museums | houses new westminster bc by tanya southcott
colonialism frontier gothic revival gold rush british columbia
nostalgia, new westminster and irving house colonial texts
To visit Irving House is to step back in time to the earliest days of colonial British Columbia when the promise of gold brought pioneers and prospectors in great numbers to New Westminster and the Fraser River. Captain William Irving, his wife Elizabeth Jane and their five children arrived in 1865. A Scotsman, he had followed the goldrush to the American west coast where he made his wealth in the riverboat trade carrying men, their equipment and supplies to the goldfields. Irving saw in the Fraser River the ideal business opportunity. Through his sternwheeler company he established the necessary transportation link between Vancouver Island and the interior goldfields of the province with New Westminster at its hub. The arrival of the Irving family in New Westminster was noted in the local newspaper, The British Columbian , under the heading ‘Local Improvement’. Particular attention was paid to the construction of their house considered to be ‘… not only the handsomest, but the best and most home-like house of which British Columbia can yet boast’. 1 Built in Gothic Revival by local architect James Syme it reflected both the status of the Irvings in early BC and the high degree of design and craftsmanship available in New Westminster. The house remained in the family for three generations until it was sold to the City of New Westminster by Captain Irving’s granddaughters, Naomi and Manuella Briggs. After almost 100 years the building was still very close to original; exterior and interior elements remained intact, including a large collection of
original furnishings. With the encouragement of the Native Sons and Daughters of British Columbia, Irving House was reopened as New Westminster’s Historic Centre on 19th November 1950. Today the house stands much as it did almost 150 years ago, overlooking the city that has grown around it. The oldest house museum in the province, it is considered one of the finest of preserved Victorian houses open to the public. H ouse-museum refers to a single historic structure whose maintenance, care and interpretation provide the basis for a museum. Interpretive emphasis is on the building itself and the lives of the individuals related to it. Unlike a conventional museum in which artefacts are displayed against a neutral background, the historic house provides a spatial context and framework for the interpretation of its contents. The site, structure, furnishings, landscape, family and personal possessions are used to preserve a particular past and communicate it to future generations. The single most important artefact in the collection, however, is the house. As architecture it provides the container for the abstraction of time. Irving House offers New Westminster a modest museum in which to store and display the accumulation of the community’s heritage: it functions as both a show case and an educational tool whose authority comes from the authenticity of its objects and the degree of accuracy with which they are presented. Its strength is in the narrative it provides, the story told by objects in the context
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On Site review 20: archives and museums
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