Parsonville is a ghost town on the east shore of the

Fraser River The Fraser River is the longest river within British Columbia, Canada, rising at Fraser Pass near Blackrock Mountain in the Rocky Mountains and flowing for , into the Strait of Georgia just south of the City of Vancouver. The river's annual d ...

approximately opposite Lillooet. On BC Highway 99, the locality is by road about northeast of Pemberton, northwest of Lytton, and west of

Kamloops Kamloops ( ) is a city in south-central British Columbia, Canada, at the confluence of the South flowing North Thompson River and the West flowing Thompson River, east of Kamloops Lake. It is located in the Thompson-Nicola Regional District, w ...

Name origin

From about 1859, Otis Parsons, who supervised the team that built the section of the

Douglas Road The Douglas Road, a.k.a. the Lillooet Trail, Harrison Trail or Lakes Route, was a goldrush-era transportation route from the British Columbia Coast to the Interior (NB another route known as the Lillooet Trail was the Lillooet Cattle Trail, which ...

to the head of Anderson Lake, operated the Parsonville ferry until his death. Presumably, he employed others to run the day-to-day affairs. From 1871, he was captaining Fraser River

steamboat A steamboat is a boat that is marine propulsion, propelled primarily by marine steam engine, steam power, typically driving propellers or Paddle steamer, paddlewheels. Steamboats sometimes use the ship prefix, prefix designation SS, S.S. or S/S ...

s and drowned in 1875.

Goldrush settlement

About opposite the Seton River mouth, this prospectors' shanty town sprang up on the east bank of the Fraser during the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush (upper canyon) but rapidly emptied during the Cariboo Gold Rush. Although impossible to precisely place any of the settlements, Marysville was believed to be adjacent to the north and Fort Berens to the south. At the time, Parsonville was a fair-sized settlement on the flats. Jewish merchant Felix Neufelder owned a branch store. Crawford and Matheson built and ran the Parsonville House (1862) catering to travellers, one of the more substantial buildings. However, none of the early residents had legal tenure. In 1863, Alexander Kennedy preempted this acreage.

Early roads

In June 1862, the

Royal Engineers The Corps of Royal Engineers, usually called the Royal Engineers (RE), and commonly known as the ''Sappers'', is a corps of the British Army. It provides military engineering and other technical support to the British Armed Forces and is heade ...

roadbuilding crew, under Sgt. Major John McMurphy, camped at Parsonville. From "Mile 0", the Old Cariboo Road had advanced about northward to Alexandria by August 1863. In 1862, a tollbooth existed at Parsonville, and Otis Parsons and his partner named Nelson were running a successful freight business. However, traffic diminished when the new

Cariboo Road The Cariboo Road (also called the Cariboo Wagon Road, the Great North Road or the Queen's Highway) was a project initiated in 1860 by the Governor of the Colony of British Columbia, James Douglas. It involved a feat of engineering stretching fro ...

via

Ashcroft Ashcroft may refer to: Places * Ashcroft, British Columbia, a village in Canada **Ashcroft House in Bagpath, Gloucestershire, England—eponym of the Canadian village * Ashcroft, New South Wales, a suburb of Sydney, Australia * Ashcroft, Colorado, ...

, bypassed Lillooet in 1864. Parsonville quickly faded and Lillooet became "Mile 0". What had been the leading town in 1858 was merely a gold prospecting site by the 1880s.

Jonathan Hoiten Scott

J.H. Scott had grown several crops of the finest leaf tobacco prior to buying from Kennedy, who had pre-empted the property months earlier. In 1938, George Matheson Murray unveiled a monument at the western end of the Parsonville plain. The bronze plaque attached to the 7-ton granite boulder noted that Scott grew and processed the first tobacco on the BC mainland 1858–1864. In summer 1865, Scott purchased the machinery from the steamer ''Champion'', which had worked on

Seton Lake Seton Lake is a freshwater fjord draining east via the Seton River into the Fraser River at the town of Lillooet, about long, in area and lies at an elevation of . Its depth is . The lake is natural in origin but was raised slightly as part of ...

, to build a steam-powered flour mill. The mill, which was operating by September 1866, relocated to

Clinton Clinton is an English toponymic surname, indicating one's ancestors came from English places called Glympton or Glinton.Hanks, P. & Hodges, F. ''A Dictionary of Surnames''. Oxford University Press, 1988 Clinton has frequently been used as a given ...

in 1868.

Railway

In early 1915, the

Pacific Great Eastern Railway The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of Earth's five oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Southern Ocean (or, depending on definition, to Antarctica) in the south, and is bounded by the continen ...

(PGE) built a rail bridge across the Fraser. PGE established a divisional point and erected a station and four-stall roundhouse at East Lillooet (former Parsonville vicinity). The 1931 route realignment completely bypassed this locality.

Footnotes

References

* {{coord missing, British Columbia Ghost towns in British Columbia