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Page last updated April 13, 2008
The "oldest operating store in British Columbia," apparently established about 1861 in the early days of the Cariboo Road and the Gold Rush, burned down about two years ago. The Pavilion General Store stood beside the wagon road on the stretch between Lillooet and Clinton (now the highway goes from Lillooet through Marble Canyon to Hat Creek Ranch near Cache Creek). The store stood on the north side of the road, across the road from the PGE (BC Rail) tracks and the "Pavilion" siding, in a landscape opening out into grasslands and benches.
The store building was a 1920s or perhaps 1930s structure, which may have contained elements of an earlier roadhouse, most likely the fine old stone-faced fireplace. Interestingly, there is no historical information on the store in either the Lillooet Museum or the BC Archives, and it does not appear as an historic roadhouse in Branwen Patenaude's Trails to Gold (Horsdal & Schubart, 1995). Apparently, the claim that it was the oldest operating store is a bit of a canard--it was the successor to businesses started there in the early 1860s.
I went past the store in the fall of 1999 and stopped for an ice-cream. There were a number of people about and, as it was late in the afternoon and I wanted to get to Ashcroft that evening, I went on without stopping to paint it. So I was astonished to go again along the road in June of 2002, with every intention of stopping and painting, and to find only the chimney standing against the sky, with a rubble of rusted metal roofing, contorted by the heat of a fire, lying scattered about on the ground. I talked to a couple of people in the nearby Indian village of Pavilion, but they could add little detail to what was obviously a tragic accident. All that was left, other than the chimney, was a yellow rosebush blooming in the dusty wind and the gravel. I took cuttings for my wife, Christine Allen, to grow to add to our collection of rustled roses from historic places; she identified it as a rose known as Harison's Yellow (unfortunately the cutting died--rats).
The Pavilion Store in the late 1930s or 1940s. Photo courtesy of Lillooet Museum.
The store in 2000. Photo by Lesley Keith
Note from Bernard Schulmann: I thought I would let you know what happened to the store. In January 2000 the building had an electrical fire on a Saturday night. Shirley Alec was at work and heard some odd cracking noises in one of the walls. She went and looked around and saw nothing. She closed the store and went home. At about 11 pm the building was seen to be on fire, the Pavilion Band Fire Department came and tried to put the fire out. The first truck of water and foam was getting the fire under control, but it was not enough. Ronson Ned had to go back to get the truck refilled and by the time he got back the building was in full flame. It seems clear now that the 1920s wiring (with bakelite insulation) within the sawdust insulated walls had caused a short and a fire. Over the previous five years there had been several problems with wiring, but the cost of renovating was too high given the value of the property (the Regional District had not zoned the property commericial and therefore the building was not in conformity with the zoning and the site was officially not acceptable for highways due to the access to the highway).
Note from Catherine and Keith Quirke in New Zealand: My husband and I have found a suitcase of old letters one of which is possibly a cousin of my husband. She wrote a letter in 1974 saying she was a storekeeper at the Pavilion General Store. Unfortunately we only have a first name of Kathleen. Can you give us any possible leads to tracing this person?
Roy has a recent photo, July 2006, of the still-standing chimney at www.panoramio.com/photo/9157168
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This is the kind of image that approaches abstraction, yet it is so typical of the dry BC Interior and reminiscent of the roads from pioneering days: one bulldozer-blade wide, artfully switchbacking up a steep hill through the sagebrush and scattered pines. I pulled off to the side of the road in the canyon between Lillooet and Pavilion to paint it.
At a talk I gave at Crofton Manor, a retirement home in Vancouver, a man told me how in the early days of motoring there used to be a pile of cut trees at the bottom of the steep grade on the old road from Pavilion to Clinton, now a back road. Motorists would cut a tree at the top and tie it behind their car to act as a drag and save the brakes on the precipitous descent down the mountain.
There is a similar story in Mrs. B.T. Rogers' diary from July, 1899 (privately published in 1985 as M.I.Rogers 1869-1965, edited by me) that is worth repeating in its entirety. Mrs. Rogers, with her husband Benjamin (owner of the BC Sugar Refinery) and some fellow mining investors went from Vancouver to see a gold mine north of 150 Mile House.
"July 5: . . . Made a good trip to Ashcroft--sat on the rear from North Bend up, and saw Lytton and Spences Bridge by daylight. The B.C. Express Company sent [a stagecoach] to meet us, and we went up to the hotel, where we got plastered rooms--about 8 feet by 6 feet. Decided to go via Lillooet.
"6: Got up before 5, had a milk punch to sustain us and started off in our 4 horse coach--J. Gillies, driver. We drove through a fine canyon and made Hat Creek [the Hat Creek Ranch, now a B.C. government heritage attraction just north of Cache Creek] for breakfast and change of horses. An inebriated individual made the start rather lively. We drove along the Bonaparte River and Hat Creek, and then entered the Marble Canyon at the second lake, the one that is so magnificently blue. Our near leader [the left front horse], which had been roaring from the start, began to totter, and as we reached a stream, he fell in his tracks. With much exertion and the help of a bottle of whiskey, he staggered to his feet, and managed to get behind the stage, where he fell and died.Then they had to use more exertion to drag him into the bushes, where he would lie, until the Indian sent by the driver could burn him up, according to law. We reached Pavilion Mill (21 miles from Lillooet) rather late, very hungry, and Mrs. Cummings had not much of a lunch to give us. Here we got a couple of X horses and a couple of Indian ponies, who did splendidly. The road into Lillooet is grand but awful. The road is at the edge of a precipice, sheer down to the Frazer, and some of the hills were terrifying. We passed a place where a Chicago man is hydraulicking; near Lillooet, some Chinamen who rent the property from a N.W. Co. are very flourishing. They pay $350 rent and last year took out $13,000, besides raising fodder and vegetables, which they irrigate at night when not using the water in the flumes. Arrived Lillooet and went to the Pioneer, kept by Mrs. Allan, a funny old girl with a false front fastened to her net cap. She gave us a fine dinner--venison, peas and wild raspberries. Ben bought two bearskins, and Mr. Gerbracht one.
"7: Got up at 6, and started at 7--had to turn back for Ben's watch. Retraced our way to Pavilion Mill, walking up the steep hills. Had lunch and started off with a spiked team for Clinton. Taking a short cut up a hill, Mr. Gerbracht got lost, we halloed but got no answer, and after hunting an hour, we proceeded to Carson's Ranch, on Pavilion Mountain [the 26 Mile House, established in 1867], very anxious. Sent out two boys to hunt for him, and a spare pony. The youngster who followed the road found him, coming up with an Indian--he had been all the way down to the Frazer, to an Indian settlement, and paid the klootch $10 for a boy and a horse to go to Clinton. We had dinner at Carson's farm--fine butter--and got a fourth horse. The road to Clinton goes over the mountain. We ascended to 4,850 feet, and then in 3 miles dropped to 3,500--it was awful, the sharp turns terrible. We had two trees behind to save the wheels and brake. Long before we arrived it was quite dark. Got into Clinton at 10:30, put up at the Dominion."
Branwen Patenaude, in Trails to Gold (Horsdal & Schubart, 1995, page 78) describes this route as G.B. Wright's Road, constructed in 1862. "Just why G.B. Wright chose such a difficult route for this road has always been a subject for conjecture. A much easier grade would have been the route followed many years later by the Pacific Great Eastern Railway [now B.C. Rail] from west of Pavilion Mountain, north to Kelly Lake and east to Clinton."
Can anybody who remembers the early days of motoring here confirm the story of the trees at the bottom of the hill and tell me exactly where that was?
