LORD STANLEY SEES HIS PARK
Stanley Park is named after Canada’s Governor- General at the time it opened, Lord Stanley of Preston.
Unfortunately, Lord Stanley was in Ottawa when the 1,000-acre park was officially unveiled on Sept. 27, 1888. But just over a year later, he took a special Canadian Pacific Railway train out west.
His arrival at the CPR station on Oct. 26, 1889, was a big deal for three-year-old Vancouver, which had an estimated 8,500 residents. He was Queen Victoria’s representative, the closest many Canadians would ever get to royalty.
The city decorated the streets near the station with evergreens, flags and bunting, there was a fivestorey high arch welcoming him at the foot of Granville Street, and 3,000 people stood outside the first Hotel Vancouver to see the official greeting ceremony.
Mayor David Oppenheimer declared a public holiday for Monday, Oct. 28, when Lord and Lady Stanley boarded the S.S. Premier for a cruise around English Bay, Howe Sound and Burrard Inlet. That night, there was a fireworks display on the waterfront, and the following day Lord Stanley was scheduled to tour the park named after him at 10 a.m.
Unfortunately, it rained like hell that morning, so he nixed his original plans and went for a tour of Hastings Sawmill instead. At 12:45, the rain started to let up, so the GovernorGeneral and his party set out in three carriages for Stanley Park.
“When the trail was reached the members of the party alighted and walked through it to see the big trees,” reported the Vancouver News-Advertiser.
“It is needless to say that the dimensions of the Stanley Park giants were a genuine surprise, and His Excellency no doubt experienced a feeling of pride in having lent his name to a public reservation containing something so great as one of those cedars.”
Lord Stanley took in the “splendid view” from Observation Point (Prospect Point) before laying the foundation stones of a cairn in honour of his visit. He left at 2:15 p.m., which means Lord Stanley of Preston spent a little over an hour in the world-renowned park that bears his name.
Oddly, there don’t seem to be any photos of Lord Stanley in Stanley Park. Perhaps the weather was so awful, the handful of photographers in Vancouver didn’t venture out to capture the historic occasion.
But then he never saw a Stanley Cup game, either, even though he donated the cup in 1893 as a championship trophy for Canada’s best amateur hockey team.
There are some wonderful quirks to the October 1889 newspapers. The News-Advertiser carried a full list of every phone number in both Vancouver and New Westminster, and they were only one to three numerals long.
Thomas Dunn’s store on Cordova Street, for example, was Number 7, while Dunn’s home number was 121. The number for Ross & Ceperley real estate was 12.
The Ross in Ross & Ceperley was Arthur Wellington Ross, an MP from Manitoba who seems to have spent most of his time between 1886 and 1890 selling real estate in Vancouver. In 1886, Ross made the request to city councillor/CPR surveyor Lauchlan Hamilton to ask the federal government to turn a military reserve at the head of Coal Harbour into Stanley Park.
This may have been at the behest of the CPR — Ross was closely connected to the company. His sister was also married to Vancouver’s first mayor, Malcolm Maclean.
Ross & Ceperley took out a giant ad in the News-Advertiser during Lord Stanley’s visit, and it is boosterism at its best, filled with wild typography that switches typefaces from line to line. “VANCOUVER!!” it reads. “Heretofore Vancouver has been known only as the western terminus of the Canadian Pacific Railway. But time works wondrous changes, and today Vancouver is not only talked of as the Pacific Coast Terminus of the Canadian Pacific, the most magnificent railway system ever known. …
“(But also as) the North Pacific Terminus of all the Great Railway Systems of Canada and the United States, and the Eastern Terminus of the Pacific Ocean Steamers, and a great city will result.
“Make no mistake about it! It’s surely coming!”
Amazingly, it did.