Recollections of Early Vancouver in My Childhood 1893-1912*

by Dr. Gladys C. Schwesinger">

Recollections of Early Vancouver in My Childhood 1893-1912*

by Dr. Gladys C. Schwesinger, Ph.D.

EARLIEST MEMORIES

Vancouver was young, very very young; in fact not much older than the children who were moving into the house on Powell Street when this tale opens. The tow-headed little girl had lived with her family in a small house on Mount Pleasant where she and her younger sister were born. At the time of her birth, lower Mount Pleasant was little more than a forest with wild animals roaming in the woods that skirted er immediate environment. Only a few houses covered the expanse that was then Mount Pleasant, and a big school had been erected on Ninth Avenue indicating that the city fathers expected more babies in the years to come. The first residents on the "Hill" dug wells for their water and cut trails through the heavy evergreen woods. Mothers aired their babies in the woodsy paths, never sure that they would not encounter wild animals while doing so. Housewives did their marketing at a grocery store on old Westminster Avenue and bought their vegetables-those that thev did not themselves grow-from Chinese peddlers who delivered from door to door.

The sprawling infant town developed at a rapid rate and verv early car track crept along Westminster Avenue to the foot of Mount Pleasant's long hill. By then the babies were taken for their airings along Dufferin Street, an east-west road that stretched out from the main artery. In time Westminster Avenue boasted a wide sidewalk and a few years later a bicycle path that went as far south as Ninth Avenuee. Beyond Sixteenth Avenue an old logged-over corduroy road straggled, on which mothers could not push baby carriages. This feature probably couraged the mothers to cluster at the foot of the hill where they could settle themselves on the stray logs and stumps and stones that bordered the first sidewalks. There the mothers did their talking while they tended their babies in the open on sunny days.

The men preferred as their meeting-place the old brewery located on the point where "Brewery Creek" crossed Sixth Avenue. Evenings the oldtimers would gather in what was chumily called the "Mount Pleasant Parliament" where they would review the happenings of the day.

Brewery Creek, well supplied with trout, offered sport for any one who wanted fishing. Also it provided an attractive old swimmin' hole for the boys, being filled with clean, pure water from which a stream escaped to gurgle its course down to Front Street where it emptied into at larger body of water known locally as "False Creek."

At this junction, two gaunt-looking wooden buildings, both slaughterouses, stood with their backs to the bay. Men folk congregated there too to thrash out the problems and gossip of their pioneer town.

The family of the tow-head and her sisters lived near the lower end the stream, not far from where the slaughterhouses stood, and overlooking the stretch of water called False Creek. The children's father as in the cattle business, supplying animals for the slaughter-houses, and it was part of the youngsters' regular experience to see droves of cattle herded along Front Street on their way to the coralls in the "cattle-fields." As a cattle-dealer, the father often had to be away from home, especially when his business took him to the prairies around Calgary where the cattle ranged.

Living alone on Mount Pleasant with no husband to give her a hand was not an easy life for a young mother with three tiny youngsters and no near neighbors. Hence, the family decided to leave the house on Mount Pleasant and move "down town" where there would be neighbors within their block, but no cougars. In the "East End" a street car would run witliin a block of the new home, indeed almost past its door, and people would be passing by on foot within a scream's reach of their voice.

From: Gladys C. Schwesinger
Ventura, Calif.
16 May 1960

WHERE BREWERY CREEK EMPTIED INTO FALSE CREEK

I write this additional note to the account of the early creeks on Mount Pleasant, partly to allay a possible misconception (see Reuben Hamilton's "Mount Pleasant Early Days," pp 30 and 1), and to correct an earlier mistake (see Stan Meadows "The False Creek Story," B.C. Magazine, Dec. 31, 1955, p 8, middle column), as to where Brewery Creek terminated. This creek, of course, was never a part of the drainage into China Creek, and it entered False Creek, not at the foot of Prince Edward Street, but on Front Street (now East First Ave.) about half-way between Scotia Street and where New Brunswick would have extended had that street been continued to the north.

