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British Columbia Tourism Region : Thompson Okanagan
Description From Owner:
Shorts Creek
- Ewing - Originally Ewing's Landing after R.L. Ewing, who settled here in the early 1900s.
- Fintry - The land here was bought in 1909 by Captain James Cameron Dun-Waters, who named his estate Fintry after his family home in Stirlingshire.
- Shorts Creek - After Captain Thomas D. Shorts (1837-1921), who pre-empted here in 1883 and was captain of the first steamboat on the lake, the Mary Victoria Greenhow, 1886.
- Silver Star Mountain - Formerly Aberdeen Mountain. Now named after the Silver Star Mining Co., which had a claim here.
- Vernon - In 1862 Father Paul Durieu, OMI, built a cabin here, an out-station of Okanagan Mission, and thus he gave Vernon its first name of Priest's Valley.
- In 1887, after almost becoming either Centreville or Forge Valley, Priest's Valley became Vernon, in honour of Forbes George Vernon (1843-1911), Chief Commissioner of Lands and Works for British Columbia.
- Vernon was born near Dublin. After a short period of service as an officer in the British Army, he came to British Columbia with his brother Charles in 1863, arriving in the Okanagan with Colonel C.F. Houghton, the first owner of the Coldstream Ranch.
- This magnificent ranch was bought by the Vernon brothers in 1869 and later passed into the sole ownership of Forbes George Vernon.
- Vernon entered provincial politics and became a power in the land. In The Valley of Youth, C.W. Holliday preserves a lively recollection of Vernon's electioneering technique as practised one night in the barroom of the Ram's Horn at Lumby:
- Forbes George, a big genial Irishman with a merry twinkle in his eye, sized up his audience, and mounted a barroom chair there was nothing else to mount, and there did not appear to be a chairman ...
- He mounted that chair, and, had a representative of the press been present he would have had little trouble reporting the speech, for, holding up his hand to silence the applause,
- 'Gentlemen,' he said, 'you boys all know me and know all about me, and I am quite sure none of you want to hear me make a speech, so all I will say at present is: Let us all go and have a drink.' (p. 308)
- With permission from G.P.V and Helen B. Akrigg 1997 British Columbia Place Names. UBC Press.
Address of this page: http://bc.ruralroutes.com/VernonBC