District of North Vancouver
by Chuck Davis
The first local people to greet Captain Vancouver when he entered Burrard Inlet lived on the North Shore. “We passed the situation,” Vancouver later wrote, “whence the Indians had first visited us the preceding day, which was a small border of low marshy land on the northern shore, intersected by several creeks of fresh water ... Most of their canoes were hauled up into the creeks ... None of their habitations could be discovered, whence we concluded that their village was within the forest.”
Seventy years were to pass before the Inlet’s people were to see white men again, but when they came in 1862 they came to stay. Contractors T.W. Graham and George Scrimgeour pre-empted land for a sawmill on the north shore of the Inlet more than six kilometres east of First Narrows. They immediately began to build Pioneer Mills, the first industrial plant on Burrard Inlet. Water to power the mill was got from Lynn Creek, more than three kilometres distant, and logs were hauled in by oxen. Cedar trees in Lynn Valley were magnificent, among the largest in the world. They were cut and sent flying down to the harbor in huge flumes. In December 1863, five months after it began, and facing relentless competition from mills closer to its markets (New Westminster and Vancouver Island), Pioneer Mills along with a million feet of cut timber lying in the nearby woods was up for sale. The next owner, John Oscar Smith, a New Westminster grocer, had no better success and sold the plant (which he’d renamed Burrard Inlet Mills) in January 1865. Smith accomplished something of historical note during his ownership: on November 9, 1864, he oversaw the first international shipment of goods out of Burrard Inlet: 277,500 feet of lumber to Adelaide, Australia.
The man who bought the mill from Smith was Sewell Prescott Moody, a Maine-born American and a seasoned lumberman. He was a tough and able administrator, and made an immediate change in the mill’s fortunes. (There was another change, too: the area around the mill began to be called Moodyville. Moody himself went to live in Victoria.) Renaming the operation Burrard Inlet Lumber Mills, he began to ship wood out in greater and greater quantities. “By God, he was a good lumberman,” a contemporary noted. “Kind of a tall, lanky sort of a guy. He would go through the woods like a blooming deer. But a teetotaler. No booze in Moodyville. The guys would have to go over to Gassy Jack’s in Gastown ...” Tragedy struck in 1875 when “Sue” Moody left for a trip to San Francisco aboard SS Pacific. Off Cape Flattery the Pacific struck another vessel and sank. Moody was among those drowned. A piece of the ship’s wreckage, on which Moody had scrawled his name and the message “All lost” washed up weeks later on the shore in Victoria within sight of his home. The mill carried on without its dynamic boss, finally closing in 1901.
In his diary for June 19, 1865, the Rev. Ebenezer Robson, a New Westminster Methodist minister, noted: “Rode out to Burrard Inlet, and crossing over in a canoe preached to 15 persons at Moody and Co.’s mills after supper; good attention and invitation to come again ... This was the first sermon on the inlet.” The Inlet’s first marriage was performed July 18, 1868, when Ada Young was married to Peter Plant in a ceremony performed by the Rev. Edward White.
Communication between the two shores of the inlet was maintained by a succession of ferries, although “ferry” is perhaps too imposing a word for Navvy Jack’s rowboat. In 1866 Jack, a gravel merchant, began to row people across the Inlet for a small fee. You could shout across the water to fetch him.
With the North Shore’s population increasing, a group of locals got together to apply to the provincial government to incorporate, and on August 10, 1891, the District of North Vancouver was born. The first meeting of the municipal council (with Reeve C.J.P. Phibbs presiding) took place 19 days later in councillor Tom Turner’s house near the foot of Lonsdale. The petitioners had hoped to include Moodyville within the new municipality, but the mill’s executives refused. Even so, the district was huge: it stretched along the North Shore all the way from Horseshoe Bay to Deep Cove. The population was sparse, a few hundred.
