ARCHITECTURE:
Built in the middle of the period in which Samuel Maclure designed some of his most notable Prairie houses (e.g., 1031 Terrace Av (1905-06), 943 St Charles St (1912), 1025-27 Moss St (1912-13), all in Rockland), with their shallow hipped roofs and horizontal emphasis, this house in the shadow of Gonzales Hill is the antithesis of that style. Looking taller than it is wide, the main block is an end-gabled 2½-storey structure with a towering gabled dormer on a steeply pitched roof running parallel to Foul Bay Rd. The roof has exposed beams, open eaves, exposed raftertails, and a fasciaboard. Unusually for a Maclure home, both storeys are half-timbered on the street façade, with vertical planks rising from foundation to eaves (interrupted by a single-storey hipped-roof square bay with a river rock base and five leaded glass casements, and a short pent roof running around the side of the house). The left side and half the right side have two-storey half-timbering as well; the remainder of the house cladding below the eaves and gables is stucco.
There is a gabled wing forming the stem of a T at the rear. All three gables are half-timbered and project slightly over beltcourses with modillions. There is a complex structure at the right rear corner junction of the main block and the rear wing that is partly original (including two wall dormers on a corner) and partly a later addition of a roof-level sundeck. Two massive coursed-granite chimneys tower above the roof. There are several two- and three-part multipaned leaded-glass windows.
ORIGINAL OCCUPANTS:
Frank Compton Green (1873-1963) was a civil engineer born in Saint John, NB, and educated at the University of New Brunswick. Upon graduation in 1893, Frank served as an engineer for four years on the railways in New Brunswick. He came to BC in 1897 and became a provincial land surveyor the following year in Nelson. He worked mostly on mining surveys. In 1904 in San Francisco, Frank married Myra Hatt (1872-1949), a native of Fredericton, NB, who had just moved out west. In 1911 Frank and Myra moved from Nelson to Victoria, and Frank established a private engineering firm, Green Brothers, Burden & Co (his brother Alfred H. lived in Nelson, while Frederick P. Burden lived in Fort George, BC). This firm became one of the largest of its kind in BC.
Frederick Burden became Provincial Minister of Lands in the 1928 Conservative Government and Frank served as Surveyor-General of BC from 1930-46, and was responsible for revising many of the provincial administrative boundaries, including judiciary, electoral and educational. He was also a pioneer in the use of aerial photography in topographic mapping. Frank was chairman of the Victoria branch of the Engineering Institute of Canada, and for 30 years was a member of the board of the BC Land Surveyors Corp. He served as president in 1911-12.
Frank lived in this house until 1953, and eventually retired to 1040 St. Louis in Oak Bay.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION & IMAGES:
• This Old House, Victoria’s Heritage Neighbourhoods,
Volume Four: Fairfield, Gonzales & Jubilee
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