THIS WEEK IN HISTORY |1892
Vancouver’s original crest was designed by Lauchlan Hamilton, a CPR surveyor who laid out and named the city’s streets.
On April 13, 1892, the municipality of South Vancouver was formed. It was amalgamated into the City of Vancouver in 1929, but you can still recognize the old boundary along 16th Avenue, where some streets ( such as Burrard) run into a dead end.
Oddly, the Vancouver NewsAdvertiser didn’t run a story on the new municipality the day South Vancouver incorporated. Perhaps South Van was so sparsely populated the editor didn’t think it was all that important — Vancouver itself only had 23,000 residents at the time.
But searching through the April 1892 microfilm turned up something cool — an ad for the Vancouver Board of Health asking for tenders “for the complete scavengering of the City.”
“Scavengering” probably meant garbage collection. That isn’t what’s cool about the ad, though — it’s the long- forgotten City of Vancouver crest that ran with it.
The crest shows a train with a cowcatcher rolling past a windswept tree and a sailing ship. A smoke stack from a lumber mill or ship is belching out a black plume in the distance, as is the smokestack on the steam locomotive. There’s even a few logs off the side of the track.
The circular illustration is surrounded by the legends “City Hall” and “City of Vancouver” on top, and “By Sea and Land We Prosper,” “Incorporated A. D. 1886” and “British Columbia” along the bottom. It looks like a woodcut, and still appears incredibly sharp and stylish, more than a century later.
As it turns out, the crest was designed by Laucchlan Hamilton, the Canadian Pacific Railway surveyor who laid out and named Vancouver’s streets ( he named Hamilton Street after himself).
In a 1928 letter to The Sun, Hamilton said the crest was based on the Burrard Inlet waterfront “in the days when trees fringed the waterfront.”
“I certainly had a vision of the future when I blocked out the crest or seal of the city with its motto, ‘ By Sea and Land We Prosper’,” he wrote.
“Vancouver, with its shipping, its seaborne commerce, its fisheries, its timber, the products of its own lands and the grain from east of the mountains, is surely living up to the motto of the city seal.”
Hamilton was on Vancouver’s original council in 1886, but two years later left the city to take another CPR job in Winnipeg, and never lived here again. In 1903, his logo was replaced by a design by James Blomfield, who did many of early Vancouver’s great stained- glass windows.
Blomfield’s crest featured a bearded logger with an axe on one side and a bearded fisherman in sou’wester apparel on the other, clutching a salmon net and an oar.
In the middle of the crest is a shield decorated with a caduceus, a staff carried by Hermes in Greek mythology. On top of the shield is the headpiece of an armoured knight, a granite crown, and a ship. Beneath it is the “By Land and Sea We Prosper” motto.
In 1928, Blomfield’s design came under fire from a city engineer named Brackenridge, who declared it was “all wrong” from the heraldic point of view. But it survived, at least until somebody suggested they add “by air” to the motto in 1958. The issue percolated for a few years ( in 1966, The Sun headlined an editorial “By Land and Sea We Dicker”) until the city finally agreed to change the crest in 1969.
The 1969 crest retained the logger and fisherman, but they had a shave, and looked more like weekend warriors than proletarians. The caduceus on the shield was replaced by a totem and a pair of dogwood flowers, and, yes, “air” was added to the motto.
The 1969 shield is still in use, but there have been suggestions we update it again. Former Province cartoonist Dan Murphy’s update featured the logger with a gun, shooting the fisherman.