ARCHITECTURE:
This is a 2½-storey late-Victorian Queen Anne Revival-style house. Cross gables sit behind the gable-on-hip main roof. A full-height, pediment-gabled extension on the right front has a 2-storey angled bay; the gable has a Palladian window with scroll-cut ornamentation above. The main entrance left of the bay separates it from an octagonal pepperpot turret on the left. The bellcast, fish scale shingle courses below the turret roof are continuous with the wide shingled belt course of the main walls. Later additions on the rear include a stair system to upper suites. The windows are double-hung sashes, many with Queen Anne and etched glass in the upper panes. The house is clad in drop siding, the foundation and three remaining corbelled chimneys are brick.
The wealth of brackets, mouldings and other decorative details befit the home of the co-owner of one of the City’s major millwork and moulding manufacturers. The house was converted to four suites in 1943, from plans by architect D.C. Frame. At some point it was covered in half-timbering. In 1981, Robert Yellowlees, Ron Bickford and David Watson received a Hallmark Society Award for their restoration of the exterior.
ORIGINAL OCCUPANTS:
1990-38: Benjamin Gonnason (1854-1938), born in Stockholm, Sweden, and raised on the family farm, came to North America with his mother in 1872 to join his father who had arrived earlier in Kansas, to escape bleak farming conditions in Sweden. Benjamin married Anna Colling (1856-1919), a fellow Swede, in 1882. They moved to Seattle in 1883 with Benjamin’s brother Aaron, and the brothers worked in a sash and door factory for one year.
The Gonnasons arrived in Victoria in 1884, and the brothers continued the same line of work for seven years. In 1891, they established Capital Planing Mills, later known as Lemon, Gonnason & Co, in Rock Bay at the corner of Store and Pembroke with Joseph James Lemon, who ran the office; they employed 20 men. In 1903 a sawmill was added early in a period of tremendous economic expansion. Lemon, Gonnason specialized in sash and doors and fine interior finishings, and supplied materials for many of Victoria’s well-known buildings, including the Empress Hotel (721 Government St), the Sayward Building (1201-13 Douglas St) and the Pemberton, now Yarrows, Building (637 Fort St), all Downtown. Five years after the death of Joseph Lemon in 1915, Herbert F. Crowe, Aaron’s son-in-law, joined the firm and the name was changed to Crowe, Gonnason & Co. Benjamin and Aaron died five days apart in 1938. The firm continued to flourish until an economic downturn forced it to close in 1958. The vacant sheds burned down in 1960.
OTHER OCCUPANTS:
1940-43: Northwestern Creamery President Francis Herman Anthony Norton (b. Saltspring Isl 1884-1959) and Laura Sophia (née Nordquist, b. Minneapolis 1886) were married in Victoria in 1910. Francis founded Northwestern in 1912 with Arthur G. Snelling (1872-1934). Francis’s parents were from two of the earliest groups of settlers on Saltspring: John Norton, Portuguese from Pico Island in the Azores, and Annie Robinson, a Black woman from San Francisco.
1943: NHA converted the house into four apartments, at a cost of $4,000, to provide more wartime housing.
1944-46: Margaret Harris lived in suite #102 while her husband Fernley was on Active Service in WWII.