Collections - Township of Langley

salishan Place

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salishan Place by the River currently maintains a collection of over 9000 photographs, 2000 archival documents, 9000 objects, 500 works of art, and 300 oral history recordings. This collection, spanning hundreds of years, is a wonderful window on the past and present life of our community.

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File: '000222'

Object Description

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Object Name

Print, Photographic

Object ID

0222

Title

Fort Langley (village) business district and surrounding area.

Date

[191-?].

Description

Fort Langley (village) business district and surrounding area, probably taken from the Mavis property where the Fort's parking lot now is. St.George's Anglican Church, the Hora Block, the old Fort Langley Community Hall, Illahie, the Drummond house, the Coulter house, the Coulter & Berry store, and Reid's Blacksmith shop can be seen.

Photo Inscription/Caption

Inscription in ink.

People/Subject

Coulter & Berry Store

See Also: Berry, John Walter ; Coulter, David Moss
Term Source: HPC Records (CHURC-18/133)

Coulter House

David Moss Coulter was born in 1862 in Perth County, Ontario. He married Elizabeth "Lizzie" Burton in 1885. She was born in 1865. The Coulters had six children. In 1897, David Coulter went west to Fort Langley and bought a store. Lizzie Coulter came out later that year with her four young children, by rail. The family lived behind the store, on the south-east corner of Glover Road and Mavis Street, before building this house to the south of the store on Glover Road in about 1898.

Drummond House

Located in Fort Langley - roughly where Frontier Hardware now stands (2005). James Morton Drummond came to the HBC shop in the village in July of 1887. A younger man with a good mind, Drummond was to see how it ran and make improvements. Around the time of his arrival in the summer of 1887, or early the following year in preparation for marriage, Drummond built (or had built) this house. He married Ida Emma Towle, daughter of local Commercial Hotel owners Wilson and Eliza Towle, on March 14, 1888. Drummond was also the postmaster. Drummond resigned from the HBC in March 1892. In the directory of this year, he is listed as the Justice of the Peace and the Treasurer of the Municipal Council, and in 1895 was the Graveyard Commissioner for what is now the Fort Langley Cemetery. His wife Emma was the postmaster for a short time during 1896, after which time the Drummond family seems to have left Langley. Where they went is unclear.
In 1897 David Moss Coulter came to Langley and sent for friend John Berry. The men opened a store in Murrayville and Fort Langley, in the old HBC store. While Berry manned the Murrayville store, Coulter ran the store in the village. The Coulter family joined David in Langley, and they all lived in the back of the old HBC store for a few months until the new Coulter & Berry store was built on the corner of Mavis and Glover, at the site of the current IGA store. At this point, the family moved into the Drummond house and lived there for two years, until their family house just north of the Drummond House was completed. The Coulter family would have moved out of the Drummond house in approximately 1899. This was roughly when the Wilkie family moved in. It is believed that Henry and his wife Catherine lived in the Drummond house in about 1899 or so, when the Coulters moved out, as that is where they appear to be in the 1901 census, living with their grandson, Henry Holding.
Henry Wilkie died in 1905, but it seems that his son Walter Wilkie lived in the house with his wife and children after his marriage the same year to Louisa Anne Edwards, as Agatha Vera Primrose (nee Coulter) remembered the Wilkies being neighbours for a time as she would play with Walter Wilkie's children.
Longtime local resident Alf Trattle also remembered the Wilkie's living in the Drummond house, but remembers the Plaxton's living there for a time, too. Robert Plaxton arrived in Fort Langley with his family in 1886. He was a school teacher, and the family spent time living in Fort Langley and in Langley Prairie. Plaxton's daughter, Elsie Wark, remembered that after her father passed away in 1913, her mother Nancy rented the old Drummond house.
Who lived in the house during the 1920s and 1930s is unclear, but some remember members of Henry West's family residing here later, in about the 1940s.
After the Wests, the Czorny family lived in the Drummond house. Not much is known about this family, but they would have lived there in roughly the 1950s and/or the early 1960s. A long-time resident remembered this family, and believed that the house was torn down after this family moved away.
Although the exact age of the current building at 9202 Glover Road is unknown, it is believed to have been built sometime between 1956 and 1962. The location was used as a building supply store before the Dyck family started running the business as Frontier Building Supplies in December 1971. Frontier Building Supplies closed in May 2011.

