Tragedy at Colony Farm

Colony Farm at Essondale was a thriving business into the 1940s. Farm work was seen a therapeutic and the patients would work in the fields and care for the animals. There were several teams of Clydesdale horses housed in a large arena with teamsters and dairy men. Married men lived in houses with their families and single men lived in bunks in various buildings. Everyone would gather in the huge dining room for their meals.

Those Clydesdale horses were a source of pride for all at Essondale. Maybe not everyone though. In December of 1946, a milker set a series of fires at Essondale, one of which burned the Clydesdale arena.

Essondale had its own fire department - nine full time employees and 20 volunteers - but they were no match for the determined arsonist setting the fires.

"The blaze that utterly destroyed the arena was the most tragic of all. Prideful teamsters and grooms wept as the foot-thick wooden beams burned, then collapsed. One employee and several young Clydesdale horses were lost. The Clydesdale operation was never the same again."

From Coquitlam - 100 Years.

Bob Gardner was the farm's foreman at the time. His daughter, Jenny, grew up at Essodale remembers that terrifying time.

"It was a traumatic experience. If you lived that close to fire, you never forget it. My hair turned white within a year and my dad's too. The arena was the first big fire...It was a massive, gorgeous building with huge oil paintings of the prize-winning Clydesdales and Holsteins, all the shiny harnesses, trophies and records.

As we opened our door we could see the tall tower of the arena collapsing, that's how intense the fire was. They got all the teams out by pulling them through the bull pens with wet sacks over their heads and then into the open fields. But they couldn't get to the young stock. It all happened so fast; men wearing glasses didn't even have time to put them on. One man was trapped upstairs. All the records and harnesses, everything was lost."

From Coquitlam - 100 Years.

According to a December 10, 1946 newspaper article, one man and five horses died in the fire, which left $200,000 worth of damage. Ian Ferguson was a 62-year-old teamster who ran into the fire to retrieve a suitcase full of money.

Twenty-four men were sleeping on the top floor of the two-storey building when the fire started. A farm employee, Bob Wall, was playing his radio in bed when he smelled smoke. He then saw the fire burning in the hay so he quickly woke the others and all escaped.

The farm superintendent, Peter Moore, said that if the wind had been blowing east, the fire would have spread to a nearby building housing 250 head of prize cattle.

Thanks to the PDF, Riverview, A Legacy of Care and Compassion for the above information.

I hope you find the beauty around you.

Karen Magill

Vancouver Explodes

Vancouver was incorporated on April 6, 1886 so that is our official birthday. However, many people feel that June 13, 1886 was the day that Vancouver was truly born.

Sunday, June 13, 1886 was a peaceful sunny day. Art Sullivan and a friend were lazing in a half-decked pleasure sloop just off the Burrard Inlet shore near the Indian Mission Church, west of Moodyville. Art and his mother were proprietors of the prosperous Gold's Hotel on Water Street. The Vancouver boom had been good to them and many others.

Suddenly, a fierce, freakish western squall swooped down on English Bay and the Inlet.

On the south shore, clearing fires to the west town were inflamed. The small, controlled blazes burst into a thundering menace.

Sullivan swung the sloop across the wind to head to the city wharf at the foot of Carrall Street. With two reefs in the mainsail, the jib blown away and his shipmate bailing furiously, he couldn't make the long slant to the wharf. He ended up at Hastings Mill, half a mile past the newly built wharf. That trip took less than twenty minutes.

That was all the time it took for the blossoming city of Vancouver to wiped off the face of the earth.

First warning of the impending disaster was the dense cloud of smoke from the western clearing. Then came the shouts of men running from the clearing camps, which were quickly followed by the clanging of the bell at St. James' Church at Powell Street and Westminster Road. Father Clinton had seen the mass of smoke in the distance and guessed correctly as to what it was.

There was no way to fight this fire. In seconds, not minutes the fire swept across the tangle of felled trees and brush along the shore of the inlet. It torched its way through the dense timber still standing south of Hastings Street. The flames jumped ahead of and cut off the men from the clearing gangs as they rallied on the Regina Hotel in its cleared area west of Cambie Street.

There were four avenues of escape for those in town; the city wharf at Carrall, along the CPR embankment or the road to Hastings Mill, to False Creek at Pender and Carrall or out the Wesminster Road and across the bridge to the south shore of the creek.

On the south shore, Sam Brighouse and George Black were racing horses that morning. One of the spectators, Lewis Carter - owner of Carter House - tried to make his way back into the city. He got across the bridge when the flames forced him into False Creek.

Houses in Vancouver that day did not 'catch fire'. Paint or the pitch on new boards blistered and ran, walls and roofs shimmered with heat waves for a second or two then the whole exterior of the building was a single mass of flame.

One eyewitness said, "Vancouver did not burn - it exploded."

The above information was taken from the book Vancouver, From Milltown to Metropolis by Alan Morley.

I hope you find the beauty around you.

Chang Toy

Today I am going to tell you about one of the men responsible for the building of Vancouver- Chang Toy.

Born in Guangdong province in southern China in 1857, Chang Toy's father died when Toy was three. This didn't stop Chang Toy from going to school though. He was married as a child - so that his mother could have a servant.

In 1874, Chang came to Canada. Initially, he lived in Victoria before moving to New Westminster where he worked at a sawmill. In 1876, Toy moved to Granville and bought a share in a laundry. He then added a small grocery business and started labour contracting other Hakka speaking Chinese workers.

As the years passed, Chang Toy got involved in more businesses such as charcoal burning, an import and export business, steamship ticket sales and real estate. Originally, the goods were shipped from a more established Victoria merchant, the Wing Chong Company to Chang's business, the Sam Kee Company. Funny thing is that Sam Kee appears to be a totally made up name.

Chang Toy. Photo courtesy of the City of Vancouver archives.

After the Great Fire of 1886, Chang Toy moved to Steveston. But by 1888, he was back in the newly named Vancouver. Retail sales rose steadily and the company also acted as a wholesaler - bringing in goods from Hong Kong then shipping them to other parts of B.C. 

In the early 1900s, Sam Kee's store was on the south side of Pender backing onto a much larger False Creek. Sam Kee was also a clearing house for Chinese sending money back to China. By 1908, trade in things such as rice had grown hugely. Chinese sourced rice was shipped mainly to major Vancouver wholesalers like Kelly-Douglas and W H Malkin. On the export side, Hong Kong and later Shanghai had a market for salted fish.

As that trade expanded, Sam Kee made complex relationships with Japanese fishing concerns. When the sources of fish declined, the company made connections in Nanaimo. Sam Kee added a wharf, fish tanks and a saltery. Then Chang Toy's company turned around and leased the area to Japanese companies who supplied the fish Sam Kee exported. 

The different traders in Chinatown were rivals but they worked together when needed. In 1893, Alexander Cumyow and Chang Toy pooled their resources to buy property, which they then leased to Wing Sang and other merchants before selling two years later.

I want to thank the website Building Vancouver for the information on Chang Toy. I will tell you more about him on Wednesday.

I hope you find the beauty around you.