More substantial craft than Navvy Jack’s rowboat had begun providing cross-Inlet travel, and by 1900 a scheduled service began with a new vessel, the North Vancouver, built expressly for the job. Many of the passengers were heading for scenic hikes or skiing on Grouse Mountain, or a scary stroll across the Capilano Suspension Bridge. Detailed descriptions of the interesting years of ferry service on the Inlet so important to the history of the district can be found in two books, Ferry Across the Inlet, by former master James Barr, and the informal Echoes of the Ferries, by J. Rodger Burnes. North Vancouver Ferry No. 5 is around to this day as the Seven Seas Restaurant. (By the time the fondly recalled ferry service ended on August 30, 1958, more than 112 million passengers had been carried.)
The No. 5 was one of many vessels built at Wallace Shipyards, which quickly became a prominent industrial centre on the North Shore. But this prize, begun in 1903 by English-born Alfred Wallace, was later lost when residents and merchants around Lonsdale petitioned to have a separate place hived off from the district. The newly created City of North Vancouver took the biggest share of the North Shore’s population, retail and industrial strength (including Wallace’s busy yards) when it was incorporated on May 13, 1907. In 1912 the Municipality of West Vancouver was created, and the district lost still more ground ... and more tax base. Then tiny Moodyville joined the city in 1915. The Dollar Mill was established in 1916 at Roche Point on Indian Arm. Started by shipping magnate Robert Dollar, the mill was a major employer for many years but closed in 1942. By the 1921 census, while still physically large, the district had a population of 2,950, little more than a third of the city’s.
It wasn’t until 1925 that a bridge was built across the Inlet, a span designed to carry both trains and automotive traffic. This first Second Narrows Bridge meant someone driving from Vancouver could now reach the North Shore in about 20 minutes. On the day it opened, November 7, more than 3,000 cars drove over it. The creation of the bridge encouraged businessman W.C. Shelly (a baker made prosperous by his famous “4X Bread") to create Grouse Mountain Highway and Scenic Resort. One year after the bridge’s opening, the resort’s chalet opened with a tea party. Mount Seymour’s development took a little longer: the Alpine Club of Canada conducted a ski tour of Seymour in 1929, and vigorous development followed. The new bridge had been badly designed: its lift-span was over shallow water at the south end rather than over the deep central channel. The span was put out of commission so often by ships colliding with it (once disabling the bridge for more than four years!) that it earned the sour nickname “Bridge of Sighs.”
Then came the Great Depression. Like many struggling places in North America, the District of North Vancouver its tax base hammered by the loss to the city of major industries and the lucrative ferry service collapsed in 1932 into bankruptcy. One old-timer recalled jigging for salmon in local streams to have something for dinner. Some 75 per cent of landowners saw their property revert to the municipality for unpaid taxes. The district was placed under the control of a commissioner, Charles Tisdall, and would not have representative government again until 1951.
The North Shore’s fortunes began to revive in 1939 after the 1938 opening of the Lions Gate Bridge, and war-propelled industrial activity revived the sagging economy. By the 1941 census the district’s population had grown to nearly 6,000 to the city’s 9,000; by 1951 it had ballooned to nearly 14,500 and 10 years later was at 39,000, some 15,000 more than the City. (A recurring theme in the years since the two North Vans separated is the desire to get them back together again. It hasn’t happened yet.)
The 1958 opening of a new Second Narrows Bridge sparked another surge in growth. Today the district, with a population of 82,000, is thriving. There isn’t room on these two pages to tell all its colorful and busy history. In 1990 a lavishly illustrated book appeared titled Reflections: A Celebration of the District of North Vancouver’s Centennial. There, people like John Linn, Emily Patterson, Malcolm Lowry, Waiter Draycott, Chief Dan George, Chief Capilano Joe, song- writing Bentley C. Hilliam, Alfred Wallace, Captain James Van Bramer, Ron Andrews, Karen Magnussen and others are treated at greater length.
(0)
Recent Comments