Editorially speaking…
A recent Canadian Press news story prompted a visit to my archives and this week’s ramble...
‘Vancouver heritage building demolished, at risk of collapse’ headlined Ashley Joannou’s article on the demolition of downtown Vancouver’s Dunsmuir House, 500 Dunsmuir Street. Although formally registered as a heritage building, it was condemned as a threat to pubic safety because of terminal “structural deterioration” due to years of neglect by its owners.
Built as a hotel in 1909, it also served as a sailors’ barracks during the Second World War, as a Salvation Army home for veterans and as social housing, but had been vacant since 2013.
My interest in this case was piqued by the building’s namesake not its loss to heritage. It reminded me how the coal mining Dunsmuir family, once the most exalted in all of British Columbia, have almost slipped into limbo. To take Dunsmuir family patriarch Robert, for example, I’ve asked before in print:
“Where’s the statue to this pioneering giant, the public tributes usually given to men who achieve incredible wealth?”
If fur trader, colonial governor and statesman Sir James Douglas–‘the father of British Columbia’–is our greatest public figure, Robert Dunsmuir must surely rank as his peer in the private sector. Not in terms of ‘greatness,’ as most would measure it, perhaps, but in stature and influence. He built an industrial empire and founded a dynasty. In his day he was the province’s Morgan, Rockefeller and Carnegie, rolled into one.
Legend has it that Robert promised to build wife Joan a castle if she’d accompany him to the New World. She did, and the result is with us today: Victoria’s stately Craigdarroch Castle. —Wikipedia
So who, today, cares? Victoria has Craigdarroch Castle, if one counts self-built landmarks as such. Son James left Colwood’s Hatley Castle and Park, for 50 years a military college, now Royal Roads University.
The Dunsmuirs do grace our maps, albeit in very restrained fashion when one considers their impact on the provincial economy for more than half a century, and that James served as premier and lieutenant-governor.
West of Qualicum Beach is the postage-stamp community of Dunsmuir–sparse enough tribute to Robert. Ladysmith Harbour has its Dunsmuir Islands, again, scant acknowledgement of James’s role as its founder, and Burleith Arm, bearing the name of his first Victoria mansion.
In Cedar District’s Dodd Narrows there’s Joan Point, a tip of the mapmaker’s hat to Joan Olive (Mrs. Robert) Dunsmuir. There’s the aforementioned Dunsmuir Street in downtown Vancouver, Esquimalt has one three blocks long, and, behind City Hall and two blocks from the Island Highway, Nanaimo has a Dunsmuir Street. Running between Albert and Franklyn, it inspired the late E. Blanche Norcross, editor of Nanaimo Retrospective: The First Century, to observe that the Hub City, “whose fortunes had been so intimately linked for two generations with the Dunsmuirs, remembers the name in only one short and unimportant street”.
This, in memory of Robert (1825-1889) who, in clawing his way from Hudson’s Bay Company miner to coal baron, helped to build Nanaimo; the poor if not penniless immigrant who promised his wife that, one day, he’d build her a castle–and did. The man who built the E&N Railway–for a price that many still think was too high. The man who built the communities of Wellington, Cumberland and Union Bay.
The man who originally treated his employees paternally, but who’s remembered for being one of the all-time strikebreakers, even to the point of using armed troops.
Son James (1851-1920), who’d trained as a mining machinist and who’d known what it was like to labour underground (as the rich owner’s son), created Ladysmith and Extension, built a castle (as noted) of his own, and made it to the highest political offices in the province. Of the Dunsmuirs, he’s the one who’s most, if begrudgingly, respected.
Determined, it seems, to outdo his father, James Dunsmuir built his own castle at Colwood. Many of his miners lived in shacks. —Author’s photo
Alexander, brother, the first white child born in Nanaimo and black sheep who drank himself to death is rarely mentioned; daughters Elizabeth, Marion, Mary, Maude, Emily, Jessie and ‘Effie,’ more or less concerned themselves with their social lives, then spent years, and a king’s ransom, fighting James in court over the spoils of Alex’s will.
Burleith Arm, east of Woods Island, recalls James’ Victoria residence, named in turn after Burleith Farms, Ayrshire, near his father’s Scottish birthplace. Commander James Parry, master of HMS Egeria, christened Joan Point and the Dunsmuir Islands during the same re-survey of Ladysmith (then Oyster) Harbour in 1904. Dunsmuir Creek, tributary to South Nanaimo River, likely owes its origin to this most famous coal mining family in Island history as, likely, does the Beaufort Range’s Mount Joan. Crofton has several streets named for the Dunsmuir mother and daughters, courtesy of son-in-law Henry Croft—before he, too, fell out with James and his mother-in-law.
Four books have been written about the remarkable Dunsmuirs. Coal Mine to Castle, by James’ grandson James Audain, has been out of print for years–its obscurity reputedly encouraged by family descendants who didn’t like Audain’s version of the facts.
Some years ago, the Chemainus Theatre staged Alone at the Edge, playwright Rod Langley’s well-received study of this enigmatic and, as it proved, tragic family.
The Dunsmuirs didn’t need to be further chronicled to ensure their place in provincial history. But it’s intriguing to ponder their back-handed acknowledgements by our mapmakers. If popularity alone had been the criterion, it’s likely that even such insignificant geographical features as Dunsmuir, Dunsmuir Islands, Burleith Arm, Joan Point and Dunsmuir streets wouldn’t exist.
Now even the dilapidated Dunsmuir House is gone.
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