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This page last updated August 30, 2007
Note from Ellen M Torng (Na x No k Ksim Tsimilk): we would like inform you of the Walhachin Centennial Festival scheduled for Aug 1, 2, 3, & 4 2008. If you have any artifacts or photos relating to Walhachin that we could use in our display, please get in touch.
Val Carey in Walhachin (250 457-6678) is trying to contact people interested in Walhachin's history and its old buildings to create a support group for the community. She is concerned with the gradual erosion of its historic quality and the unsympathetic renovation and demolition of the remaining pre-World War One houses, of which there are apparently only nine left. Please telephone her or email me and I'll pass the message along.
Note from Jodi-Anne Anderson (née Crosthwaite): My name is Jodi-Anne, and my family onced lived in Walhachin. I was looking at some of the pictures that you have added onto the site, I believe that the house marked on the bottom as "a view from the bungalow", the second picture from the right, was our old house. I could be wrong, but I remember that it was a two story house, with an unfinished attic upstairs that we kids got to sleep in. I was just a little girl, about 9 - 12 years of age, so of course my memory is faulty as most small children's memories are.
I remember that it had an old wood stove to cook on (how I miss that thing), an old claw foot tub in the bathroom. My mom would heat water on the stove on a big old pot and the boys would carry it down to the tub. I always wanted to be the first child to have the bath cause, you not only got hot water, but it was clean!
When five kids are bathing in one water run, it got dirty very quickly.
I know we had a chicken coop in the back yard, and a place to keep horses. I was bucked off one of ours and fell into the cactus patch, and wound up in the hospital in Ashcroft with appendicitis. The house seemed humongeous to me, but probably wasn't as we all but mom and dad and I think Jenny slept upstairs. My husband and I are planning to take a trip to all my old "wierd places the Crosthwaite's lived" tour, hopefully next year.
I really want to see the old place, and am hoping to find it still there. I really loved that house!
PS. My parents are Lawrence and Sheila, who have recently taken up residence in Limerick SK, they maybe able to help you more with some history of the town.Note from Gillian Rodie, Nova Scotia: It has always been told in our family that my husband's grandparents, Edward and Edith Windsor, went to Walhachin to set up fruit farming. They were talked into it by someone in England. They married in Shropshire in 1910 and apparently emigrated to Canada and Walhachin. From then on we know little except that they lost all their money and in October, 1912 were in Port Alberni where their first child was born. Life was extremely difficult as they had lost everything and in January of 1915 their second son was born in Vancouver. In May of 1915 Edward Windsor died of heart disease leaving his widow and two babies. So far I have been unable to find any proof of this story or any records of their stay in Walhachin. I am wondering if you might have any advice on how to find these records. Hoping to hear if you have any suggestions. Note from Theresa Kishkan: I have the Walhachin census information, 1910, and the Windsor name doesn't occur on it.
Note from Chris Green: I live in Savona and accidentally found your site with the pictures of the Thompson River/ Walhachin area. I was delighted to recognize many of the buildings in the interior you've chosen to record, and to see my friends Val Carey, and the Gorings, mentioned.. One of my brothers wrote a play, a musical-, or film-script about Walhachin some years ago, but so far nothing has been done with it. I'll point out your site to him. The one person who greatly sticks in my mind from the pre-WW1 era, is one Gordon Flowerdew. When the war started, he helped organize a mounted horse tropp and eventually joined the fighting in Europe. In Poland, he led a mounted charge against an enemy machine gun nest, perhaps the last person from the British Empire to do so (The Polish Cavalry did something this in WW2, attacking the Germans--perhaps German tanks (?).)
The water system in Walhachin has recently been given a much needed upgrade, with a big new well being drilled, after the town ran out of water during the summer of fires up our way. That, along with the relatively low property prices, might leadd to a small increase in the housing in the town. The old orchard properties accross the river are also being developed as 5 or 10-acre hobby farm parcels (with some real, if small, market gardens actually providing the owners with a good living), but they're nick-named "Sandblast Flats" for a good reason, as I learned when I did some construction there last summer.
