It should come as little surprise to regular readers of The Journal that I’m interested in history. Since I started my “Golden Country” bi-weekly feature in September 2012, I’ve written more than 140,000 words about local history in that space alone (and for all those who’ve asked “Will you ever run out of historical things to write about?” the answer is “I doubt it.”).
Last week I wrote about my parents, Bill and Heather Hacock, moving to Penticton after living in Ashcroft for 24 years. While here, they lived in a 2,400-square-foot house, which meant that as they prepared to downsize to a 970-square-foot condo something (or some things) had to go.
I took what long-held family items I had space for; but inevitably there were pieces I had no room to accommodate. Among the pieces I couldn’t find space for were a beautiful handcrafted wooden table from the 1840s, and an inauspicious-looking armchair that has a nice historical pedigree.
I’ve previously written of my connection with The Revd. George Munro Grant, who accompanied Sir Sanford Fleming on his surveying expedition for the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1871, and documented the group’s travels cross-country in Ocean to Ocean. George had a first cousin, James, who in 1891 married Jessie McKay. A letter from George to his cousin James that I have in my possession is dated 16 September, 1891, and begins “All hearty congratulations on your marriage! You are now a complete man. I rejoice that your better half is from so good a stock.”
James and Jessie were my great-grandparents; their youngest son was my maternal grandfather John Grant (who, with his wife Glenna, lived in Ashcroft until his death in January 1997). James died shortly after my grandfather’s birth in 1908, and Jessie remarried. Her second husband was a lawyer—Henry O’Brien, QC—author of O’Brien’s Conveyancing, a staple of Canadian law.
Henry O’Brien came of a distinguished family; his brother Lucius O’Brien was the founding president of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1880, and was celebrated for his oil and watercolour landscape paintings of the country. Henry—as a Queen’s Council—had the ear of politicians of the era, and one of the visitors to his home to discuss politics was Sir John A. MacDonald, Canada’s first Prime Minister.
Apparently when Sir John visited Henry, his favoured seat was an armchair that has descended through the family; when I first came to know it, in the late 1960s, it was upholstered in a rather drab mouse-brown fabric. After our move to Ottawa in 1974 it was re-upholstered in a somewhat more cheery reddish cloth, and in that guise accompanied my parents back to Richmond, and then to Ashcroft, where it sat in their family-room.
However, there was no room for it in their new Penticton home; nor did we have room for it in our house in Ashcroft. Then inspiration struck: could we not find room for the chair (and the aforementioned table) at the Journal office?
The answer was that we could; and thus it is that visitors to the Journal can—if they wish—sit in the same chair that our first Prime Minister graced, so many decades ago. A cautionary note: the springs aren’t what they could be. You’ve been warned.
editorial@accjournal.ca
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