Pioneer Churches of Vancouver Island and the Salish Sea: An Explorer's Guide

By Liz Bryan

A concise, full-colour visitor’s guide to dozens of historical churches scattered throughout Vancouver Island, from humble country chapels to soaring urban cathedrals.

For many European settlers who arrived on Vancouver Island in the late nineteenth century, building a church was as important as establishing a homestead or erecting a school. The church was the heart of the community. Today, although demographics have shifted and church attendance has waned, many of those early structures are still standing.

Pioneer Churches of Vancouver Island and the Salish Sea features more than forty surviving churches whose construction dates back to the 1800s. It explores the architecture; the local history of the area; and the stories of the builders, worshippers, clergy members, those who are buried in the adjoining graveyards. Divided into geographical sections—Victoria, Esquimalt and the Saanich Peninsula, the Cowichan Valley, Salt Spring Island, Central Vancouver Island, and the North Island—this book is a beautifully photographed, easy-to-follow guide for anyone interested in exploring these architectural treasures and learning more about the history surrounding them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Heritage House
• Release date: Jun 23, 2020
• ISBN: 9781772033069

Liz Bryan

Liz Bryan is a journalist, author, photographer, and co-founder of Western Living magazine. Bryan has written several books, including Pioneer Churches of Vancouver Island and the Salish Sea: An Explorer’s Guide (which was a finalist for the Lieutenant Governor's Historical Writing Competition), River of Dreams: A Journey through Milk River Country, and Stone by Stone: Exploring Ancient Sites on the Canadian Plains.

Book preview

An Explorer’s Guide

Pioneer Churches

of Vancouver Island and the Salish Sea

Liz Bryan

Heritage House logo

Table of Contents

Preface

Adding to Your Reading Pleasure: A Note from the Publisher

Victoria, Esquimalt, and Metchosin

Christ Church Cathedral (1892)

The Church of Our Lord (1874)

St. John the Divine Anglican Church (1860) (1912)

The Chapel at St. Ann’s (1858)

Sisters of St. Ann, Log Cabin Chapel (1853)

St. Andrew’s Cathedral (1892)

St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church (1890)

James Bay United Church (1891)

St. Peter and St. Paul’s Anglican Church (1866)

Royal Naval Chapel (1868)

Church of St. Mary the Virgin (1873)

The Saanich Peninsula

St. Luke Cedar Hill Anglican Church (1886)

St. Michael and All Angels Anglican Church (1883)

Our Lady of the Assumption (1894)

St. Stephen’s Anglican Church (1862)

Holy Trinity Anglican Church (1884)

Old (and New) St. Mary’s Church (1893) (1987)

Central Saanich United Church (Shady Creek Church) (1895)

The Cowichan Valley

St. Francis Xavier (1887)

The Ghostly Butter Church (1870)

St. Ann’s Catholic Church (1880) (1902)

St. Peters (Quamichan) Anglican Church (1876)

St. Mary’s Graveyard (1875)

St. John the Baptist Anglican Church (1905)

St. Michael and All Angels (1891)

First United Church (1888)

St. Philip’s Anglican Church (1891) (1908)

Salt Spring Island

St. Mark’s Anglican Church (1891)

Salt Spring United Church (1899 or 1952)

Burgoyne United Church (1887)

St. Mary’s Anglican Church (1894)

St. Paul’s Catholic Church (1880)

Nanaimo and the North

St. Paul’s Anglican Church (1862)

St. Andrew’s United Church (1893)

St. Peter’s Catholic Church (1894) (1960)

St. Anne and St. Edmund Anglican Church (1894)

Union Bay Mission United Church (1906)

Cumberland United Church (1888) (1895)

Cumberland Community Church (1889)

St. Andrew’s Anglican Church (1877)

St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church (1887)

St. Peter’s Anglican Church (1893) (2017)

St. Pius Catholic Church (1890) (1956)

St. Olaf’s Anglican Church (1898) (1937)

Christ Church (1892)

Glossary of Church and Architectural Terms

Acknowledgements

Suggested Reading

About the Author

Image Locations

A tall stone angel in a graveyard. Tucked under the angel's arm is a bundle of bright red flowers.A map of Vancouver Island with dots added for each church covered in the book.

Pioneer churches of the Comox Valley and north Vancouver Island.

A close up of Vancouver Island from Victoria to Nanaimo with dots added for each church covered in the book.

Southern Vancouver Island from the Greater Victoria Area and Salt Spring Island to Nanaimo.