Fort Langley (village)

Fort Langley Community Hall

This location was the site of the first town hall, although it was closer to the north-east corner of the lot, near the Fort Grocery. In 1924 the Fort Langley Women's Institute, led by the second Mrs. Hector Morrison, started the Fort Langley Community Improvement Society with the idea of building a new town hall. In 1925 the old town hall grounds are purchased from the municipality for $137.13, the amount of the tax bill still owing.
Although the Fort Langley Community Improvement Association had been primarily founded in 1924 by the second Mrs. Hector Morrison (nee Hadden), George Young became a very active influential member as well. Archibald Campbell Hope, architect brother of local Charles Edward Hope, was commissioned to plan the new hall. Construction on the building did not begin until 1930. On March 6, 1931, the formal opening and Inaugural Dance was held, and that same year maple trees were planted by members of the board, those along the north by the women and along the south by the men, and the cherry trees were later donated by another supporter. Originally the hall was painted dark brown.
The Community Hall became a designated Heritage site September 10, 1979.

Hora Block

Wilfred Robert Hora was born in about 1856. He was a local farmer and businessman. He had the Hora Block built on the corner of Glover Road and Mary Street in Fort Langley in about 1909-1910. It was a large two-storey building, so Hora had space to sell advertising on the side. Besides himself, some advertised on the side of the building (as seen in photo #550) include the "Fort Langley Bakery," "P. B. Primrose Photographer," "George H. Medd General Blacksmith" and "Builder W. H. Brown Contractor." Hora died on February 20, 1923 in Vancouver.

Illahie (Hope Estate Home)

Name of the home of Lily Dawson (nee Mavis) and Charles E. Hope on 96th Avenue in Fort Langley, located where the McBride Station complex now stands. It was built around 1910 and burned down on May 1, 1928, with a loss estimated to be $15,000. According to a newspaper clipping from The Province on 3 May, 1928, the fire was first discovered on the roof of the residence, with a strong wind spreading the flames quickly. Some furniture on the lower floor was saved. Sparks threatened the village of Fort Langley for a time, and a boxcar on the Canadian National Railway siding caught fire but was put out quickly (the CN Station was originally located further to the west, north of the house). The Hopes did not rebuild.

Landscapes

Reid's Blacksmith Shop/Garage

Charles Reid emigrated to Canada in 1908. Two years later he settled in Fort Langley and took over Medd's blacksmith shop. Later, he became one of the first machinist shop operators in the area. A fire destroyed the blacksmith shop in 1922, and the new one was built, which increasingly acted as a garage, not a blacksmith shop. Charles was the first chief of the Fort Langley Volunteer Fire Department, a charter member of the Fort Langley Community Improvement Association and an early member of the Board of Trade. Charles married a pioneer Fort Langley girl, Olive Carter, and raised a family of three children, including son Don and daughter Helen Gardner (husband Bill). He was in the business for 60 years; he saw it change from horse shoeing and wagon repairs to motor mechanics and heavy equipment repairs. Son Don took over the business from him, but it believed to have closed down in the 1990s. Later, the garage was used to store canoes for the Fort Langley Canoe Club.
See Also: Reid, Charles
Term Source: HPC Record (HPC-273/1069)

Saint George's (St. George's) Anglican Church

(Now at 9160 Church Street). The Hudson's Bay Company sold the south-west section of their Fort Langley property to Alexander Mavis in the 1880s. The local cemetery, where many early settlers and HBC employees were laid to rest, was included in this sale. Mavis erected a fence around the cemetery to keep wandering cattle from grazing amongst the gravestones. He later subdivided his farm and sold the cemetery with adjacent land to the Anglican Parish for $50. In October 1901, St. George's Anglican, a small Carpenter Gothic Revival style church, opened on the site to serve the surrounding communities (including Milner, Glen Valley and Langley). It was built by Duncan Buie, with BC Mills providing the building supplies and the Coulter & Berry General Store supplying the hardware. The original windows were all single-hung sash with plate glass. The total cost for building St. George's, including the land and some furnishings, came to $744.40. A local craftsman by the name of Joe Sailes created the lectern and other fixtures. A striking iron cross is mounted over the front door and details the artistic aspect of the blacksmith's craft. It is thought to be a marker once gracing the grave of a Hawaiian (Kanaka) HBC employee. 1912 saw the Chancel enlarged and the installation of the stained glass window over the altar. A small bell tower was added in 1914 and rebuilt in 1982. The bell is purported to have come from the estate of Port Kells' Carl von Mackensen, a German loyalist interned during WWI. Billy Brown donated new front doors to St. George's in 1935 (after finding they were the wrong size for the church that originally commissioned them). A hall with full basement was constructed at the rear of the church in the late 1940s to facilitate growing social functions. Memorial gifts (often stained glass) add to the church's interior decoration.
See Also: Pioneer Cemetery
Term Source: Langley's Heritage

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