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This page last modified January 3, 2020

© Michael Kluckner


First view of the "inn", with the corrugated-iron roofing on the dormer curled and bent by windstorms

Written/painted in 2001: The most important threatened building on Saltspring Island has to be "Travellers' Rest," the 1865 former home of market gardener and innkeeper Joseph Akerman Sr. It is the oldest building on Saltspring and, indeed, the oldest on any of the Gulf Islands; there are only a handful of older buildings extant elsewhere in British Columbia. Built of hand-hewn squared timbers, the house was covered in shingles in the 1920s and was operated for many years as a store and as "Travellers' Rest," the first inn on Salt Spring Island. After a half-century of ownership outside of the family, Akerman descendants repurchased the property in 1974 and continue to own it. Its condition is nothing less than a scandal. The official 1987 publication of historic buildings of the Gulf Islands, Island Heritage Buildings (Islands Trust), noted that it was "presently unoccupied and becoming somewhat overgrown, but is still structurally sound and continues to have good potential for restoration." Fifteen years later, the house has become nothing more than a pergola for an enormous tangle of blackberry bushes and ivies. It was hard to find a view of the house that did it any sort of justice due to the jungle-like tangle of vines, and it is hard to imagine that the building will survive for long. This is a job for an island Heritage Council or local government--unfortunately, according to architect Jonathan Yardley, there appears to be little official interest in island heritage, period.

Update December, 2003: according to the Heritage Society of BC newsletter (Fall 2003, p. 13), the Travellers' Rest has been demolished, and the owner will build a new house on the site.

Note from an anonymous person, 2010: The house is definitely gone and a bungalow-type house was built in its place. 
 
There are rumours that saving old buildings on Saltspring is just not very important to most people, although I don't know why. Apparently a lot of old places were even used as fire practice, what a shame!
 
The old creamery is up for sale again.

***

I was most attracted to the area around Fulford Harbour and the Burgoyne Valley, the locale of the old inn pictured above. It is the most open and pastoral landscape on the entire Gulf Islands – in my opinion, the least afflicted by the "can't see the forest for the trees" landscape of many of the smaller islands, which are perhaps best experienced from a boat or kayak just offshore. The steep, rocky shoreline painted in the watercolour from the Fulford Harbour dock is typical--picturesque building sites, but difficult access to the water itself.

This (2001) was my first trip to Saltspring Island in more than 20 years, and although the island has changed considerably, not least in the number of people who live there, a visit to it is as much a trip through time as it is through a landscape. That is, it's a trip back to the 1970s. Whereas the town of Ganges has become modern, bustling and unattractive (rather like Sechelt on the Sunshine Coast), the village of Fulford Harbour is caught in a wonderful time warp of little stores selling organic muffins and cups of herbal tea, emporia of colourful headbands and shawls, with rusty, beaten-up Volkswagen buses providing a noisy chorus in the background.


Aficionados of Volkswagen buses (see the unpublishable book Van Ordinaire on this site) seek out the pre-1968 split-window microbuses; in fact, most of those have been bought up and restored by collectors, often affluent 20-somethings who view them as a work of art or cult-car. On Saltspring, I only saw the less-fashionable, more-utilitarian post-68's, like the one I painted above near the dock at Fulford Harbour. I simply couldn't return from Saltspring without a VW bus painting. I swear most of them were running around with burnt exhaust valves or blown head-gaskets – prompting the fat, wheezing exhaust sound of a VW bus trying to climb a gentle hill.

Note from Joe Clarke, Saltspring Island, 2008: We've owned Vanishing Vancouver for many years and enjoy reminiscing as we browse the pages and the stories. It seems we have a somewhat serendipitous connection to your subject matter as we owned the silver grey Datsun station wagon depicted in the image of the house at Macdonald and 43rd ave...we bought it after we moved to Saltspring island in 76. At the time you depicted it (albeit coincidently at the roadside) we were visiting our friend who was living in the house. The Volksie bus you depicted much later in Fulford harbour in front of the Patterson house did then and still does belong to our eldest son Ben, who has semi-retired it at the moment.

Note from Gay Aikoff, 2007: Looking through your Saltspring paintings I found one of my farm and I thought you might like to know some of the history. The farm itself is usually know as the Old Shaw Farm and is now in four different pieces -all still farmed, three organically. - It was called "Roseneath" by the Shaws who spent 60 years there. The barn was built about 1905 -the building beside it with the metal roof is the original building and became the blacksmith's shop, the old milking shed with its always-cold running water from the spring where the milk from the whole valley was collected is no more but I plan to rebuild it on its original site.

The Barn was built in two sections - the central posts are whole cedar logs and the roof is all original shakes under the rusty corrugated iron. Later the side sections were added. It is all getting a bit shakey and the roof is held in place by logging cables stopping it from slipping outwards. The old milking stalls and some of the logging equipment is still there. Unfortunately it is a bit out of my league to rebuild it.