Note from Melody Thacker: It's a bit hard to tell but I believe my Grandfather owned and lived in the "Manager's house" for some time up to the early 1960's. At any rate most of my family lived in Walhachin. My Grandfather was Harry Ferguson he owned the Walhachin ranch along with 3 of his sons, Henry, Harold and Bill. My Aunt Babe also live in Walhachin and my parents owned Thacker's Store and ran the post office there. In the old days (before I came along) Walhachin held the best dances in the area, the hall has a fantastic floor for dancing, it's on springs I think? I know there is something special about it! We moved to Savona about 1964 as did my Aunt and Grandfather around the same time. (I was too young to remember the exact date!) My Mother truly loved Walhachin and all its history, some of the fondness has rubbed off on me I suppose. I remember visiting an elderly lady in a stone house and thought it was most fascinating as a child.
Note from Janet Clarke, N. Ireland: my father in law, Richard Clarke, was born in Walhachin around 1920 (?). His father, Jack Clarke, was one of the fruit farmers who came out from England before 1st world war. We have the family photo albums which give a good glimpse into life in Walhachin at that time. Go to Clarke photo album.
From the viewpoint along the TransCanada highway, the view across the sagebrush-studded, arid landscape along the Thompson River towards Walhachin, which sits on the small bench in front of what look like two pyramids in the left distance--in fact, it's a single hillside that has been mined out for gravel. Modern pumps have no trouble supplying water to irrigate the alfalfa field occupying the former orchard land that was the raison d'etre for the community. It was a late September afternoon, about 4 o'clock, the low sun shading the hillsides into soft hollows like a woman's.
Walhachin in 1910 (photographer unknown; this is a composite of BC Archives photos D-8175 and D-8176). The Walhachin Hotel and the CPR station are long since demolished. I believe the building I've indicated was the Barnes bungalow (photo below)--i.e. the manager's house--which still exists.
The Footner bungalow as it appeared before renovations a generation ago. The front porch was screened, as was the sleeping porch above. The upstairs dormer had a hipped roof, now changed to a gable; the roof itself was covered in cedar shakes--there is now a separate rafter system with metal roofing over it. The"X" board detailing on the dormer, which has since been removed, appeared in a photo of the house in an unpublished research document by Edward Gibson, written for the Canada Council in 1976 and only surviving as a very poor photocopy in the Heritage Branch library in Victoria. I was interested to see that pattern of boarding on the bungalow called "Rose Cottage" ostensibly at Pankot in India in the Granada TV program "Jewel in the Ground."
Photograph about 1910, photographer unknown
Footner's houses reflected the colonial bungalow form that had evolved from indigenous Indian architecture and become the standard country house in England's hot-climate colonies, especially Australia. A high hipped roof (sometimes built as a true pyramid) provided a natural insulator to keep the main-floor rooms cool. Windows were set to catch views and breezes. Porches, sometimes open and wrapping around the house, other times screened, provided extra heat shelter. (The standard work on the subject is The Bungalow: the Production of a Global Culture, by Anthony King, Oxford University Press.)
"Guisachan House," built by Lord and Lady Aberdeen in Kelowna in 1891, is now restored and used as a restaurant. It is the purest example of a British colonial bungalow in B.C. Photograph from the Kelowna Centennial Museum collection, 12260, part of the Living Landscapes series on the web.
A CPR engine and the beginnings of the government bridge across the Thompson River
A farm tractor at Walhachin, and the completed government bridge
View from the bungalow. The people along the bottom are A.R. Willan, R. Chetwynd, O.K., J.C.C. and A.R. Willan
Along the bottom row, the people are C E B, K B, Col Flick, and R E P
Picnic at Twin Lakes
(There are also a few roadtrip pictures from this album at the Alex Bridge page and the Lillooet one.
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The house at Magner Street.
The house at Magner and Riverview Drive in Walhachin. It is one of the finest surviving houses in the village, at least in the sense of its classic pyramid roof and wraparound porch--essential elements of the Colonial Bungalow--as well as for its three brick chimneys (reduced to only 2 in 2004). The third chimney for a fireplace in what was obviously a recreation or billiards room indicates the house's original owners were different folk from typical BC settlers. The house stands on the edge of the village, looking out onto what is now a verdant alfalfa field, due to the technological advances in water pumping in the 90 years since the original colonists struggled to water their arid, almost infertile landscape. I painted the house from behind partly to capture its roofline, but also because it has been greatly altered, with doors, windows and walls moved. The current owners, Dave and Arlene Taylor, were kind enough to let me see the inside, and attempted to explain what the house was once like.
