The Millar Addition is a suburb of
Prince George, British Columbia
Prince George is the largest city in northern British Columbia, Canada, with a population of 74,004 in the metropolitan area. It is often called the province's "northern capital" or sometimes the "spruce capital" because it is the hub city for ...
,
Canada
Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by tot ...
. It is named in honor of its developer,
Charles Vance Millar
Charles Vance Millar (June 28, 1854 – October 31, 1926) was a Canadian lawyer and financier. He was the president and part-owner of the Toronto brewery of O'Keefe Brewery. He also owned racehorses, including the 1915 King's Plate–winning h ...
, who later became famous for leaving behind the most notorious
will in Canadian history, which was the catalyst for the
Stork Derby
The Great Stork Derby was a contest held from 1926 to 1936. Female residents of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, competed to produce the most babies in order to qualify for an unusual bequest in a will.
Background
The race was the product of a scheme ...
.
History
When the construction of the
Grand Trunk Pacific Railway
The Grand Trunk Pacific Railway was a historic Canadian transcontinental railway running from Fort William, Ontario (now Thunder Bay) to Prince Rupert, British Columbia, a Pacific coast port. East of Winnipeg the line continued as the National Tra ...
was announced in the early 1900s, many new towns were built and promoted along the proposed route. Some were built by the railway themselves, while others were built by land speculators, who were hoping to get in on the ground floor before the railway was completed. Sometimes this created a great deal of rivalry. In Prince George, then known as Fort George, there was more rivalry than usual. By the time the railway was ready to purchase land for a townsite there in 1910, two rival ones had already been built,
South Fort George and
Central Fort George, each of them bordering a
Lheidli T'enneh village and reserve.
Not wanting to buy into either of these rival townsites, the Grand Trunk Pacific began negotiating to purchase the
First Nations
First Nations or first peoples may refer to:
* Indigenous peoples, for ethnic groups who are the earliest known inhabitants of an area.
Indigenous groups
*First Nations is commonly used to describe some Indigenous groups including:
**First Natio ...
property, but were continually foiled by Central Fort George's promoter, George Hammond, who invited the Chief of Fort George "to tea" on two separate occasions to make sure the Chief knew just what the land was worth to the railway and advised him not to sell. As the negotiations dragged on, an agent for Charles Millar, then the owner of the
BC Express Company, successfully made a deal with the Chief and their spokesman, Father
Nicolas Coccola
Nicolas Coccola (December 12, 1854–March 1, 1943) was a French Oblate missionary in British Columbia, Canada from 1880 until his death in 1943.
He spent 63 years in different regions of the province, working among the Shuswap, Kootenai, Da ...
. When the railway learned that yet another townsite was going to be built on the very land they wanted the most they appealed to Ottawa and Millar's deal was negated. In the end the GTP settled out of court and sold Millar of the property for $59,296, which Millar subdivided and promoted in 1914. It has been theorized that the railway resented having to sell the land to Millar and struck back by building low-level bridges on the upper
Fraser River, effectively blocking one of Millar's sternwheelers, the
''BC Express'', from working on her profitable route from Fort George to
Tête Jaune Cache
Tête, head in French, may refer to :
* ''Tête'' (sculpture), a 1912 work of art by Amedeo Modigliani; one of the most expensive sculptures ever sold
* "Je danse dans ma tête", a 1991 song from the Dion chante Plamondon album by Céline Dion
* ...
.
Modern day
Today, Millar Addition is primarily a residential area and is home to some of the city's oldest heritage homes, some dating back to the early 1920s.
References
External links
The Village of Lheidli1914 in Prince George from Settler's Effects
{{coord missing, British Columbia
Neighbourhoods in Prince George, British Columbia