Laurel Point Environmental Clean-Up Long Overdue

An environmental clean-up program that could cost as much as $25 million is about to be launched to remove a century’s worth of industrial contamination at Victoria’s Laurel Point.
The City of Victoria’s share is about 10 per cent of that budget for remediating the point’s park after the work is done.
It’s known that the toxic stew left behind by previous owners includes metals, petroleum hydro-carbons, chlorophenols and polychlorinated biphenals (the notorious PCBs). The contaminated soil will be removed and replaced with clean fill, both to be carried to and fro by barge.
The project, expected to take up to 18 months, is set to begin in September.
Today’s Laurel Point, the site of a luxury hotel, is nothing like it was when Jacob Sehl bought it as “a barren rocky spot” in Victoria’s Inner Harbour. There, where the south shore jutted out, where once had been a First Nations burial ground, is where he’d chosen to establish the city’s leading manufactury of fine furniture.
He didn’t just build a factory, he built his home there, nothing less than a mansion as befitting his financial success in the home furnishings business.
Years before, in 1858, Sehl and two brothers had come to British Columbia, en route to the Cariboo gold fields. They hoped to make their fortunes there, of course. But it was 30 years later, in Victoria, as a maker of furniture, that the enterprising German immigrant struck it rich.
In fact, by 1881, Sehl’s factory and showrooms at Government and Langley streets formed one of the largest businesses in the city. It was reported that Sehl’s fine furniture, 90 per cent of which was produced on the spot from local woods, would “make a young housekeeper’s eyes sparkle to see…the temptations to purchase must be well-nigh impossible.”
Although Vancouver Island maple didn’t offer the more intricately patterned grains such as bird’s-eye and curly, it was claimed that the furniture manufactured of maple from Comox and Sooke compared favourably with articles produced by Eastern firms.
The furniture business prospered to the point that, by 1881, Jacob Sehl had overflowed his downtown premises and was using adjoining structures for warehousing. This set him to looking for larger premises in which to install the “12 skilled artisans” on his payroll.
Thus it was that the manufacturer moved, lock, stock and maple, to then barren Laurel Point, where he constructed a large factory of brick and a palatial residence which soon became known as one of the finest and largest in Victoria, “both in the beauty of its outside appearance and in the elegance and completeness of its furnishings”. Built of wood upon foundations of stone and brick, and erected upon the “solid rock of the point,” the mansion cost the grand sum of $25,000—a very respectable sum in that pre-inflationary age.
With its terraced gardens, balconies and lookout tower, or cupola, the Sehl manor became a familiar landmark to those entering and leaving Victoria Harbour. Designed by C.E. Apponyi, a noted architect of the day, it was described as being a “unique and costly residence.” Aside from its lookout from which owner Sehl and his family could enjoy a panoramic view of as-yet-undeveloped James Bay, the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the silvery Olympic Mountains, the home was acclaimed by visitors for its spacious halls and grand staircase.
Adjacent to the house, on the seaward side of Laurel Point, were the factory and outbuildings. Three storeys high, and built of brick, the furniture plant boasted all of the latest in technological developments. Here, Sehl’s artisans produced “rich bedroom sets, beautiful sideboards, handsome wardrobes, comfortable rocking chairs, cozy lounges and sofas, superb extension dining tables, together with a thousand and one other articles…”
But, on the evening of Jan. 15, 1894, tragedy struck the Sehl household at Laurel Point when fire reduced the fabulous house and its fortune in fine furnishings to ashes.
For two weeks Sehl had been laid up with a cold and, on the fateful night, had been in his bedroom, situated beneath the cupola on the top floor. Although he’d been out for the first time that day, he still wasn’t feeling well and, early that evening, his wife, nephew Leonard Maas, and Maas’s wife and baby who also resided in the house, visited him in his room. Earlier, Maas had been down to the cellar to stoke the hot-air furnace for the night.
Once in his uncle’s room, he was startled to see a wisp of smoke issuing from a wall register.
Instantly, Sehl later told a newspaper reporter, he “rushed down, and when I got to the foot of the stairs I found the smoke so thick that I could hardly breathe in it, and great clouds were pouring from the cellar. I could hear the flames crackling beneath. I called to my wife to get out with all hands immediately, and they came down, just as they were, without getting their hats. I got out somehow and left myself, in my slippers. The smoke was so thick, we would not have passed through many minutes later, and we were lucky to escape as we did. If it had been a little later and we had been in bed, we certainly would have been burnt to death. As it was, we lost everything except what we had on—no one carried out anything and no one could have entered the house after we left.”
Although the fire brigade under Chief Tom Deasy responded promptly, the mansion’s style of architecture, its isolation on Laurel Point, and a violent wind off the water doomed their efforts to save it. Within two hours, the handsome structure, and popular landmark, was a total loss.
