Where was this photo taken? It may well have been one that Dr. Horace Wrinch took with his glass slide camera—it is in his collection and he was taking photographs when he arrived in Hazelton, B.C. in 1900. If so, this would date the photograph to about 1900–1904, when he appears to have moved to a more modern camera. The “S” suggests it was a Salvation Army Church. Could this be the inside of the new church at Glen Vowell, a few miles up the Skeena River from Hazelton, BC. Glen Vowell was established as a Salvation Army village after a row with the Methodists at Kispiox. However, it could be easily be somewhere else. Ideas? (Photo: my own collection)
Captain McCoskrie's Town Site at Hazelton
Captain McCoskrie and A.C. Murray, a Hudson’s Bay trader, had great hopes for the Crown grants of District Lots 103 and 42 they acquired in 1902. These lots were strategically located between the Gitanmaax Reserve around Hazelton and the Reserve close to the bridges across the Bulkley River at Hagwilget. The Hazelton Hospital was located on close to the southern boundary of DL 105 immediately to the north of DL 103. A Hazelton Town site Syndicate was set up in 1905 and the town site on the 353 acres on DL 103 they owned mapped out, complete with street names. There was to be a River Street, a River Drive and a Water Street. The government even built a bridge to cross the river. Because it required a steep descent to it and ascent from it on the other side was extremely steep, it was unpopular and considered dangerous. Their plan depended on the railway coming to Hazelton but, when it became clear that it would not, the plan soon withered. Some reports suggest McCoskrie may have donated a small part of his land to the Hazelton Hospital.
May Hogan
A few years after his wife Alice died and with his children growing up and leaving home, Horace Wrinch married Eva May Hogan, the hospital secretary. May spent over twenty years in Hazelton and her contribution to the hospital and its success should not be forgotten.
May was Irish and had come out from Dublin in 1893 with her mother and father, the missionary ‘Father’ William Hogan (although he was Anglican). The Hogans had been living at Port Simpson when Horace arrived there in the autumn of 1900 and stayed for a few days on his way up to Kispiox. It is likely that she and Horace first met then. Horace was recently married and almost 35 years old. May was a few days shy of her nineteenth birthday. After qualifying as a nurse she came to the Hazelton Hospital as Ladies Superintendent and matron in 1912.
She took a full part in the Hazelton community, as did her mother, a highly respected and well-loved figure in the community, who had come to Hazelton in 1914 after her husband died. Both served on the Red Cross Committee during the war. May was also musical and played the piano at festivities in the community.
In May 1917 she enlisted in the Canadian Army Medical Corps as a nursing sister and left for Europe at the end of June. Initially she was with the No. 16 Canadian General Hospital at Orpington, Kent. But the beginning of February 1918 found her in France at the 10th Canadian Stationary Hospital at Calais. She sent back a German helmet as a souvenir to her mother at the hospital. Armistice Day in November found her still there, just back from two week’s leave in England. After the war she spent some time at the 3rd Canadian General Hospital, and at other military hospitals in England, before returning to Hazelton via New York.
When May returned to Hazelton in 1919, her position at the hospital as Ladies Superintendent had long been filled by someone else and so she became the hospital secretary, taking some of the administrative load off Dr. Wrinch, who was spending more and more time in Vancouver. In 1927 she and Horace married in Vancouver. In 1936 she and Horace retired from Hazelton and went to live in Toronto. But they soon returned to Vancouver, where Horace died in 1939. May herself died in 1945.
The poignant photograph below shows a young girl with her life ahead of her. It was taken in Dublin by W. McRae a year or so before she came out with her parents in 1893. (Photo: my own collection)
Early Hospitals in British Columbia
When Hazelton Hospital opened in 1904, it was the only hospital in the northern interior of BC, apart from a small one in Atlin on the Yukon border. The closest hospitals to the east were in Edmonton and to the west were on the coast. Far to the south, the three-room Cariboo Hospital had opened in 1863 at Williams Creek, near the mining town of Barkerville. When Hazelton Hospital opened it had 17 beds. In July 1909, the Omineca Herald reported that, with 22 beds occupied, the Hazelton Hospital was the fullest it had ever been.
In the Colony of Vancouver Island, The Royal (Home) Hospital in Victoria, located at the corner of Yates and Broad Streets, was recorded as having been opened in November 1858, with the first patient being admitted on November 27. Bishop Cridge was one of the organizers and became its treasurer. This led to a new hospital on acquired land, which in turn led to the Marine Hospital and eventually to the Royal Jubilee Hospital. The first hospital in the Colony of British Columbia appears to have been the Royal Columbian Hospital which opened in New Westminster on 4th Street and Agnes Street on 7 October, 1862.
Vancouver General Hospital, in its earliest form, opened with 35 beds in 1888/9. St. Paul’s opened in Vancouver on 28th, 1894 with 25 beds. In the next decade a number of small hospitals, mostly private or run by religious bodies, also opened across the Province.
