the lawn of the Fairmont Empress Hotel.
Emily was born at Carr House in 1871, and died a few blocks away at the James Bay Inn, 74 years later. For most of her life, she lived in James Bay and wrote extensively about the area and her family’s homes.
James Bay is the oldest residential area of Victoria and takes its name from Governor James Douglas. Douglas built his house in the 1850s on the current site of the Royal BC Museum. Dr. John Sebastian Helmcken married Douglas’s daughter and built his house next door. His house is still there and is now a provincial museum.
Until a causeway was completed in the early 1900s, Government Street was made up of Carr Street (named after Emily’s father Richard), Birdcage Walk, and the James Bay Bridge—a wooden bridge that crossed the mud flats and continued downtown.
In 1908, the James Bay mud flats were hidden underneath the spanking new $13-million Empress Hotel. By the 1940s, houses had taken over all the land. Postwar development hit in the 1950s, and then in the 1960s and ‘70s—as in Vancouver’s West End—many of Victoria’s superb heritage houses were bulldozed to make room for apartment buildings.
Yet with all these changes, the Victoria Heritage Foundation still lists over 150 buildings on its heritage inventory, some like Helmcken’s, that date back to the 1850s.
Emily started writing in the late 1920s and had seven books published during her lifetime and after her death. She wrote extensively about James Bay and her family house in The Book of Small, and about how much she hated being a landlady in The house of All Sorts.
What was great, at least in 2012 when I was putting this tour together, was that most of the houses that involve Emily—including the home where she was born on Government Street, the “House of All Sorts,” known for all the different people who boarded there, two of her sister’s houses, and James Bay Hotel (Inn) built in 1911, are all still there.
So, the next time you’re in the area, grab a copy of Sensational Victoria from Munro’s Books, and take a walk around Emily’s James Bay.
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17 comments on “Emily Carr’s James Bay”
We’ll follow your map next fall when we visit Victoria. Jacqueline Pearce has written a couple of great historical fiction novels about Emily.
I’ll check them out!
Love your stories .. Thank you
And, thank you!
Family lore: My father grew up in Victoria (chummed around with Pierre Berton and Bill Reid….), son of stuffy British expats. He was a bit of a drawer himself and one day, according to him, he came across Emily Carr in Beacon Hill Park, also sketching….She was apparently taken by my dad, and gave him one of her sketches. He proudly took it home, whereupon his mother angrily threw it out, saying it was by “that crazy woman….”…..Emily Carr was revered by my parents…..a large reproduction of The Indian Church, a wedding present, still presides over the living room fireplace of our house….must do that walking tour
Oh no–you could have had an original hanging in your office! I heard something similar from Fred Varley’s grandchildren. He lived in Lynn Valley for a time and apparently used to patch up the leaks in his house with his paintings
Life is full of what-might-have-beens. Take my Victoria-born wife’s late father. Born in 1916, Ed Ball had to drop out of school after Grade 7 to support his cash-strapped parents and younger siblings
Working for a butcher, Ed delivered packages of meat to customers, including Emily Carr. Imperious and prone to answering the door with a monkey or other menacing pet on her shoulder, Miss Emily scared the bejesus out of the delivery lad. “What do you want, boy?” was a frequent welcoming comment from the curmudgeonly doyenne.
Not surprisingly, young Ed stammered, “Here’s your order” and quickly left. Many years later, he realized the correct response should have, at least once, included: “Ma’am, can I please have one of those paintings you’re throwing out?”
In his telling of those encounters, my late father-in-law told his children that the Carr lawn and garden was strewn with castoff canvasses that, presumably, had failed to pass internal muster with the exacting artist.
Who knows what became of those throwaways? God forbid they ended up in the city dump!
As for the delivery boy…Ed Ball was bright enough to learn what he needed to succeed in life. He eventually joined the Victoria Fire Department, retiring as Deputy Chief.
Before passing away in 1980 he sometimes reflected on how a Carr original or two would’ve made a fine bequest to either family or a charity.
Great story, thanks so much for dropping by the blog
Your excellent Emily Carr presentation is of the greatest interest.
It has given us an even greater incentive to explore the life of this truly remarkable woman. Thank you so very much!
Thanks for dropping by!
Ah…we stayed at the James Bay Inn last spring; just delightful. And I’ve been to Emily’s home in 1990 when it was being restored, but every time I go there to get inside again, it’s closed! I won’t give up though. My husband loves her forest paintings.
Thanks, Kathleen! Enjoy!
We’ll follow your map next fall when we visit Victoria. Jacqueline Pearce has written a couple of great historical fiction novels about Emily.
I’ll be sure to check them out. Enjoy your visit!
This was a wonderful post.
I am an immigrant from North Carolina to Victoria. My mother WAS Emily Carr… an artist, born to wealthy society parents with whom she could not identify, a little bit crazy, nuts about animals, and reluctantly became a schoolteacher to support us, although she didn’t like children. I fell in love with Emily’s trees on my very first visit to the AGGV. When my elderly mother made her one and only visit to our new Canadian home, we took her to Carr House where Molly Raher Newman, an Emily “channeler”, was reading from one of her books (about “pink scanties”) in the parlor. My mother instantly identified. (she kept saying Goll-ee! and couldn’t stop talking about her afterwards.)
I later sent Mom all of Emily’s books, where she read them to other residents and staff of her nursing home. There is a place in High Point, NC where Emily is VERY well known and loved.
When Victoria Parks & Rec was desperately trying to find funding for the (underappreciated) artist Barbara Patterson who created “Our Emily”, I made a sizeable donation in my mother’s memory.
As an aside, my husband’s name is Ted Harrison. We went to a display of Ted Harrison’s works with him presiding, at Emily’s house. Prominently featured was a painting the artist had done of the house. So I took a photo of my husband, Ted Harrison, and the artist Ted Harrison, flanking the painting of Emily Carr’s House, in the parlor of Emily Carr’s house, where we had so poignantly encountered he “spirit” along with my mother a few years earlier.
What a great story with so many BC connections! We’ll have to find you an artist to channel. It’s astounding to me that it took so long to get some recognition for Emily, and I thank you for your contribution (it’s in my author photo)
[…] took swimming lessons from Joe Fortes and later, art lessons from Emily Carr. Friends of her mother’s who dropped by the house included suffragettes Nellie McClung and […]