A Year in Five Minutes: Vancouver 1886

Mayor, council and city officials in front of tent after fire of 1886. Item # LGN 1045.

By Chuck Davis, The History of Vancouver
Photos courtesy of Vancouver Archives

[Editor's Note: We at re:place are honoured, yet again, by Chuck Davis' newest undertaking - A Year in Five Minutes - of which this is the first. This series, which will run until Chuck thinks up another initiative he'd like to start, will showcase the main events during a given year. It will run in sequential order and inevitably get a special link on the homepage where readers will be able to access any given year quickly. Thanks, Chuck!]

The Main Events: The city is incorporated; the city burns down

This was the year the City of Vancouver began, and the year it nearly ended.

The beginning was calm enough.

While he was in Granville in January of 1886 looking for a school site MLA John Robson told a public meeting of 250 residents—about a quarter of the population—that they should incorporate as a city.

A committee was struck on the spot. After careful reading of the charters of other Canadian cities, they presented a draft bill to the legislature. It was backed by a petition signed by more than 100 locals, one of whom was a real estate agent named Malcolm MacLean. He would become the little city’s first mayor.

Approval for incorporation was given and, on Tuesday, April 6, officially granted. At its birth the little city extended from what became Nanaimo Street on the east to Trafalgar Street (then called Boundary Street) on the west, and from Burrard Inlet on the north to 16th Avenue on the south.

The first election was held May 3. It was an at-large vote that elected ten aldermen and the mayor.  Richard Alexander, manager of the Hastings Mill and MacLean’s opponent, blundered badly on election day: contemptuously ignoring the ban on Chinese voters spelled out in the new city’s charter he gathered his Chinese workers en masse and marched them to the polling place to vote, one supposes for him. Enraged white workers fell on the bewildered group with clubs and fists and drove them back to the mill. Alexander could have used those men: the final count was 225 for him, 242 for MacLean.

The very first resolution the first council passed was to petition the federal government to grant to the city for use as a park the heavily forested 1,000-acre military reserve at the entrance to the city’s harbor. That request would soon be granted, and that’s how we got Stanley Park.

Later in the month a chief of police was chosen: the stern and portly James M. Stewart. Later, when the force grew to four, Stewart would send an order to Seattle for uniforms and other equipment. The tiny department’s badges were made from American silver dollars, with one side smoothed down and engraved Vancouver City Police, and the other with a pin soldered on. A volunteer fire brigade was organized on May 28.

A Bank and a Baby

This was the year Vancouver got a bank in the city. The Bank of British Columbia (headquartered in London, England and not related to the present bank of the same name) had been organized under that name in July of 1862, and had been doing well in Victoria and New Westminster. In September 1886 a branch was opened here, “the first banking office in the newly-founded city.”

The first baby born in the newly incorporated city (she arrived April 27) was a girl named Margaret Florence McNeil, born to Alexander and Anna Springer McNeil. Little Florence was baptized by Father Patrick Fay at Holy Rosary Church. Six weeks after her birth her parents bundled their baby up and fled Vancouver. Why?

The city had burned down.

The Great Fire

The Great Fire happened June 13, 1886, a Sunday. A small crew of CPR men was keeping an eye on clearing fires that had been set the day before. “The fire started between Hamilton and Granville Streets,” volunteer fireman Hugh Campbell told the city archivist in 1931. “The CPR were clearing the land, and the fire got away from them.” The reason it got away was a freakish squall, a sudden blast of wind from the west. The wind was strong enough to take the coal hulk Robert Kerr, anchored off Deadman’s Island, and push her, dragging her anchor, down to the Hastings Sawmill at the foot of Dunlevy Street. (There, providentially enough, the Kerr would serve as a refuge for people jumping into the inlet to escape the fury of the fire.) The wind blew big trees over—and blew flames and burning debris right into the sprawling tinder-dry collection of homely wooden buildings that was the two-month old city of Vancouver.

“The city did not burn,” said pioneer W.H. Gallagher, “it was consumed by flame. The buildings simply melted before the fiery blast . . . The fire went down the sidewalk on old Hastings Road, past our office, so rapidly that people flying before it had to leave the burning sidewalk and take to the road; the fire travelled down that wooden sidewalk faster than a man could run.”

