The man who laid out the University of British Columbia's grounds also drew the plan for a small terraced garden on the Deer Lake slopes. Thousands walk his larger work without learning his name; in Burnaby, the smaller work survives as roughly 0.6 hectares of plantings above the water.
Brenda · 5 min read
A small wooden tram shelter built in 1911 is the only piece of Burnaby's interurban railway still standing. It has moved twice by truck, and the engineer it was named for has all but vanished from the record.
Artom Butenko · 4 min read
On 22 June 1956, a contractor handed Reeve Charles MacSorley the keys to a new municipal hall at 4949 Canada Way, near Deer Lake. The site had been chosen two years earlier by a simple rule: put the seat of government where neither half of Burnaby could complain it favoured the other.
Artom Butenko · 5 min read
In 1893, an English dairy worker who had crossed the country on the first transcontinental train bought fourteen acres of logged-over land in East Burnaby and planted an orchard. He raised eleven children in the house he built by hand, sold strawberries to Vancouver hotels, and sat on the council of a municipality barely older than his youngest child. The house still stands.
Artom Butenko · 6 min read
A single English industrial name, Barnet Mill, sits over an older Squamish name that describes a yearly act of the living world: the arbutus shedding its bark on the rocky shore of Burrard Inlet.
Brenda · 5 min read
Convicted of seditious conspiracy after the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike, William Pritchard served a year in Stony Mountain Penitentiary, settled on Capitol Hill in 1922, and was elected Reeve of Burnaby in time to watch the municipality go bankrupt and lose its elected council to a provincial commissioner.
Artom Butenko · 6 min read
A single stone projectile point, pulled from a midden in 1894 on the slope where the Burnaby Village Museum now sits, carries a date the museum gives as somewhere between 1,000 and 2,630 years old.
Artom Butenko · 4 min read
The Brunette River drains the east end of Burnaby Lake into the Fraser, and at that junction stood villages whose names some Burnaby residents have never read once.
Artom Butenko · 5 min read