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This page last updated November 29, 2002
© Michael Kluckner
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This is the picturesque little cottage that, incongruously, is now near the side of the Okanagan Connector about 15km east of Merritt at Iron Mountain Road. As the highway at that point is being expanded to 4 lanes, the house's livability is increasingly compromised. It was once the Aspen Grove Road, as it was called, not far from Corbett Lake Glynnis Tidball of Merritt showed the picture to her great-aunt, who says it belonged to the Clowter family in the 1930's. She wondered if they had been sheep ranchers as the property next door to this had been a sheep ranch called SX Ranch. According to Kimberley Turley, whose Sunnyhill Ranch is the current owner of the property and house, the place was built by the Guichon family about 1900. Joseph Guichon came from the Savoie region of France and built a vast cattle empire. He built the Quilchena Hotel in the Nicola Valley in 1907-1908. |
| The house is a classic western ranch: the main building with side gables, a simple roof without any dormers, a front porch with a hipped roof, and a rear addition (which may indeed have been the original building) with the gable in the opposite direction forming a T with the main house.But what has always distinguished this place, for me, is the expensive turned porch posts and brackets, illustrated roughly at the right. These things were not cheap, and would have been imported from a mill probably in New Westminster, so the rancher must have been having a good year. If it was built by the Guichons, it was probably all built at once. |
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