2009

4 December 2009 Shadows of Vancouver Past Live in Rail Surveyor's Art Old view of Nanaimo on Vancouver Island.     Vancouver British Columbia - Lauchlan Hamilton was only in Vancouver for five years in the 1880s, but his impact is still being felt, every day. Hamilton surveyed the city for the Canadian Pacific Railway, and laid out and named the original streets. Many were named after British naval officers or politicians (Burrard, Granville, Hastings), others were named after CPR officials, including Hamilton himself.   Hamilton was also an amateur artist, often taking photos and doing watercolours of the towns he surveyed. A print featuring several Hamilton works has just shown up at Maynards auctions, and it's a dazzler.   The print is out of Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, an American publication that would do engravings of paintings or photos in the days before printing technology allowed you to reproduce them. The title is "British Columbia Scenes on the line and at the terminus of the Canadian Pacific Railway", and the date is 24 Oct 1885 eight months before the city of Vancouver was incorporated.   There are seven scenes depicted, including Coal Harbour from Pratt's Fishery, Howe Sound, the entrance to Burrard Inlet, the Hastings Mill Wharf, Sallicum (Siwash) rock, and Burrard Inlet from the head of Coal Harbour, the Frazer (Fraser) River three miles above the town of Yale.   Some of the scenes are mind-blowing. Hastings Mill Wharf features a couple of sailing ships anchored near a small wooden shed that stretches out into Burrard Inlet on pilings. Entrance to Burrard Inlet features another sailing ship rounding the corner by Prospect Point in Stanley Park, with big rocks where the seawall is today. Coal Harbour from Pratt's Fishery features a lone sailing ship in the water, the North Shore in the background, completely covered in trees.   Leslie's paper was quite popular in its day, selling up to 65,000 copies per week. Rare book and historical document dealer Don Stewart of McLeod's Books says copies of the Leslie paper do surface from time to time.   "They just don't turn up here," Stewart explains. "They turn up in the United States."   The Vancouver Archives has a copy of the Leslie print, but it's in black and white. The colour print at Maynards was hand-coloured later, probably by an antique dealer.   "In the '60s people would take apart these issues of Frank Leslie's, colour them, and stick them into frames," says Stewart.   "But it was only issued in black and white."   Maynards has estimated the Leslie print at $40 to $60. It will be sold at auction 10 Dec 2009, the last sale before Maynards leaves its current home at 415 West Second Ave. for a new spot at Main and Third.   If you could find one of the original Hamilton watercolours, it'd be worth a few thousand. The Vancouver Archives has 34 old Hamilton paintings, most of them scenes from the pre-incorporation days from 1883 to 1885.   One features an old-fashioned logging steam donkey at Alexander and Carroll, where the Hotel Europe is today. Another is labelled "C.P.R. townsite," and shows a single shack in a forest. A third has a lone figure walking through a path that has been cut out of a forest of giant trees at Cordova and Water, near the present-day Blarney Stone pub.   The Leslie print came out of an estate in Prince George, which also included a couple of other historic prints and maps. One is a very cool print of Nanaimo in 1880, another shows Victoria in 1868. One of the maps shows Vancouver Island. It's undated, but there is no New Westminster on the mainland, so it would be pre-1859. All three are in one lot, and are estimated at $80 to $120.   Another map shows British Columbia and Vancouver Island, and probably dates to the 1860s. It is being sold by itself, and is estimated at $100 to $150.   Hamilton, by the way, was one of Vancouver's first city councillors:  he's in the famous photo of the first council setting up shop in a tent after the Great Fire of 1886. He left Vancouver in 1888 when he was given a promotion to the CPR's western headquarters in Winnipeg, and never lived here again. He died in Toronto in 1941 at the age of 88.

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