Occasionally, when I’m searching for photos using the baffling search engine at Vancouver Archives, I stumble across an interesting building or streetscape that I’ve never seen before. Often the information with the photos is quite detailed, but in the above photo all I had was a photo of the Royal Crown Soap Company building and the date ca.1905.
As its name implies, the Royal Crown Soap Company was a Canadian company that specialized in soap with factories in Vancouver and Winnipeg.
The company first appears in the City Directories in 1900 at 308 Harris Street—what East Georgia was called prior to 1915—the year the first Georgia viaduct was completed. The company is managed by Frederick T. Schooley, and he stays at the helm for the next 28 years.
Looking at ads from the ‘20s, Royal Crown was quite a prolific print advertiser, regularly engaging in coupon campaigns.
The company—which changes to the Royal Crown Soap Company and finally to Lever Bros Soap Manufacturers in 1942—started to see declining sales of soap in the 1940s. The city directory listing for 1949 is vacant, and the factory was demolished in the 1950s.
A look at Google maps shows the building would have been where the park is at Gore and East Georgia. Today, the only thing left of the Royal Crown Soap Company, is a ghost sign on the side of the London Pub at East Georgia and Main.
Top photo: The Royal Crown Soap Company, ca.1905. Photo courtesy CVA 312.27
With a ton of thanks to Lani Russwurm who discovered the ghost sign and put it on his blog PastTense Vancouver. And, then was kind enough to pop around and check if it was still there and snap this photo.
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