First view of the "inn", with the corrugated-iron roofing on the dormer curled and bent by windstorms

Written/painted in 2001: The most important threatened building on Saltspring Island has to be "Travellers' Rest," the 1865 former home of market gardener and innkeeper Joseph Akerman Sr. It is the oldest building on Saltspring and, indeed, the oldest on any of the Gulf Islands; there are only a handful of older buildings extant elsewhere in British Columbia. Built of hand-hewn squared timbers, the house was covered in shingles in the 1920s and was operated for many years as a store and as "Travellers' Rest," the first inn on Salt Spring Island. After a half-century of ownership outside of the family, Akerman descendants repurchased the property in 1974 and continue to own it. Its condition is nothing less than a scandal. The official 1987 publication of historic buildings of the Gulf Islands, Island Heritage Buildings (Islands Trust), noted that it was "presently unoccupied and becoming somewhat overgrown, but is still structurally sound and continues to have good potential for restoration." Fifteen years later, the house has become nothing more than a pergola for an enormous tangle of blackberry bushes and ivies. It was hard to find a view of the house that did it any sort of justice due to the jungle-like tangle of vines, and it is hard to imagine that the building will survive for long. This is a job for an island Heritage Council or local government--unfortunately, according to architect Jonathan Yardley, there appears to be little official interest in island heritage, period.

Update December, 2003: according to the Heritage Society of BC newsletter (Fall 2003, p. 13), the Travellers' Rest has been demolished, and the owner will build a new house on the site.

Note from an anonymous person, 2010: The house is definitely gone and a bungalow-type house was built in its place. 
 
There are rumours that saving old buildings on Saltspring is just not very important to most people, although I don't know why. Apparently a lot of old places were even used as fire practice, what a shame!
 
The old creamery is up for sale again.

I was most attracted to the area around Fulford Harbour and the Burgoyne Valley, the locale of the old inn pictured above. It is the most open and pastoral landscape on the entire Gulf Islands – in my opinion, the least afflicted by the "can't see the forest for the trees" landscape of many of the smaller islands, which are perhaps best experienced from a boat or kayak just offshore. The steep, rocky shoreline painted in the watercolour from the Fulford Harbour dock is typical--picturesque building sites, but difficult access to the water itself.

This (2001) was my first trip to Saltspring Island in more than 20 years, and although the island has changed considerably, not least in the number of people who live there, a visit to it is as much a trip through time as it is through a landscape. That is, it's a trip back to the 1970s. Whereas the town of Ganges has become modern, bustling and unattractive (rather like Sechelt on the Sunshine Coast), the village of Fulford Harbour is caught in a wonderful time warp of little stores selling organic muffins and cups of herbal tea, emporia of colourful headbands and shawls, with rusty, beaten-up Volkswagen buses providing a noisy chorus in the background.

Aficionados of Volkswagen buses (see the unpublishable book Van Ordinaire on this site) seek out the pre-1968 split-window microbuses; in fact, most of those have been bought up and restored by collectors, often affluent 20-somethings who view them as a work of art or cult-car. On Saltspring, I only saw the less-fashionable, more-utilitarian post-68's, like the one I painted above near the dock at Fulford Harbour. I simply couldn't return from Saltspring without a VW bus painting. I swear most of them were running around with burnt exhaust valves or blown head-gaskets – prompting the fat, wheezing exhaust sound of a VW bus trying to climb a gentle hill.

Note from Joe Clarke, Saltspring Island, 2008: We've owned Vanishing Vancouver for many years and enjoy reminiscing as we browse the pages and the stories. It seems we have a somewhat serendipitous connection to your subject matter as we owned the silver grey Datsun station wagon depicted in the image of the house at Macdonald and 43rd ave...we bought it after we moved to Saltspring island in 76. At the time you depicted it (albeit coincidently at the roadside) we were visiting our friend who was living in the house. The Volksie bus you depicted much later in Fulford harbour in front of the Patterson house did then and still does belong to our eldest son Ben, who has semi-retired it at the moment.

The Anglican Church at Fulford Harbour: I have wanted to see this building ever since reading Barry Downs' Sacred Places, published in the early 1980s. According to the plaque in front, the land was donated for a cemetery by a farmer, John Sparrow, whose 19-year-old son was accidentally killed by pitlampers in 1889. Appropriately, then, the 1894 church has a wonderful churchyard, with moss growing over some of the graves and the grass blowing in the gentle breeze.

Written in 2001: Anybody who says there is no National Trust in Canada is not tuned in to the reality of how historic sites have been preserved. It has all been done with a mix of private and public initiatives although it indeed lacks the overall unifiying vision that National Trusts provide in England or Australia. Ruckle Park on Salt Spring Island – the old Ruckle farm – is a combination of restoration, contemporary recreational access and working farm that would be the pride of any National Trust in the world, and yet it is a park run by the B.C. Parks Service (not even by the B.C. Heritage branch, which manages some of the other historic sites in the province). Anyway, Ruckle Park provides a window onto an idyllic Gulf Islands history. Henry Ruckle preempted his first 160-acre parcel at Beaver Point in 1872, the year after British Columbia confederated with Canada, and built his home (below) about 1876. Other family members added their own homes to the property over the years, including the Norman Ruckle farmhouse, built in 1938, which I also painted. The entire Ruckle farm, then consisting of 1,196 acres, was bought by the provincial government in 1974 for the creation of Ruckle Provincial Park. The "tenancy for life" agreement which allows members of the family to continue to live in their homes and work the land is identical to the sort of agreements by which the National Trust in England acquired country homes and created a large part of the modern British tourist industry.