Heritage Register
Fernwood

1405 Fernwood Road (ex-35 Fernwood Rd)

Built 1901-02
Heritage-Designated 1978

For: Charles & Emma Marshall

ARCHITECTURE:

This two-storey Italianate house is hip-roofed with sandwich brackets in the eaves. It has wide hip-roofed bays on the front and left side, square on the upper level and cutaway on the lower. The cutaways have very ornate scrollsawn brackets. There is a wide bellcast beltcourse between the floors covered in decorative shingles. The pedimented entrance porch on the right front has square chamfered posts and pilasters joined by thick arches with brackets between the post capitals and the cornice. It has decorative shingles in the pediment and solid shingles on the balustrades. The upper floor is shingled, the lower floor is clad in drop siding. It was duplexed in 1949 and in 1980, converted to office use.

ORIGINAL OCCUPANTS:
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Owners: 1901-16+: Charles and Emma Marshall, who lived at 1413 Fernwood Rd from 1889, built this house on the corner of their property.
Tenants: 1903-04: Jane Cotter Dunbar (née Jennings, b. Pugwash, NS, 1863-1948), the widow of William Dunbar, and her retired parents Thomas Jennings (b. IRL, 1828-1923) and Elizabeth “Bessie” (née Patterson, b. Co Mayo, IRL, 1830-1912), her brother John “Arthur” Jennings, steamboat labourer, and her sister Marie Jennings. Thomas and Bessie came to Pugwash, NS, in 1849 and 1840 respectively. By 1889 they were in Victoria, running a boarding house at 120 Cormorant, and their daughter Bessie was a dressmaker. In 1905 they moved across Johnson St to 1325 Fernwood with Jane, and all lived there for the rest of their lives.

1905: Andrew W. Ross (b. Quebec, 1866-1923), secretary of Vancouver Island Fire Underwriters’ Association, and his family.

1908-16: Ronald Alexander Conway Grant (b. Newport, Mon, ENG, 1875-1934), of Grant & Lineham (Arthur Lineham, 840 Cormorant St, North Park), Real Estate & Insurance Agents. Grant came to Canada in 1890, and to Victoria in 1894. He worked as a gardener, then a motorneer or driver, conductor and clerk with BCER. He was married by 1899, to Valeria Sophia (née MacGregor, b. Manitoba 1878), and they lived with her father, Peter Campbell MacGregor, at Craig Royston, 6 Terrace Av in Rockland. Peter MacGregor was a City Alderman and a real estate, finance and insurance agent in MacGregor & Richards. By 1900 Ronald, too, was an insurance agent. Their only son Ivor Noel MacGregor Grant died aged eleven in 1910 of tubercular meningitis.

Ronald and Valeria divorced, and Ronald was retired when he married Mildred Sargison in 1916. Mildred was born in Victoria in 1890 to Albert Sargison and Fanny Jackson, both from early Victoria families. [Note: Fanny’s father Dr. William Jackson came to Victoria in 1862 on the Cyclone, and her mother Annie Mead came around the Horn in 1864 on the Himalaya. William was the doctor at the Marine Hospital on the Inner Harbour in Victoria West. Fanny’s brother Frederick Jackson married Elizabeth Lorimer and they built 619 Avalon Rd in James Bay.] Ronald died by a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1934.

OTHER OCCUPANTS:

1917-18: The Rev. Lewis Walsh Hall (b. Providence, RI, c.1853) and Hester Sarah (née Orchard, b. Innisfail, ON, 1857-1931). In 1893 Lewis opened the Chinatown Presbyterian Mission Church in the Dunsmuir mining community of Union, later Cumberland. He also brought Chinese labourers to Union to work in the Dunsmuir coal mines. Hester Orchard opened a boarding house there in 1895. Lewis and Hester married in 1897. After her marriage, Hester was Matron of the Union and Comox District Hospital, resigning before the birth of their only child, Ernest Winchester. They moved to Victoria c.1907 and Lewis was missionary to the Chinese Presbyterian Mission Church at 1423 Government St.

1920-23: William Ritchie (b. SCT, c.1867) and Emma Louise (née Luscombe, b. Victoria, 1879-1971) married in Victoria in 1908. William was a business manager, manufacturer’s agent, and a director of Plimley & Ritchie, Ltd.
1925-29: John MacKay, manager of MacKay Produce Co, 1832 Store St.
1935-55: BC Land & Investment salesman C.R. Vivian Bagshawe, voice teacher Doris Marion Bagshawe, and real estate and insurance agent Edward “Noel” Bagshawe, who were probably siblings. Noel served in WWI from November 1914. He and Doris remained single and died in Victoria in 1966 and 1986.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION & IMAGES:

• Fernwood History

• Fernwood Heritage Register


• This Old House, Victoria's Heritage Neighbourhoods,
Volume One: Fernwood & Victoria West