Note: Maps of the individual regions appear at the beginning of each section.

Preface

It was in the dry grasslands of the Southern Interior of BC, very far from Vancouver Island, that this book had its begin- nings. Tragedy struck in the small community of Nicola, very close to where the photo above was taken. Murray United Church, built by pioneers in 1875, the oldest building in the area, was deliberately burned to the ground. Everything inside and out was gone—the organ, the pews, the pulpit, the old hymnbooks. It was a terrible loss that affected the whole community.

I had often driven by it on my journeys to the Interior and had always stopped to take a photo. I’m glad I did, for the only things left now are the gravestones in the tiny churchyard. What was lost was not merely a building: gone were the stories and memories of the pioneers who had built it, were baptized and married in it, and were buried beside it. It was a central part of their lives. Lost was something of the spirit of the times.

Churches across British Columbia today seem to be in a state of uncertainty. Congregations are shrinking, and some of the buildings themselves—the enshrinements of Christian beliefs and traditions—are being closed, sold, rented out, and even demolished. Some have been lost to fire. I began to fear that more would soon be gone, and with them, much of BC’s history. I wrote this book to draw attention to their fragility and the pioneer memories they hold.

This is a guide to most of the churches of Vancouver Island and Salt Spring Island that were planned or built in the latter part of the nineteenth century and are still in use today. Many are small and made of wood, built by pioneers with their own hands and funded from their own poor pockets. Although some financial aid and impetus came from the church hierarchies in Europe, Eastern Canada, and America, the main motivation was a grassroots one: the settlers needed churches, so they built them, like the ones in the rural villages most of them came from—not only so they could worship, but also so they could have a centre of focus, a heart, for their communities.

The nineteenth-century churches of British Columbia are impor-tant historical landmarks that identify the early settlements and the beliefs and traditions pioneers brought with them. They are all worth study: for their architecture; for their graveyards, keeping watch over generations of pioneers; for the church fittings and fixtures, many of them antique; and for the redolence of more than a hundred years of prayer, worship, and exultation they all contain. The stories of the men and women who built them and of the clergy who served in them add to the grand history of the early years of settlement in the bleak and often raw-edged colonial lands the pioneers were eager to make home.

I acknowledge the fact that in the nineteenth century and part of the twentieth, the institutions of all Christian churches attempted to impose their beliefs on the Indigenous Peoples of BC, people who had their own strong spiritual traditions. This conflict, yet to be fully resolved and accounted for, is one sad result of colonization and its mission to make others exactly like ourselves. This book does not attempt to explore the effects of European missionaries but instead focuses on the work of early Christian pioneers who needed no conversion and arrived with a simple desire to practise their own religion in the new communities they founded.

Adding to Your Reading Pleasure: A Note from the Publisher

In her research and pictorial documentation of the churches included in this book, author and photographer Liz Bryan has visited each church and interviewed many clergy and historians. The images depict both exterior environs and perspectives of interest in the interiors. Each church is unique and worthy of a personal visit, although a few are challenging to reach.

The addresses of all churches, where possible, have been included to assist drivers who have navigation systems in their vehicle or use a digital device. Websites are also included for each church, where available, and it is recommended to check these to confirm current conditions and times when each church might be open for viewing.

In addition to enjoying the photographs within, we highly recommend visiting accessible archive websites that feature historic images of the forty-six churches documented in this book. Key websites include:

The City of Victoria Archives photo collection victoria.ca/EN/main/residents/archives/photographs.html

The Royal BC Museum and Archives search-bcarchives.royalbcmuseum.bc.ca/

Some of the churches have additional historic literature on-site and knowledgeable attendants willing to share anecdotal stories about church lore and personalities. All have donation boxes where you can assist with the maintenance of the structures.

A small white church with wooden panelling in a dry grassy field. There's a couple graves in the foreground of the photo. In the distant background, there are rolling hills covered in trees.

Murray United Church.

Victoria, Esquimalt, and Metchosin

This book begins with Victoria. Apart from the short-lived Spanish settlement at Nootka in the eighteenth century, Victoria was the very first place on Vancouver Island to be visited by priests, and the first chapels, churches, and cathedrals were built here. This fact alone gives it priority. It is also the main point of arrival for tourists who come to visit the Island. The churches of Esquimalt and Metchosin are also included in this chapter, since they are readily reached from downtown Victoria.