The nurses’ training school at Vancouver General opened in 1898 with 8 students. By 1922 this had grown to 111. Hazelton Hospital nurses’ training school opened in 1904, three years before St. Paul’s Hospital opened its own nurses’ training school with 14 students.
Hazelton Transportation about 1909
At this time horse, horse and buggy and, in winter, dog sled were the means of transportation on land. Within five years Dr. Horace Wrinch, the pioneer missionary in Hazelton, B.C., would buy an automobile and within ten years aeroplanes would be landing at Mission Point across the Bulkley River from Hazelton. Below, the Wrinch children in horse and buggy in front of Hazelton Hospital.(Photo: my own collection)
Making Ice Cream
When Horace Wrinch built the Hazelton Hospital in 1904 he also built an ice-house. The ice was brought from the Hospital Lake a mile or so away. Ice has many important uses in a hospital. Ice cream may not have been life-saving but it was certainly something that was considered very well worth having. Here Horace, on the right, is making ice cream. The ingredients were placed into a thin drum which was then sunk into a larger container that contained ice and salt. Since milk and cream won’t freeze until the temperature is 20F (-6.7C), the salt melted the ice and produced a brine that was cold enough to provide the refrigeration. (Photo: from my collection)
Mystery Photograph on the Skeena River
Horace Wrinch took this photograph of his wife Alice with a camera that took glass slides. She is the lady sitting on the steps wearing the grey dress and demure white collar. Since he disposed of this camera and moved up to a more modern camera in about 1902, we can date this photograph to between 1900 and 1902. Something about this photograph suggests to me that it was not taken at Hazelton or Kispiox. The clear slope of the land and the trees to my mind suggests the coast. Was it perhaps taken in Port Essington on the journey up to Hazelton in the autumn of 1900? Or perhaps that summer of 1901 when he and Alice were down on the coast helping Dr. Bolton deal with an epidemic there? And who were those people? (Photo: my own collection)
William Duncan's Black Currant Bush
On 17th May, 1925, the Province recorded that all the black currant bushes in northern British Columbia stemmed from one plant sent to the missionary William Duncan on the coast at Metlakatla. Reportedly, Duncan sent to England for a cutting. One was brought out to him by sailing ship round the Horn. Duncan sent cuttings to other missionaries in the north. Rev. John Field, the Anglican Missionary in Hazelton, planted one, not in his own garden because it was unfenced and would not have survived the depredations of dogs and other roving animals, but in the fenced garden of his neighbour. In 1925, this black currant bush, by then huge, was growing in the garden of Sperry Cline, another Hazelton pioneer.
This echoes the story of Captain Aemilius Simpson (1792-1831), the Hudson’s Bay Company captain and explorer of the coast, after whom Port Simpson, near present day Prince Rupert, was named. Reportedly, at a dinner party before leaving England, a lady slipped some apple pips into his waistcoat pocket, asking him to plant them when he arrived on the coast. Discovering them there next time he wore the waistcoat, which was at the Hudson’s Bay Company site at Fort Vancouver (near Vancouver, Washington), he planted them. Flourishing, these, it is said, were the first apple trees in the Pacific North West.
Read moreHazelton Hospital Nurses
Hazelton Hospital ( Wrinch Memorial Hospital) in Hazelton British Columbia
Back row: Joy Ford (1922-1925), Ella McCutcheon (1919-1922), Beatrice Vera McColl (1921-1924), Kathleen Gibson (1923-1926)
Front row: Elizabeth Nock, (1920-1924), Nina Hickman (1922-1925), S.A. Watkins (Matron), Ruth Bolivar (1921-1924) (Photo : My own collection)
Rules for Patients at the Hazelton Hospital-1909
In a letter of April 1909, Dr. Horace Wrinch wrote to the Methodist Mission Rooms in Toronto and set out the rules he had laid down for patients at the Hazelton Hospital.
Rules
1. Meal Hours: Breakfast —7.30 to 8.00 a.m.; Dinner—12.00 to 1.00 p.m.; Tea— 5.00 to 6.00 p.m.
2. Patients may receive visitors, at the discretion of the attending physician, any time between the hours of 10.00 a.m. and 9.30 p.m.
3. Visitors must obtain permission from the attending physician or lady superintendent before leaving any article of food, such as fresh fruit, candies, or luxuries of any kind, with any patient.
4. Patients are invited to use the privileges of the verandah or balcony as much as possible but must not go into the room of any other patient, or into the kitchen or other apartments of the hospital, except by permission of the lady superintendent.
5. In certain cases smoking may be permitted on the balcony or verandah, but not inside the hospital.
6. Holders of tickets will be given as good accommodation as is available at any time required.
7. Gas must be turned out at 10.00 p.m. [At this time the hospital was lit by acetylene gas, with equipment supplied by the Siche Gas Company.] [Original letter is in the T. Egerton Shore papers at the United Church of Canada Archives in Toronto.]