Between 1959 and 1966, CBC Radio’s Imbert Orchard travelled the province, interviewing nearly 1,000 B.C. pioneers, and in the process created the largest oral collection in North America. Some 2,700 hours of recordings with homesteaders, gold miners, road builders and loggers are now housed at the Provincial Archives. Some of his interviews were later published in the Sound Heritage series, including this entry from 1983 about the arrival of the Williams family in Langley in the late 1880s, when Langley was mostly forest.
Bert Williams was four years when his family started homesteading in the hill country east of the Langley Prairie. They lived on what is still known as the Brown Road (240th Street), but it was then little more than a trail through the primeval forest. Here and there a settler was struggling to let in the sunlight and get a few acres on which to grow crops. Otherwise it was a world where humans were vastly outnumbered by bear, cougar, and deer. Bert’s parents, Charles and Emmeline Williams, came from Herefordshire, Bert himself was born there in 1884, and his speech never lost the musical cadence of the Welsh borderland. The family emigrated first to Ontario, where Bert’s father, a stonemason and bricklayer, found plenty of work helping to build the large bank barns that were popular at the time. However, completion of the CPR drew his attention to the far west, and he and his bachelor brother-in-law, George Powell, came out to Vancouver to look around. Charlie continued to prosper. In those days a good stonemason could earn $10 a day.
Some time early in 1888 they called at the land office in New Westminster and found there were two adjacent homesteads in Langley available for preemption… They were reasonably accessible, being a mile or two north of the muddy track known as the Yale Road. The two men hiked out to take a look, liked what they saw, went back and filed on them. Here is part of Bert’s account from interviews in 1963/64:
“We left Westminster on the 10th of November ’89, on the old Bon Accord. It got up to Fort Langley late at night. I can remember that trip up the river; it was slow, stopping every once in a while to take on wood or put somebody off or somebody on. The Commercial Hotel and Peter Brown’s hotel were in Fort Langley then. They were wide open, you know – bars and everything. Mrs Towle, a widow woman, and her son George used to run the Commercial Hotel. That’s right where the CNR runs through Fort Langley now. We stayed there the night. Then Dad hikes out the valley here to get a team — we had a little bit of furniture. He gets a team and a light wagon, and we leaves here at 11 o’clock. It was November, and no gravel roads, remember — just trails and mud. Nine mile trip. Stuck in the mud. Dad ruined a good suit of clothes. It was 9 o’clock that night before we gets up there to what we called “the old immigrant shed”.
Dad had found this empty house and we just moved into it. Somebody was looking after it, but anybody could go. There was a family of three upstairs, and we moved in downstairs. Grandmother and Grandfather and Uncle were there ahead of us. First we had to have a bit of supper; then us kids were put to bed, three of us in the bed, and I was put next to the wall. The lumber was green and you could shove your fingers through the cracks, and of course I was up on my knees looking through to there the old folks were having their cup o’ tea and their beer, bread and cheese before they turned in. And I was taking it all in. It was new to me, and I wasn’t tired. But presently my mother saw my eye, and that’s when I got my first lickin’ in Langley. Old country people are very strict, you know. I was put to bed to go to sleep, not for peeping around.
We used to call that house the immigrant shed. It was only a small place. A man by the name of Hannon had built it, right opposite where Otter school is now — a two storey rough lumber house. He’d cleared about an acre and planted a wonderful orchard. That would be about ’84, I think. He was a married man, and that was a pretty lonesome place for a woman, you know. The old Yale Road was through, and he used to walk from there down to where Langley Prairie is now — that would be about five miles — work all day, and walk back home. And his wife’s there alone in the wilderness; and it was wilderness. It was all woods.
One night the fellow went home, and there was a note. She couldn’t stand it any longer and she’d gone — left him. He never found her, never even knew where she went. He left the place then, sold it to a fellow by the name of Laidlaw, who lived in New Westminster. You’d go in there if it was empty, and then you’d branch out and build your own shack.
That’s what Dad done. He built a house in there before the road was made… every 160 acres had a homesteader on it. Most of them were educated men. They’d been shipped from the old country for certain reasons. They were remittance men, who got their money every so often. But they were some of the finest men you’d ever know. And everyone had a little shack, a log shack mostly, throwed up and chinked with mud and straw or moss, or whatever they could get.
But Dad built a house. It wasn’t log, it was split cedar. He slid the cedar out of the woods, and, dressed up, it looked like drop siding. Being a carpenter, he made his own window frames — he had all these tools — packed the glass on his back from New Westminster, made his doors, everything. The floor was a wonderful piece of art. The joists were hewed from saplings adzed off and levelled with a line. The boards were split from cedar, a foot or maybe sixteen inches wide, twelve feet long and true as anything…It was a wonderful house, you know.
Grandmother and Grandfather were across the road with Uncle, who’d built a nice log house, quite a comfortable place. And of course, after they’d built their homesteads, they got together and soon had a road in.”
From Growing Up In The Valley: Pioneer Childhood In The Lower Fraser Valley Sound Heritage (Imbert Orchard) Series Number 40