oday it's difficult to imagine that all of Vancouver was once blanketed by a thick forest of fir trees. In 1895, Granville Street, then known as North Arm Road, was nothing more than a narrow dirt trail hacked out of the forest, connecting the recently incorporated City of Vancouver with the tiny community of Eburne, population 200, on the north bank of the Fraser River (Eburne was renamed Marpole in 1916).

Then, as now, lumber was "king".

In November 1865 former sea captain Edward Stamp, with the assistance of New Brunswick lumberman Jeremiah Rogers, established Hastings Mill at the foot of Dunlevy Street on Burrard Inlet. Other mills sprang up along the inlet in the years that followed.

A logging camp was established on the south shore of English Bay and the area was named Jericho (the home of Jeremiah Rogers' biblical namesake).

windjammer fleets of the American merchant marine and the British Navy in the latter days of the Age of Sail would have been impossible without the mast-spars

The lumber barons then turned their gaze towards the thickly forested slopes on the south shore of English Bay, today's Kitsilano.

The trees nearest the water were the first to be felled. They were then dragged a short distance to the shore, tied in "booms", and towed to the mills by steam-powered boat. As the tree harvesting moved further up the slope, and further from the water's edge, wooden skids were installed and teams of oxen were employed to haul the logs to the shoreline. When the distance to the water became too great, tracks were laid and steam-powered locomotives were brought into service.

In about 1885 a logging camp was established near the site of present-day Quilchena Park (east of Arbutus on 33rd Avenue). Steel rails were laid from the camp to the water's edge at the foot of Trutch Street in Kitsilano, following the diagonal route of present-day Valley Drive. Jeremiah Roger's steam-powered train became the first logging railway in British Columbia.

By 1911 the lumberjacks had harvested virtually every tree from the Kitsilano shoreline to south of Wilson Road (41st Avenue). The landscape was stark and barren, except for a few isolated houses and piles of burning stumps which remained from the logging operations.

All of this would soon change.

Recognizing the potential for profit a few enterprising individuals purchased much of the recently cleared land. Some of these men are still familiar to us today by way of local street and place names: Robert B. Angus, G. E. McGee, John Robson, Henry Harrison, and Montague Drake, to name a few.