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“On this bright sunny day, May 13, 2025, the work commenced on our special project for 2025...”
So begins the latest issue of the Old Cemeteries Society of Victoria’s newsletter. The special project referred to is the restoration of the grave of Edna Farnsworth, the subject of this week’s Chronicles.
Read MoreA century and a quarter has passed since 19-year-old Edna Farnsworth died. Her suicide made headlines from Victoria to San Francisco. She had no money but was given an expensive, fancy plot in Ross Bay Cemetery.
Read MoreMemory is a funny thing. It can be vivid, branded into the brain; it can be ephemeral, just a wisp-like fog that swirls about you from time to time but is always there, slumbering in the subconscious while it awaits a word, a sight, a smell or a sound—something, anything—to bring it if only momentarily to the fore.
One that has always stuck in my mind from childhood concerns money. A stack of bills pulled from the wall of an old house, once a store my mother told me, as it was being torn down.
Read MoreEric Duncan is remembered for having written what has been described as “the most important document for the history of the Comox Valley,” From Shetland to Vancouver Island: Recollections of Seventy-Five Years.
Published in Edinburgh in 1937, it’s a fine read but long out of print. Happily, I’ve had a copy—a first edition, to boot—for years and have read it twice. It was, in fact, one of my earliest antiquarian book finds.
Recently, I scanned it again and found a chapter which I’m sure will please Chronicles readers.
Read MoreIt occurs to me that Chronicles readers who don’t follow me on Facebook (T.W. Paterson History Author) might enjoy these recent posts of a visit to the Nanaimo Cemetery. I didn’t find the headstone I was looking for, but was intrigued by these three…
Read MoreApril 1925 marked the highlight of a lifetime for 86-year-old prospector Bill Brown of Barkerville.
For those who don’t recognize his name, B.A. McKelvie was a leading provincial journalist and the foremost historian and writer of ‘popular’ B.C. history in the 1920s-’50s. He was gone when I, a kid, history buff and aspiring author/historian, discovered him during my first visit to the BC Archives while looking for such serious topics as lost treasures, shipwrecks, stagecoach robberies...
Read MoreIt occurs to me that Chronicles readers who don’t follow me on Facebook (T.W. Paterson History Author) might enjoy these recent posts of a visit to the Nanaimo Cemetery. I didn’t find the headstone I was looking for, but was intrigued by these three…
Read MoreApril 1925 marked the highlight of a lifetime for 86-year-old prospector Bill Brown of Barkerville.
Read MoreFurther to today’s post on the famous—and valuable—New Westminster Mint’s 10- and 20-dollar gold coins, the crown colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia also, ever so briefly, printed their own postage stamps.
As an example, this photo is of the British Columbia & Vancouver Island Stamp #2 - Queen Victoria (1860) 2½d, Unwatermarked.
Read MoreBack in 1861, the Crown Colony of British Columbia was hindered by a shortage of money of all types.
At that time, the future Pacific province was supposed to be on the pound sterling of the Old Country. In reality, there was a shortage of coins and almost any coin of almost any realm was accepted if of gold or silver.
Read MoreIt’s all my fault.
So Stan Strazza told me at Sunday’s bi-annual South Wellington Day in the Cranberry Fire Hall.
Read MoreWhat a way to start the new year of 1896. City Constable Alex Smith was at death’s door. Shot in the chest, he’d been rushed to Royal Jubilee Hospital where doctors announced that they could do little for him.
Read MoreLet’s start the day with another great digital colourization by Duncan computer whiz Nigel Robertson, this one of a BC Archives photo of an E&N passenger train crossing the famous Niagara Canyon trestle at Goldstream in 1902.
Note that the photographer’s lens was too slow to ‘freeze’ the movement of the train as almost any camera or cell phone can do today.
Read MoreSuch it was called in a full-page story in the Vancouver Province in 1933.
A slight exaggeration to say the least, but a great story all the same!
Read MoreAt the risk of (heaven forbid) repeating myself, I’ve said before that you can always find historical nuggets in the current news.
For example, a week ago it was reported, Judge orders sale of B.C.’s oldest pub.
The pub in question is Victoria area’s Six Mile Pub, in business since 1855. That’s 170 years! You’d probably be able to fill one of the Great Lakes with the suds that have flowed from the Six Mile’s taps in a century and three-quarters.
Read MoreIn February, Chronicles readers met guest columnist Tom W. Parkin (TW2 here at the BCCs.ca) who wrote about hiking a stretch of the beleaguered E&N Railway.
I’m pleased to say that he’s back this week with a photo feature on the little-known B.C. ghost town of Donald, a construction camp during the building of the CPR.
Read MoreI must shuffle my Current Affairs files more often. Too late for last week’s feature article on Second World War explosives that continue to threaten life and limb in our own backyard, I noticed two overlooked clippings.
The first, and more apropos to the Chronicles, was a small Canadian Press article in the Victoria Times Colonist, headlined, Surrey RCMP office evacuated after grenade turned in.
Read MoreIn the year and a-half since his arrival in Victoria, George Tomline Gordon had been appointed treasurer for the Crown Colony of Vancouver Island, elected the member for Esquimalt in the Legislative Assembly, and elected commanding officer of the No. 1 Company, Vancouver Island Volunteer Rifle Corps. He had a beautiful wife, a large, loving family and a fine farm.
Read MoreIn this week’s Chronicle about unexploded ordnance, I focus on the lethal legacy of the Second World War. But the problem—the threat to life and limb—goes back long before WW2.
Read MoreOfficially, the Second World War ended with Japan’s surrender, 80 years ago. In at least one sense, however, the war goes on.
Although no hostile action was fought on Canadian, let alone British Columbia soil, we, too, have a history of live ordnance—so-called ‘friendly fire’—turning up, sometimes in the unlikeliest of places; several times, it has killed.
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