Craigflower Farm - An Emigrant Community
by Jennifer Iredale, Curator
Craigflower Farm was established in 1852 as one of four Vancouver Island farms of the Puget Sound Agricultural Company. (PSAC) a closely held subsidiary of the Hudson's Bay Company. Writing from London on March 12, 1852 to James Douglas, in Fort Victoria, the P.S.A.C. directors, Colville & Pelly said: "We have now to inform you that we have...an arrangement with....(a)... Mr. K. McKenzie (of) East Lothian, (&) Mr. Skinner in Essex...We have to request that you will...select two good situations of land, to be purchased by the P.S.A.C., where farms of 500 to 1000 acres may advantageously be established..." McKenzie and 20 Scottish farmhands many with wives and children, left Britain forever in 1852, travelling five months aboard the ship Norman Morrison to Esquimalt Harbour near Fort Victoria. Recalling their arrival, one of the Mckenzie girls later wrote:
...a cold winter day and no one to meet us and we were so eager to be welcomed...by and by along came Mr. McDonald, who was then a clerk in the Hudson's Bay Company Store. He took us to the only place available, a great loft with two partitions, and there we were housed. (p. 75, Pioneer Women)
Young James Deans, one of McKenzie's labourers also remembered those first days:
No housekeeping ready for us, we had to live at the Fort until they were so. In order to help along the work all us single chaps had to go to Craigflower where we lived in a half finished frame house. The change from the cottage homes and fertile fields of East Lothian to the dense and dreary primeval forest of Vancouver Island was so great that we felt it terrible bad...
James Douglas wrote to Barclay (PSAC director) on Jan. 20, 1853 saying]
"Mr. McKenzie has just returned from the place selected for his residence, and is pleased with the spot and the buildings already put up, consisting of one house of 50 ft. and two cottages 25 ft. in length which he can soon render habitable."
These immigrants constructed the cottages, barns, mill, blacksmith's shop and carpenter's shop, sawmill and schoolhouse; cleared the fields, tended sheep, cows, oxen and barnyard animals, grew gardens and laboured in their flour mill, bakery and brick factory. They laid out Craigflower very much as a Scottish agricultural community would have been; the cottages side by side facing each other across a lane, close to the waterway and distant from the laird's house on the hill. Mill, shops and bakery were along another road; the big barns across a field the school, built soon after arrival on Vancouver Island, was constructed across the inlet on a spit of land It was the center of social events, marriages, lectures evenings as well as a school until 1911.
Let's look at some of the people of this community and listen to what they said about their life here The McKenzie men; sons, Kenneth, 1846; William, 1850; and the two Vancouver Island born sons; Andrew, 1854; Robert 1856. Husband and father, Kenneth McKenzie; born at Renton Hall, Scotland, well educated and bailiff of Craigflower at £60/annum and later Agent of all 4 PSAC farms on Vancouver Island] Helmcken recalls him as "hale, robust and powerful - a good specimen of a hospitable, warm-hearted 'Scotch laird' a kind of whole souled proper gentleman" (p. 232,233 Reminiscences) but Annie Deans, carpenter George's wife, call him "a deceitful blaguard"
T[he McKenzie women; wife and mother, Agnes McKenzie (nee russell) and daughters, Agnes, born 1843; Jesse, 1844; Dorothea, 1848 and Wilhelmina, known as Goody (named by Capt. Wishart aboard the Norman Morrison for being such a good infant) born in 1852. One of the daughter's remembering their childhood said: [
We were happy as children for it was a great change for us to run wild after a more or less restricted nursery life in Scotland.
"But our mother found it very difficult. She had brought two servants with her, but there was such a lack of white women that they married almost at once. So, we were obliged to have Indian help. At first we were afraid of the natives, we little girls and mother.... but soon we children could talk Chinook fluently. (p. Pioneer Women)"
At first our cooking was all done out of doors.... we had to make our own bricks for the fireplace and chimneys. I remember how delighted father was when he discovered the deposit of limestone. (p. 77, Pioneer Women)"
The McKenzies were clearly an intimate, loving family; hard working, high spirited, welcome in Royal Navy circles yet comfortable with the Craigflower farmhands. Kenneth McKenzie was a stubborn, resourceful but somewhat violent man, often at odds with Douglas and others but clearly well liked by some and loved by his family.
What of other members of the Craigflower community? [The Deans brothers, James and George and his wife Annie, have left some of their history in letters, poetry and writings: Annie writing home to Scotland in Oct. 1856
Mary is growing a big lass/ she says she is going home to Scotland...I only wish that some of you have sent a doll for there is not such a thing here.
And then there are ? lively poems by James Deans:
"There was singing and dancing and hoockin and prancing,/ while some with guid whiskey grew squally,/ [there was Galic galore and of good things a store at the wedding of Mary Macauly."