(Half a century after that memorable night, Mrs. Maria Maas recalled how she, her nine-month-old daughter, husband Leonard, and Mr. and Mrs. Sehl had narrowly escaped being burned alive. “I shall never forget it,” she said, “It was such a windy night—the flames just ate up the house, and they were so high…
“When I am in bed and cannot sleep sometimes, I always think of the fire. All my wedding presents were in big cases in the house, and they all went up, too,” she sighed.)
At one point the flames had been so high that they lit up the southwestern sky and drew thousands of Victorians to watch the doomed efforts to save the two-storey mansion. When all four walls and the cupola collapsed, the firefighters turned their attention to the adjacent factory, drying sheds, stables and wharves.
The extreme heat radiated by the burning house was almost unbearable but, standing just beyond reach of the flames with boards for heat shields, firemen continued to keep the walls of the factory and drying shed, which at one point began to steam intensely, doused with water, thereby preventing the latter from bursting into flame.
“But for the fact that the rooves were of tin,” said Chief Deasy, “the wooden sheds would have perished also and passed the fire on to the factory itself.”
By this time the wind had reached almost hurricane-force and was showering millions of sparks and cinders upon the city across the harbour and threatening hundreds of wooden structures from Government Street to Quadra Street. Amazingly, in an age of wooden architecture, no other fires were ignited.
For another hour, Deasy’s men “stood the roast before it became apparent that their efforts were to be crowned with success…and by 10 o’clock, all danger was over, and the crowd of thousands who had been attracted by the brilliant illumination that had lighted the whole city…dwindled down to a few hundreds.”
The firefighters’ heroic efforts had been immeasurably aided by Sehl’s employees who’d answered the call and worked “like men” under his personal direction to move piles of lumber out of the fire’s path. Among the valuable lot of finished work saved in the factory were the “splendid new furnishings just completed for and about to be set up in the Bank of Nova Scotia building”.
Only then could the exhausted Jacob Sehl—wearing only the clothes he had on when the fire broke out, and a pair of boots loaned him by an employee—be enticed to join his family at the Driard Hotel.
For Mrs. Sehl, the loss of her beautiful home across the Harbour was too much and her health failed. Six months after the disaster on Laurel Point, Elizabeth Sehl died at the young age of 47.
Husband Jacob suffered further setbacks but he weathered the storms and, by the turn of the century, the man who, with his brothers, had sailed around the Horn 40 years before to dig for gold, was the most successful furniture manufacterer north of San Francisco. Until one day in the spring of 1904; while working in his store, he complained of the heat and sat down to rest. By the time one of his staff noticed that he wasn’t looking well, Jacob Sehl was dead.
Although correctly known as Laurel Point, for years after the Sehl furniture plant was established there, Victorians referrred to the little peninsula as Sehl’s Point. By 1900, James Bay and the southwestern shore of the Inner Harbour experienced a boom as more and more industry established there.
The next firm to settle on Laurel Point, in 1906, was Pendray’s soap and paint works. This highly successful enterprise got its start in 1881 when W.J. Pendray and W.J. Jeffree discussed ways in which to invest some of their capital. Curiously, they wanted to become involved “in some branch of industry then unrepresented in the province”. After some discussion they agreed that, “if the people were ever to become contented, happy and prosperous, they first must be clean[!].
“They discovered that a very large sum of money was spent abroad each year to purchase the soap with which the faces, hands and garments of British Columbia’s sons and daughers were purified.
They saw, too, that the great quantities of kitchen and butchers’ fats and tallow, representing several thousands of dollars annually, were wasted for want of the means to work them into merchantable articles.”
Hence, in due course, the establishment of a soap factory under the name of the House of Pendray.
Within a year, the booming soapworks had outgrown its original plant and, in 1870, the partners constructed a larger factory immediately to the west, on Humboldt Street. Steadily, Pendray and Jeffree surmounted “physical obstacles that few men would have had the pluck to face,” and branched out into the world of paint This was the beginning of what was to become a household word throughout North America, Bapco (Briish North American Paint Co.).”
In 1906 the CPR began construction of the Empress Hotel and, reluctant to have their guests overlooking a soapworks (not to mention the inevitable smell), bought the site and the prospering firm moved across the harbour to Laurel Point. That was still within sight of the Empress but, apparently, beyond he reach of the nostrils, thanks to prevailing sea breezes.
With Pendray’s accidental death in 1913, the soap business was sold and the firm concentrated upon the manufacture of paints. Bapco shut down in 1975. Prior to this, the company had made history when it linked its new plant on Laurel Point with Jeffree’s store at the corner of Government and Yates streets, via Victoria’s firs telephone.
There you have it: a furniture factory, a soapworks and a paint manufacturing plant. As it seems to have been the common practice in the old days to use any handy body of water as a garbage disposal, it should come as no surprise, a century later, that the shores of Laurel Point are heavily contaminated with heavy metals and other undesirable by-products of an earlier industrial age.
Transport Canada and the City of Victoria should be commended for their commitment to cleaning up the environment.