Men dropped before their companions’ eyes and were consumed in the fire; a mother and her child were found dead at the bottom of a well into which they had leaped for safety, smothered when the flames consumed the oxygen above. The heat was ferocious: the bell of St. James that had warned so many was turned to a molten lump of slag when the church in its turn burst into flame. (The melted bell can be seen today at the Vancouver Museum.)

The tiny volunteer fire brigade, formed mere days earlier, could do nothing. They had only axes, shovels and buckets. Tragically, and understandably, it wasn’t enough.

Fires in the new towns of the late 1800s were not uncommon; what made Vancouver’s unique was its speed. A city of about 1,000 wooden buildings was destroyed in less than 45 minutes, some say as little as 20. The fire reached the water, then stopped. Two or three buildings survived. There was nothing left to burn. (The Hastings Mill Store, in the midst of the conflagration, was untouched! Today it serves as a little museum at the north foot of Alma Street, moved there in 1930.)

Reports of the death toll vary: at least eight, perhaps as high as 28.

Mayor Maclean wired Prime Minister Macdonald for assistance (”Our city in ashes …”), and received a prompt hand-written response promising $5,000.       Help from surrounding towns was swift and generous. Alan Morley writes: “Doctors and women collected medical supplies and bandages, food, clothing and household goods were donated, and by 6 o’clock in the evening an unending relief caravan was crawling over the Westminster Road and in sight of Vancouver. “In twenty minutes, Vancouver had been wiped off the earth. In twelve hours, it was rising again.”

A newly arrived photographer named Harry Devine, just 20, took the city’s most famous early photograph three days after the fire. It showed a tent hurriedly thrown up by Alderman Lauchlan Hamilton before which the council members and a few civic officials gathered under a crudely painted sign reading “City Hall.” (see photo above)

Firsts

Journalism reared its inquisitive head early in the city. On January 15 appeared the first issue of the Vancouver Weekly Herald and North Pacific News, the first weekly newspaper in the city. Note that “Vancouver” appears in the paper’s name, three months before incorporation.

There was excitement July 4, 1886 when the Canadian Pacific Railway pulled into Port Moody. Locomotive No. 371, having been placed on the train at North Bend, hauled the “Pacific Express” into Port Moody, five days and 19 hours after leaving Montreal. It was, tradition has it, one minute late.

And the whole lower mainland was thrilled on July 26 when the first inward cargo to the port of Vancouver arrived: tea from China. Tea had become hugely popular in the western world, and in 1886 China—then supplying the bulk of the world’s tea—exported 300 million pounds, of which 170 million went to Great Britain. How much of that titanic total was on this shipment isn’t recorded.

Vancouver’s first fire engine, a 5,000-pound Ronald steam pumper, arrived at Port Moody July 30, just over six weeks after the Great Fire. A four-horse team hauled it over miles of dusty roads via New Westminster to Vancouver, where it arrived August 1.

A new firehall was built this year, and a small library and reading room opened in it, Vancouver’s first public library in a city-owned building. It was started with a gift of books from merchant David Oppenheimer. And the first purpose-built city hall went up. That’s where the new jail went in, but the building also functioned as a public meeting place, a Sunday school, a concert hall, as well as a courthouse.

Fragments

The Oppenheimer family (food wholesaling) built a warehouse this year that today is home to Bryan Adams’ recording studio, the oldest brick building in the city. The Oppenheimer Group, thriving today, is the city’s oldest locally-based  company.

On May 15, 1886 Lauchlan Hamilton began to survey what would become Granville Street, named for the Colonial Secretary of the time. One of the most interesting artifacts in the City of Vancouver archives is a collection of the little field survey booklets that Hamilton and his staff kept as he laid out the downtown. It’s fascinating to leaf through those brittle, yellowing pages and see the pencilled notes and drawings made more than 90 years ago as the surveyors decide to cut a “Granville Street” through here and a “Nelson Street” through there.

Hamilton, by the way, was also responsible for the design this year of the city’s first coat of arms. It depicted things that were the lifeblood of the city at that time: a sailing ship, a tree, wooden docks and a train. It would be replaced in 1903 by an early version of the present arms, but that retained Hamilton’s suggested motto: By Sea and Land We Prosper.

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Chuck Davis is a Vancouver writer who has written, co-written, or edited 15 books. Most of them are on local history, and he describes his next book, The History of Metropolitan Vancouver, as the capstone of his career.