Several years ago when I was visiting family in Prince Edward Island I saw a Vancouver postcard in a rummage sale. It seemed completely out of context and it was encased in a plastic envelope and it was expensive.
I bought it and held onto it, without doing any research.
The postcard had a surprising subject~there is a house with a craftsman styled front door, ionic columns, stained glass upper windows and a family posed in front of it.
The family is dressed in Edwardian dress, with the mother holding a hand muffler and wearing a scarf. The father has a hat and wears a long suit with a stiff starched shirt collar. The child is in a sailor suit, the type that was very popular in the 1910 to 1920 period. At the family’s feet is a dog that looks like a brittany spaniel.
The card was a custom one, created for this family, showing off their prized asset, their house. And on the back of the card, there was a handwritten inscription:
“2825 Clark Drive E. Vancouver B.C. A glimpse of us and our new home with units. Kind love and best wishes for a very happy Xmas and New Year to you all. Edie, Arthur, Willie”
When I started to research the house I feared that it would be demolished. But it wasn’t. It is still there, near 13th Avenue on the west side of Clark Drive.
It has lost its elegant entrance way and fancy front columns, and the entrance way has been reconfigured to access from the side instead of the front. The fancy windows and stained glass are gone but the window placement and the bay on the north side of the building still exists. The shingled siding is now covered with pink stucco. From Clark Drive a shrubby tree hides the house from the street.
The view from the back of the property shows the bones of the old original house. The bay on the house is evident, and the dormer window on the house adjacent to 2825 Clark Drive can also be seen in both the old and the modern photo.
I did not expect to find the house still existing, and then decided to do a deeper dive into who lived there and to see if I could find Edie, Arthur and Willie who had produced the postcard and so proudly posed with their house. I looked through Newspapers.com and also the Vancouver Archives.
In 1913 the house’s occupants offered a Metzler piano for sale for $250.00 in the Province, noting that this was a “real deal”. Today that $250 for a British made piano is equivalent to over $6,000. That same year there is an advertisement also in the Province offering a room for one or two with an English family “three minutes from cars”
I found Mrs. Millichip who lived in the house in July 1917 and was part of the Western Star Trench and Hospital Club. There were no regular meetings of the club that summer but if people wanted to produce socks for the war effort, they could obtain yarn from Mrs. Millichip of 2825 Clark Drive.
Good works were still being done at the house in 1947 wen Mrs. B. Tolman held a homemaking meeting as part of the Women of the Moose chapter. Set up originally in 1913,the women’s division of the Royal Order of the Moose was formed. This group still does social, organizational and service work in the community.
I have still not found out who the people in the postcard, Edie, Arthur and Willie are. It would be great to find out their last name and be able to return this postcard to their descendants. If you know who this family is or can provide any more information on this remarkable house, please let me know.
An historical search at the Land Title office would show the owners. Also very useful are the property tax records at the City of Vancouver archive at Kits Point – these also show owner names. The VPL has city directories that cover many years. The 1913 city directory shows Arthur H. Millachip at 2826 Clark. Millachip with an “a.”
“Usher” not “Ushet”
Arthur Herriot Millachip Born 1 Oct 1871 Kilburn England died North Vancouver Feb 19, 1959
http://Www.tinyurl.com/millachip
An interesting aside about pianos. A friend is “storing” a high quality, great condition grand piano in his house on Fraser Street. He doesn’t play piano. But there’s only two people in the house – so he’s got the space. He hired a pianist for a grand house warming but I doubt it’s been played since. The piano is worth approximately $0. Nobody wants them.
Apparently there has been so much downsizing that there is a massive glut of grand pianos and haulers are taking them away to storage by the dozens. Nobody wants to sell for, at best, a tiny fraction of their perceived worth. And so they sit collecting dust.
Nice story.
It would be wonderful to hear more stories about our homes and the people who built and inhabited them.
Would there be microfilms of the original deed at City Hall? That would show the name of the first owners, i.e. the folks in the photo.
To date, 1023 stories of homes and people here:
https://changingvancouver.wordpress.com/
The Heritage Vancouver database says 2825 Clark received a building permit in 1909. Fred Melton was the owner and builder, and he designed and built over 50 homes across the city over many years. In 1923 he moved to Melton Court on Cornwall Avenue, one of the first apartment buildings in Kitsilano.
He probably built the house speculatively, as in the 1910 Street Directory (online at the Vancouver Public Library) it was shown as vacant. In 1911 Leslie H Jennings was shown at 2827 Clark Drive, (with Linesford Pease living in the house across the lane to the north, 2821 Clark).
2825 first appears in 1912, with Frank Gore living there. He was a butcher, with his own store on West 4th Avenue. In 1911 he lived on Jackson Avenue and was a foreman at King’s Market at 806 Granville, part of Pat Burns’ meat empire.
He didn’t last long, as a recession was setting in, and in 1913 Arthur H Millachip was living at 2825. and the 1914 directory identifies his occupation as ‘decorator’.
The 1901 English Census shows Arthur Millachip living in Willesden, and says he was born in Dalston, in east London. His wife Edith was a year younger, and had been born in Pimlico. They married in Paddington in 1897. Their son, William, was born in London in 1904, and the family were still in England for the 1911 census, which identifies Edie’s full name as Eliza Edith Millachip, and Willie’s as William Arthur Millachip.
Edith Millachip was 61 when she died in Vancouver in 1935; her father was Albert Moore and her mother Eliza Morse. William died in 1944 in Tranquille, (presumably the sanatorium near Kamloops). He was aged 39, and single. Arthur Herriott Millachip died in 1959 in North Vancouver in 1959. He was 87 when he died.
Sandy: I have a response from a relative. I’ll forward to you.
Good work !
And thank you !
I enjoy reading about people, their lives and the places they lived and worked.
These three people are the only Millachip people listed in the BC Vital Events and it appears there are no descendants from them.
However, in England there may very well be extended family who today may once in a while wonder whatever happened to their relatives who emigrated to Canada.