Victoria’s history—and its church history—began when James Douglas of the Hudson’s Bay Company arrived in March 1843 to scout out a site for a new trading post. Travelling with him on the little ship Beaver was Father Jean-Baptiste Bolduc, a Jesuit priest from Quebec. On the shores of Cadboro Bay, the ship’s crew helped him put together a tiny chapel made of fir boughs and canvas, and it was here that he held Victoria’s first Catholic mass for the sailors, watched by a group from the Songhees Nation. The first Anglican services were given inside the fortified walls of the new Fort Victoria by the HBC chaplain Robert Staines in 1849. He was joined soon afterward by Oblate missionary Honoré Lampfrit. Both men were accommodated in the fort and both started a school. (This early history will seem like a game of leapfrog as Protestants and Catholics settled in.)

After several months, Lampfrit cobbled together a little house and chapel of wood and clay a short distance outside the fort gate. And it was here in 1852 that Bishop Modeste Demers, the first appointed Catholic bishop of Vancouver Island, arrived from Oregon County to take up his charge. He wrote, Today I take possession of my See. I have no clergy, no home, no cathedral. The lumber for the cathedral is still in the trees in the forest. But he did have a church bell, which he blessed.

Six years later, after a successful campaign in Eastern Canada for more clerics and more funding, Demers was able to build the first small Catholic cathedral of St. Andrews. By then, the Anglicans had a rather stylish frame church (with a steeple) that the first Anglican bishop, George Hills, later consecrated as Christ Church Cathedral. St. John the Divine, the prefabricated Iron Church whose parts were shipped out from England, was put up in 1860, followed by the Church of Our Lord in 1874. By then, there were Methodists, Presbyterians, and others, all vying for space on Victoria’s streets.

In retrospect, it seems to have been a feverish time for church construction. But it was a feverish time for the city itself, aching with growing pains brought on by the great BC gold rush. Today, two magnificent cathedrals anchor a network of early city churches, all with their own architectural personalities and their own unique histories, artifacts, and stories to tell. They are tightly clustered in Victoria’s central core and within walking distance of each other. The churches of Esquimalt and Metchosin will need a separate day’s journey but are easily reached from the city core.

A close-up map of the churches in Victoria.

The churches of Victoria and Esquimalt and Metchosin.

Christ Church Cathedral (1892)

930 Burdett Avenue, Victoria

[phone]

christchurchcathedral.bc.ca

Christ Church Cathedral would not look amiss in a European cathedral city. This massive block of twin-towered masonry overlooking Victoria’s downtown reflects the Gothic architecture of the thirteenth century, with the arrow slits and turrets of a fortified castle and a yawning, recessed arch above the entrance that shades a huge, traditional rose window. Fortunately, visitors can stand far enough back to take in its magnificent facade: it sits at a convenient T-junction, at Quadra and Courtney Streets, with a small park across the way. Side views are also easy, since it is surrounded by green space and trees, with the pioneer graveyard on one side and a large lawn with a labyrinth on the other. A walk around the cathedral will give a good idea of just how beautiful a building it is. Its stone facade ranges in colour from grey on rainy days to warm honey-gold when the sun shines.

The current building was not the first cathedral; its history goes back to the early days of Fort Victoria. It started out as a Hudson’s Bay Company church, built in 1856 with the encouragement of the fort chaplain, Edward Cridge, who became its first rector. The church was extended in 1862 and again three years later. By 1865, familiarly known as Christ Church, it was a fairly substantial building, measuring thirty by fifteen metres, with a tall bell tower, and occupying a prime city position overlooking the harbour.

Now, a bishop must have a cathedral. When the newly appointed bishop of British Columbia, George Hills, arrived in Victoria in 1860, there wasn’t one. Once he had taken stock of his huge, new diocese that included all of the islands along the coast and the mainland from the forty-ninth parallel to Alaska, he had to make a choice: Christ Church or St. John the Divine—a prefabricated upstart made of iron—which had arrived as part of his new episcopal endowment. He chose Christ Church as the first cathedral, with Edward Cridge as deacon.

It was during the evening service on the day of the cathedral’s consecration in December 1865 that a sermon preached by Rev. William Reece, the first rector of St. Peter’s Church in the Cowichan Valley, seemed to be encouraging more pomp and ceremony in Church of England services. Henry VIII would have shouted Popery! and Cut off his head! Cridge jumped up and, in a vehement outburst before the whole congregation, voiced his strong opposition to such proposals. This was the start of a bitter altercation between Cridge and the bishop that later resulted in Cridge being defrocked, and a large number of the congregation leaving Christ Church and starting a new one down the hill—the Church of Our Lord (see page 15).

On the night of