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When he was ten, David R. Gray and his brother used to "find ‘stuff" in an old midden at Tod Inlet, including the skulls of pigs. The boys didn’t realize they had stumbled upon the remnants of an immigrant Chinese community that had worked at the long-gone cement plant, constructed in 1905.
Tod Inlet is located adjacent to the current Butchart Gardens in Victoria, a former limestone quarry that had supplied the cement plant. The Vancouver Portland Cement Company was the first to manufacture cement on the West Coast and it’s the reason for the existence of that mostly-forgotten community that arose in 1904.
The company employed ethnically diverse workers such as Chinese Canadians, South Asian Canadians and Indigenous people who were segregated from white engineers, managers and plant workers and their families.
“Our family boat was kept there,” David Gray says, “and it was where we spent summers fishing, swimming, exploring and playing.”
David and his brother were thrilled with the pig skulls. "As we dug into the loose soil to find more of the curving tusks in earth-stained jawbones —the real prize, we thought then—we discovered old bottles, broken pottery and chopsticks, and then beautifully glazed jugs, pots and rice bowls.”
There were still old-timers around and Gray approached them for answers. They had vague memories of a long-deserted Chinese village connected to the abandoned cement plant, which closed in 1921.
Some of those Chinese Canadian workers had gone on to be employed at Butchart Gardens. Two men even continued to live in one of the last standing buildings at Tod Inlet, the old laundry house, until the mid-1960s: Yat Tong and Yem Choy, a gardener who joined the Butcharts in 1941. Gray tried to track down the two men to no avail. Then, the laundry house was burned in a training exercise by the local fire department in the late 1960s.
The site of the plant and the long-gone community is today part of Gowlland-Tod Provincial Park in the municipalities of Saanich and Central Saanich, and it is registered as a Canadian Historic Place.
Remnants of the plant and its associated worker housing are eroding and overgrown with vegetation. The former footpaths once used by Chinese and other workers have been transformed into a trail system.
While Gray now lives in Ontario, he has never lost his fascination for his old stomping grounds, leading him to research and publish Deep and Sheltered Waters: The History of Tod Inlet (RBCM $29.95). 978-0772672568
[BCBW 2020]
Tod Inlet is located adjacent to the current Butchart Gardens in Victoria, a former limestone quarry that had supplied the cement plant. The Vancouver Portland Cement Company was the first to manufacture cement on the West Coast and it’s the reason for the existence of that mostly-forgotten community that arose in 1904.
The company employed ethnically diverse workers such as Chinese Canadians, South Asian Canadians and Indigenous people who were segregated from white engineers, managers and plant workers and their families.
“Our family boat was kept there,” David Gray says, “and it was where we spent summers fishing, swimming, exploring and playing.”
David and his brother were thrilled with the pig skulls. "As we dug into the loose soil to find more of the curving tusks in earth-stained jawbones —the real prize, we thought then—we discovered old bottles, broken pottery and chopsticks, and then beautifully glazed jugs, pots and rice bowls.”
There were still old-timers around and Gray approached them for answers. They had vague memories of a long-deserted Chinese village connected to the abandoned cement plant, which closed in 1921.
Some of those Chinese Canadian workers had gone on to be employed at Butchart Gardens. Two men even continued to live in one of the last standing buildings at Tod Inlet, the old laundry house, until the mid-1960s: Yat Tong and Yem Choy, a gardener who joined the Butcharts in 1941. Gray tried to track down the two men to no avail. Then, the laundry house was burned in a training exercise by the local fire department in the late 1960s.
The site of the plant and the long-gone community is today part of Gowlland-Tod Provincial Park in the municipalities of Saanich and Central Saanich, and it is registered as a Canadian Historic Place.
Remnants of the plant and its associated worker housing are eroding and overgrown with vegetation. The former footpaths once used by Chinese and other workers have been transformed into a trail system.
While Gray now lives in Ontario, he has never lost his fascination for his old stomping grounds, leading him to research and publish Deep and Sheltered Waters: The History of Tod Inlet (RBCM $29.95). 978-0772672568
[BCBW 2020]