History: in 1910 the Shaw family came to the farm - they were Scottish and had been living in Nagasaki Japan. I believe they were on their return journey to Scotland and stopped to see one of their relations and, as with many of us Saltspring Islanders, never continued on their journey. There were four children who all grew up and stayed on the farm. The last one, Cree, died in 2001, in Greenwoods in Ganges, a couple of months after the farm came to me. Only one of the children was married, so they all stayed together until 1972 when they sold it to Gordon and Laura Cudmore (local islanders, Gordon's father had laid out the original plans for Fulford village.) and Gordon set out on building the runway along the back fields.

One of the first springs in the valley has its source in the forest above the back field and creates a stream that runs through the vegetable garden and the old Orchard and on into the church yard down to Fulford Harbour. There are only about 15 of the old original trees left - they produce a huge crop still - apparently 250 were pulled out of the farm fields to create a dairy after the apple industry declined with the rise of apples in the Okanagan. All over the island trees were pulled but there are still some that 'got away' probably now a hundred years old. Local organic farmers are putting back heritage apples and to some extent farming on Salt Spring has come full circle as more and more farms are farmed organically and with a dedication to create local produce on and for the island. In time I hope to be growing some of those vegetables though at present the farm is hayed (by the descendants of Jo Akeman - you painted his old house too.) and also I have about 30 different kinds of willow for basket making in incredible colours, ready to harvest this month.

The Shaws had a dairy - they were immensely generous people and gave the land for the Fulford Community Hall as well as leaving a large amount of money to rebuild Mahon Hall in Ganges.

 

The Anglican Church at Fulford Harbour: I have wanted to see this building ever since reading Barry Downs' Sacred Places, published in the early 1980s. According to the plaque in front, the land was donated for a cemetery by a farmer, John Sparrow, whose 19-year-old son was accidentally killed by pitlampers in 1889. Appropriately, then, the 1894 church has a wonderful churchyard, with moss growing over some of the graves and the grass blowing in the gentle breeze.

Ruckle Provincial Park

Written in 2001: Anybody who says there is no National Trust in Canada is not tuned in to the reality of how historic sites have been preserved. It has all been done with a mix of private and public initiatives although it indeed lacks the overall unifiying vision that National Trusts provide in England or Australia. Ruckle Park on Salt Spring Island – the old Ruckle farm – is a combination of restoration, contemporary recreational access and working farm that would be the pride of any National Trust in the world, and yet it is a park run by the B.C. Parks Service (not even by the B.C. Heritage branch, which manages some of the other historic sites in the province). Anyway, Ruckle Park provides a window onto an idyllic Gulf Islands history. Henry Ruckle preempted his first 160-acre parcel at Beaver Point in 1872, the year after British Columbia confederated with Canada, and built his home (below) about 1876. Other family members added their own homes to the property over the years, including the Norman Ruckle farmhouse, built in 1938, which I also painted. The entire Ruckle farm, then consisting of 1,196 acres, was bought by the provincial government in 1974 for the creation of Ruckle Provincial Park. The "tenancy for life" agreement which allows members of the family to continue to live in their homes and work the land is identical to the sort of agreements by which the National Trust in England acquired country homes and created a large part of the modern British tourist industry.





Painted in 2001: The Norman Ruckle house, with sheep grazing on the rich grass in an adjoining paddock. I thought this had to be the essential Salt Spring Island view, due to the sheep (island lamb is acclaimed in gourmet restaurants throughout southwestern B.C.) and the snake fence – adequate to contain livestock on an island that doesn't have predators like coyotes or cougars.

From Brenda Guiled, founder and chair, Friends of Ruckle Park Heritage, 2020:


[Brenda is the author of Ruckles' World: A History of South-East Salt Spring Island, available at http://www.friendsruckleparkheritage.ca/index.html. Here is a chapter from it about Adolphus Trage and the Fulford House painted above, which opens as a pdf or downloads, depending on your device..] From the above web link, you can read the latest Friends of Ruckle Park Heritage newsletter. We're working with BC Parks to get the 1876 Henry Ruckle house, which you depicted beautifully, open as an interpretive centre this spring, all going well. The best of it, from an arts perspective, is that a number of the Ruckles were artists, and I'd like very much to revive the farm as an arts hub, working from the 1876 house, where four Ruckle offspring grew up at 'artists in residence'. Below is an interpretive panel, to be finalized and installed in the next few months.



From Rumiko Kanesaka, 2017: I am a new immigrant from Japan living on Salt Spring Island for twenty some years. I am a member of the Japanese Garden Society of Salt Spring Island that founded in 2007 to create a space for unity and reconciliation. The Society recently received a grant to conduct a research on the historical charcoal pit kilns that were built by the early Japanese Canadian settlers on the Southern Gulf Islands. We just launched the project and the research has begun. You might have heard about historical charcoal kilns on the islands. We are hoping that by peeking through the little window of the charcoal pit kilns, this research will help us learn about the lives of early Japanese Canadian settlers in the Southern Gulf Islands. It is very hard to find anything related to the historical kilns though.

I am wondering if you happen to hear about charcoal kilns and/or charcoal making on Mayne Island in your correspondence with the people who contacted you.



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Artwork and text ©Michael Kluckner, 2001