From 1897 to 1908, I lived at the corner of Front Street and Scotia Street, and within half a block from wliere Brewery Creek emptied into the salt water of False Creek. For several years, ours was the only home between Scotia Street and the mouth of Brewery Creek, except for a place where the butcher boys gathered near the creek and the cabin where "Crazy George" lived on a corner of the north-east part of our large yard. Our east fence adjoined a stand of tall timbers-primaeval firs and cedars -underlain with a thick growth of the variety of lesser trees, bushes, and plants that ordinarily make up the "fir tree association." This wood sloped downward gradually for several hundred yards along Front Street until it reached the creek bed. From there the stream flowed under the old wooden plank-road that made up the eastern extension of Front Street, and it ran through, or slightly skirted, the buildings of Burns' Slaughter House. About 1907, Toni Kieffer and his bride built their two-storey home (still standing) in the butcher-boys location on the creek. In 1952, 1954, and 1958, I visited the spot and found that the remains of our beloved childhood stream had degenerated into a stagnant, gray smelly, almost hidden swamp!

My early years were intimately linked witli this brook, but we never referred to it as "Brewery Creek," always calling it merely "The Ravine." Our special area of the ravine lay between the north side of the Dufferin Street Bridge (now East Second Avenue) and the brook's mouth at Front Street. The south side of Dufferin Street Bridge was apparently privately owned, for the stream was included in the property of a Frenchman named Alphonse (?) Faron (?), who had widened the brook into a large oblong pond. This pond was curbed in and gave exercise and comfort to dozens of white ducks daily. Indeed, one of the sights of those early days was to stand on the bridge and look down at the ducks cavorting in their spacious swimming-pool. The whole property, including a fine big house, later became the home of the Taylor family from Saskatchewan. We, too, raised ducks at our home, and it was a common sight each morning to see our flock leave the "farm yard," waddle down Froiit Street for a day's jaunt at the brook, and return home the same evening!

Day after day, once school was let out, and on weekends-except in inclement weather-my sisters and I would repair to our Ravine for play. This was our special preserve, our forest retreat, our playground, and my own personal conception of a fairyland on earth! In the spring time we gathered violets, mostly yellow ones; also may-flowers, twin-flowers, pigeon-berry blossoms, ferns and mosses. We ate "sasky" and "muck-a-muck" (the succulent new shoots of the salmon-berry and the thimbleberry bushes.) We waded in the stream of the brook, and climbed back and forth over the many logs which had conveniently fallen across its deeper pools, joining rock to rock, and affording walkable bridges. We met our young friends in the Ravine. We played house there. We made up stories and told them to one another. We exchanged confidences, and we dreamed dreams of the future.

In summer time, we sampled fully of the crops which the Ravine so generously provided for our delectation. We hunted out the buried liquorice root and chewed it assiduously. We coloured our lips with he juice of salal berries. We ate the yellow and red salmon berries, the thimble berries and the wild raspberries. Also we picked bucketsful of blue berries, red huckleberries, black caps and blackberries to take home to Mother for pies or winter preserves.

True enough, we often had to fight the devils clubs and skunks cabbages and stinging nettles that grew up thickly from the lush, black earth; but in time, we learned how to cope with these annoyances. We climbed trees on the higher levels of the woods and shooed away the rows from their trees. When we found robins' nests, with their tiny blue eggs inside, we carefully left them there, untouched!

In places, the brook bed produced tall clumps of spirea, which we loved to pick and present to our friends. I recall gathering many armfuls of this showy flower, together with long green ferns, and decorating e Methodist Church on the occasion of the double-wedding of the Glover girls, both school teachers, one of whom married Mr. Dobson, the other Mr. H H. Stevens (later M.P.) I would guess the date to be the end of June, 1906.

Across the Ravine, and some ten or twelve feet below the level of the Dufferin Street bridge, on its north side, there ran an old, dingy, boxed-in wooden flume, moss-covered and somewhat slippery. Where carried its water to-if any-we did not know. We were forbidden by our parents to walk or run along this flume, but there were times when we dared to do so anyway. Once, Hazel Borthivick (now Mrs. Kyle Clarke) took a tumble off the near end of the flume and broke her arm the fall. The commotion which arose from this accident effectively stopped all further excursions across the flume.

Brewery Creek, in a way, is tied up with the two slaughter houses (B.C. and Burns'), both having large front yards facing on Front Street, with their buildings backing on False Creek. After the Great Northern Railroad sent its spur froin Seattle to Vancouver (about 1904) these two firms moved elsewhere, and their old buildings were ordered burned. Under the supervision of the Vancouver Fire Brigade, the fires were started one day at dawn, and it was our pleasure and thrill to watch the double spectacle. Again the Creek figured in history, for with the firing of the buildings, all the rats-big ones, little ones, and middle-sized ones, dozens, perhaps hundreds in number-forsook their quaters in the old blood-soaked, meat-plastered buildings and swam across the stream in droves, making for the cattle-fields beyond! No Pied Piper was ever more effective than Vancouver's Fire Chief that day!

