The original Toronto Street School (c1889).--PHOTO COURTESY Esplanade ArTS AND HERITAGE CENTRE
Ewart Duggan House, a Provincial Historic Resource, has a high profile, next to the Esplanade. In addition to the showpiece volunteer garden, June tours have been on-going of the oldest brick house in the province, built in 1887. The 60,000 brick were handmade by B.C. McCord and Company beside Ross Creek, hauled by horse and wagon and then erected in six weeks!
Who was Benjamin C. McCord? He was born in c1841 in Canada West (Ontario), where his parents and siblings had emigrated from Glasgow, Scotland. He grew up on the farm near Perth. He arrived in British Columbia about 1858 with his older brother William, probably drawn by the gold rushes.
Getting from Ontario to BC in those days before transcontinental railways meant travelling the arduous Oregon Trail or taking a boat to Panama, crossing the isthmus, and another boat up the coast.
Instead of finding gold, he ended up hewing lumber. In c1876, Ben McCord married Margaret Eihu, the daughter of a native Hawaiian and Cowichan princess, at Fort Langley HBC post. They had three children by 1881, before Ben disappeared into the North-West Territories (Alberta), to Fort Macleod where his brother found work as a farming instructor on the Pikani Reserve.
Ben settled in Medicine Hat Coulee along with other squatters in 1882 before the railroad arrived. His home by the Seven Persons Creek, shared with two other men, was described as a 15′ x 16′ pine log structure with dirt floor, mud roof, one window and one door plus a stable. He was growing potatoes and oats. McCord brothers served in the Rocky Mountain Rangers during the Riel Rebellion.
In 1886, David W. Corbin, a brickmaker from Ontario, applied for an adjacent quarter section to the east. With John Ewart’s backing, Corbin and McCord were making softmud bricks, with their first project being the Tweed and Ewart warehouse. Corbin soon left for BC, but McCord carried on making bricks until 1890, including those for Ewart’s house and Toronto Street School. McCord, however, got into a legal dispute with Louis Sands and Tweed and Ewart ended up with the brickyard.
McCord then (1890) opened a coal mine upriver (later Ajax mine, now Echodale), selling out to the Crockford brothers in 1895. Active locally, he was a Director of the Agricultural Society, a Mason, and a member of the Liberal-Conservatives. He left the Hat in 1892, on a gold prospecting trip to South Africa, and on his return, moved to Lewiston BC, probably in the mining business. He sold his property to John Earl in 1898. Meanwhile, his wife remarried to Donald McPhee and had more children.
Still looking for gold, Ben McCord went to the Klondike in 1898 where he died in a mine accident in 1901 and was buried in the Masonic cemetery in Dawson City. His former brickyard had by then been taken over by the Purmal brothers who operated it for many years, and in 1929 by I-XL, the first and the last industrial clay operation in Medicine Hat’s Historic Clay District.
Malcolm Sissons is vice-president of the Historical Society of Medicine Hat and District
