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My interest in an old house on Vancouver Street began several years ago when I started research for a proposed biography of my three-times-great grandfather, Chief Factor John Work. Locating sites of various family houses on the 600-acre property he purchased when he moved to Victoria in 1852 was part of the project. One of the many B.C. Archives records I looked at early in my research was James Nesbitt’s 1948 article in his Old Homes and Families series for the Colonist weekend magazine. I was curious about one of the photos of the house, which Nesbitt said was once thought to be the original the Work home, “though it bears little resemblance to pictures of the original Work homestead.” He described the Vancouver Street house as “a big, roomy cottage, with high ceilings, a gracefully curved porch roof, floorboards four inches across, tiny fireplaces and large windows.” As I drove by on my way home I had no trouble identifying the house, in spite of many renovations, by the unique double flue chimney shown clearly in the photo. I took photos and noted the street address in my research file to look at another day. That day arrived May 1, 2007, when I drove by the house again. By a fortunate coincidence, two women were working in the garden of the house next door. I stopped to talk to them, explaining that I was writing about John Work and trying to find out if their neighbour’s house was where the Work family once lived. One of the friendly women asked if I’d ever seen the little door at the rear of the building that had no landing or steps leading to it. She then invited me around to her back garden to see the plain small door under the roofline leading nowhere. She also told me there was a little shed in another neighbour’s yard that had no indoor plumbing until the mid 1970s. I remembered a newspaper article from 1909 in my files titled “Old Time Victorian found dead in Shack – James Pottinger Discovered Lying on Floor of House on King’s Road.” It placed his shack near the corner of Graham Road. Through previous research I knew Pottinger was the son of John Work’s gardener and farm hand, William Pottinger. With this scrap of new information I felt I had to learn more about the house. It became my summer project, a break from writing. I went back to check more miscellaneous files on the Work family. The first item I found was a D.R. Harris Map of Victoria dated 1884 which showed the City Boundary Line and a cluster of eight buildings labelled “Hillside Farm” in the vicinity of Fourth Street (now Quadra Street) and Queens Avenue. When the map was published Kings Avenue ended at Fourth Street so I drew a dotted line extending the road to where the buildings would have been located in 2007. Next, I looked at my records from BC directories and saw that from 1892 to 1895 Mrs. J. Work (John’s widow Josette who died in 1896) lived at “‘Hillside’ at King’s Road beyond Fourth.” Was this the Vancouver Street house? My copy of John Work’s will showed that “Hillside” plus 200 acres of Section Four in Victoria District, including house, garden and farm buildings, were left to his wife. John’s son-in-law Roderick Finlayson plus two other family members were trustees for the Work estate until Finlayson’s death in 1892, when Edward Gawler Prior, another relative, took over as trustee. He was assisted by Arthur William Jones, a real estate and financial agent, a brother-in-law of Cecilia Josephine Work, as manager of property rentals and sales. When I searched the probate papers I found affidavits from Prior showing some lots and a six-acre section of property remained in the Work estate in 1892 . Ledger entries for rental properties and property sales also in the probate file indicate that “undisposed’ property described in the will was sold later. Also included with the probate papers were several invoices and receipts for the Work estate, which were later found to be significant clues in my search. After getting the current legal description of the house from the City of Victoria tax department, and some information from the Permit and Inspection department about when the house was built – their records listed 1912 as the date - I checked with the Victoria City Archives for online information at their helpful website which serves as a. guide for researchers. Then I visited the archives in person. Carey Pallister of the Archives staff brought out a 1903-1907 fire insurance map that showed a small triangle of a building near the corner of Kings Road and Vancouver Street, possibly the original home. She believed that the house shown beside this triangle might be the one I was investigating. This was another clue that it was built several years earlier than the building permit and inspection records showed. Next Carey brought out a 1907 map by T.N. Hibben that showed a subdivision plan of the area. She explained how the lots of the relevant block 33 were identified, and recommended that I go to the Land Titles office for further information on the plan. While at the Archives I also looked at city directories recording the occupants of the Vancouver Street house backwards in time until the address was no longer listed. Carey then directed me to the microfilmed City Land and Improvement Assessment Rolls for the relevant years. I