Incidentally, as a foot note, I might mention that, in the farthest cattle-field, a small brook ran northwards, but it had no name, nor do I know how or where it originated. It was too far west and south to be a tributary of China Creek, and it had no connection with Brewery Creek. I used to take small children there on picnics, and we would amuse ourselves catching minnows from its waters, something we could not do in our own Ravine. (Perhaps the chemicals dumped from the Brewery at Seventh Ave. prevented fish life from thriving in lower Brewery Creek?) I could go on and on, but will draw my story to a close, and append a note to explain my reference above to "Crazy George."

Gladys C. Schwesinger

"Crazy George"

"Crazy George" was a character in the early days of lower Mount Pleasant. He was an old man, with long, white, silky hair and beard, shabbily dressed as a rule, but clean. He batched in a one-room shack at the edge of the woods on eastern Front Street, doing his own housekeeping and cooking, with none of the amenities of life available. During his more lucid moments, he emerged from this shack and walked along the streets, sometimes talking to himself, but always courteously greeting the people he met. He was a good neighbor, friendly, kind and harmless. Often, especially in the long summer twilights, when he would play on his flute and send its melodious tones out to entertain us, a feeling of beauty and peace would come to our little world. George was too old to work and I do not know what the source of his small income may have been. It was before the day of organized social services or charity. He drew his water daily from our outdoor tap, and carried it some two hundred yards to his shack in two large, trimmed-off coal-oil tins. These he suspended from an old broom handle, laid across his shoulders, much as the Chinese pedlars did when selling their vegetables.

Crazy George's main characteristic was that he heard "voices" and he answered theni, often vituperously. These hallucinatory experiences generally took place in his shack, and through the thin walls of that shack, we on the outside, could hear him wrestle with the "voices" that assailed him. These long, disquieting verbal conflicts with his mental demons would sometimes go on for hours. We children on orders from our mother-were not permitted to disturb or make fun of the old man. In spite of his being "crazy," we recognized that Crazy George had been reared in culture to be a courteous English gentleman. We did not know his story, but unverified rumours floated around that he had been jilted in his youth by a girl in England. His real name was "George Dyer," but everyone referred to him simply as "Crazy George." I doubt if many even knew his sir name as we did. No one ever learned his story that I know of. He lived, and doubtless died-alone.

May 18,1960
Ventura, Calif.
Gladys C. Schwesinger

Ventura, Calif.
May 14. 1960

Dear Major Matthews:

In re the picture of "Fifth Avenue East," page 31, of Reuben Hamilton's memories: "MOUNT PLEASANT EARLY DAYS," I can make a comment or two. I knew this block very well, for I lived in two places on the block: the first from 1908 to 1911 , at 283 Fifth Avenue E., this being on the north-west corner of Fifth and Scotia. Then, for three months in 1911, we lived temporarily on the spot facing the man who is standing on the bridge. I have never seen this picture before.

I attended Mount Pleasant School from April, 1899 to December, 1905, and had three choices of route from home on Front and Scotia Streets: Up Scotia and down Dufferin St., or down Fifth Avenue, or down Sixth Avenue to New Brunswick St., and up to the school. We preferred tthe Dufferin-New Brunswick walk, but often took the Fifth Avenue crossing too, so I knew it well. I feel sure that this block was more built up in April 1899 than is shown in the picture and that its sidewalks were laid by the time I began school.

The house on lot 2 (later occupied by the Stewarts) almost obscures the house on lot 3, which belonged to Marstrand, and was later occupied by Parkinsons. This was a much more imposing house than that shown in the picture My guess is that its west addition had not yet been added. I think your last date for the picture, 1898-1900, is a little too late!

About 1904 or so, some artist did a water-colour sketch of the view to the north from the corner of New Brunswick and Fifth Avenue. I remember it featured the Jelley's house on the south-west corner. The sketch was exhibited for weeks in a store window on Westminster Avenue, perhaps for sale. I wonder who has it today.

Similarly, by 1899, the Mount Pleasant School, shown on page 8 (ibid.), had its building mate to the west, and the sidewalks laid on all sides of the large two-block school yard.

Note: The first name in the Class of 1904 (page 8) should read "Domoney," not "Doming." These early students were "big boys" and "big girls' when I entered!

Sincerely yours,
Gladys C. Schwesinger

*Excerpts from the pamphlet, Recollections of Early Vancouver in My Childhood 1893-1912 published by the City of Vancouver Archives in 1964.