Editorially speaking…
At 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.
View Royal’s historic Six Mile Pub has been pouring suds for 170 years.—Pinterest
The reasons for its court-ordered sale are of no issue here.
The Chronicles’ interest is in its colourful history which actually began in 1848 when millwright John Fenton built a water-driven sawmill on the site for the Hudson’s Bay Co. which had established Fort Victoria five years before.
In just a year, however, Fenton was off to the California gold rush and a former London Bobby, Bill Parsons, took Fenton’s place. He built a bridge across Millstream to open the Sooke district by land—hence the name Six Mile which denotes its distance from Victoria.
For two years, he operated a grist mill then bought 40 acres from the HBCo. and built the rustic Parsons Bridge Hotel—not waiting to get his first liquor license and being fined for his impatience.
The hotel may have been a long way by horseback, carriage and foot from Victoria, but it was accessible enough to the British seamen sailing in and out of Esquimalt Harbour, initially because they replenished their water drums from Millstream.
According to the Six Mile Pub website, “The tap room rang with laughter and shouts [and] there is talk that it used to be the headquarters for rum-running at a later date. The Six Mile was the hub of the small community and was used as a postal address by those close by when the stagecoaches began to run in the 1880’s...”
I could go on but you get the idea—you can find “ancient history” in today’s news regularly. Which is why I subscribe to several newspapers and constantly scan online news sources for articles and leads to share with readers of the Chronicles.
I know, it’s a dirty job but someone...
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Also on Vancouver Island, the Cowichan River, one of 44 heritage rivers in the whole of Canada, is under increasing environmental threat by, of all things, one of the chemicals used to make sunscreen. The problem has become so bad that the Town of Lake Cowichan wants to ban the sale of sunscreens containing oxybenzone, the culprit in some of the sunscreens with which 10s of 1000s of ‘tubers’ annually slather themselves.
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Nationally, education officials in Newfoundland Labrador have ordered the destruction of 1000s of textbooks because they contained “inaccurate information about the province’s Indigenous population”.
Apparently the books “erroneously stated that Turtle Island—a name for the North American continent used by some Indigenous people—is a creation story that applies to all Indigenous people” and contained inaccurate references to tax exemptions, eating habits and social structures.
It’s not unlikely that other text and reference books will come under the glass.
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On the international stage, U.S. President Trump is accused of “sidestepp[ing] racism in U.S. history” after he challenged the venerable Smithsonian Institution’s portrayal of American history as it pertains to slavery.
He has signed an executive order entitled, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” that, critics charge, downplays, and all but denies, this black (no pun intended—TW) and irrefutable chapter in U.S. history.
Surely, not even Donald Trump would try to deny the United States’ history of slavery? —Wikipedia
Trump has also ordered Interior Secretary Durgeon to look into the removal of Confederate monuments since the 2020 murder by police of George Floyd.
Obviously, there’s much more to this story, but I leave it to readers who wish to know more to pursue it online.
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On a happier note, rebuilding is underway of Lytton’s Chinese History Museum which was destroyed by the fire that literally swept this historic community from the B.C. map. Operator Lorna Fandrich hopes to be able to re-open this fall. Here’s hoping.
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