don’t know why I first started to look at the year 1909, but I quickly found the record for Hillside farm, which read: Work Estate; Hillside Farm Block 33, 6.18 acres. Kings, Fifth and Bay, A.W. Jones in Trust. At this point I knew I was looking at the original Work home site area. I fast-forwarded the microfilm for the 1910 entry for Block 33, Hillside Farm, and found that the original 6.18 acres had been subdivided into 35 lots, 50’ by 117’. All lots were assessed at $400, but only lots 18, 19 and 20 showed amounts in the Improvements column indicating buildings. Lot 18, with improvements at only $200, might have been the shack, while 19 and 20 at $1000 worth of improvements each suggested houses. By May 17 I was so curious about the house that I phoned one of the tenants explaining my search. She was also interested in the history of the house where she felt a sense of peace. She told me that repair work after a water leak in the kitchen ceiling revealed two false ceilings. She also told me about a room they called the long room. When I explained that my research was about the Honourable John Work who was the largest landowner in Victoria at his death in December, 1861, she invited me to come to see the house. My dream come true! Stuart Stark, an authority on heritage architecture and restoration, agreed to accompany me on a visit to the house on May 19. I brought a large bouquet of flowers for the lady of the house and a binder full of research notes for Stuart. He agreed that the Vancouver Street house we were looking at was not the original Work family home but was nevertheless historically important because it was indeed on John Work's Hillside Farm. He first remarked on the exterior of the building, which had a characteristic symmetrical 1860s shape and roof pitch. The chimneys were double-flued, but had a split opening between the flues, another characteristic of 1860s chimneys. Inside, he commented on the 'long room' which would have originally been the central hallway leading the length of the house from front door to back door. Other items of interest were the wide floorboards visible from the basement between the joists above, the little door at the roof line and the outside plumbing stack. An area of old wallpaper in the attic, described as being marbleized, correlated to other marbleized wallpapers in Victoria in the 1860s.
Checking back to the Probate file in my binder I read the invoice dated January 3, 1893, from Weiler Bros. for “Papering House.” (Weiler Brothers store was a top-of-the-line furniture store in the 1890s.) Meantime, back at the city archives, May 23: I tried to follow up on another invoice in the John Work probate file regarding “laying water pipes &c at Hillside, $67.47” from Waller & Downer, but found nothing in the records which started in 1892. The Plumbing/Sewer application could have been submitted the previous year. By now, I was puzzled by conflicting pieces of information. For instance: A B.C. Archives photograph was identified as Work residence, with a suggested date in the 1880s. During another visit to BC Archives I asked to see the original photo of the Work farmhouse. It was only 3 x 4 inches, but writing on the back identified it as Residence, John Work, Hillside Farm. It was donated by J. W. Tolmie. Another clue! J.W. Tolmie was John Work Tolmie, a grandson of John and Josette whose daughter Jane married William Fraser Tolmie. Next day I checked B.C. Archives online photos for a larger image. Mrs. Work was wearing widow’s clothes, so I knew it was taken sometime after John died in 1861. I checked my Tolmie records and found that May Fraser Tolmie and Jane Work Tolmie were born in 1860 and 1862. Could these be the two little girls in the photo? I estimated the girls’ ages by their heights and concluded they were about five or six years old. If this was correct the photograph would have been taken around 1868, not in the 1880s as suggested on the BC archives website. So the Vancouver Street house was certainly not the original Hillside farmhouse. But how did Josette come to be living there, as confirmed by the 1891 Census which describes the house as a wood building, one floor with eight rooms, Persons living with Mrs. Work: Ling, Chinaman, servant, single, 99 years old: James Portinger [sic] 46 years old, gardener, and Margaret Sinclair, female servant age 23 years old, single. Then, as I went back through a file of miscellaneous material, I read an excerpt from Alexander Caulfield Anderson’s manuscript, History of the Northwest Coast, compiled for the historian Hubert Howe Bancroft in 1878. Here was the missing clue to the puzzle: “A spacious log residence in which the [Work] family lived until a few years ago still stands in a good state of preservation and is the oldest structure of its kind on the Island of Vancouver. The family are justly proud of this old relic of a past year, and its preservation is in accordance with an expressed desire of the deceased gentleman. A modern dwelling has since his death been constructed on a site only a few yards distant from the old mansion.” So the house was never a farmhand’s dwelling, as I once thought, but rather the home of Josette, widow of one of the major figures in early British Columbia history, until her death in 1896.
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