1887 – The Birth of The Board of Trade

1887 - The Birth of The Board of Trade

The early years of The Vancouver Board of Trade—celebrating its 120th anniversary this year—were rocky. Funds were severely limited and the city was small and still recovering from its devastation in the Great Fire of June 13, 1886. But the grit and determination that brought the earliest settlers to this area had not diminished and, as has often been mentioned, the men and women of the new city began to build while the destroying fire’s embers were still cooling.

It helped that the Canadian Pacific Railway had reached the city in May of 1887. Now the city—and its business—would really begin to grow. (The population when the train arrived was about 1,000. At the 1891 census four years later it was 14,000.)

A few months after the railway’s arrival The Board was established. There’s some uncertainty over the precise date: The Board’s own site says September 22, 1887, but at its 50th anniversary celebrations in 1937 the president of the day, Walter Carson, cited a date of November 24. Perhaps what happened was that the idea of the organization was hatched on that September date, and the formal incorporation happened in November. There were 40 members.

The first president was David Oppenheimer, the second was the splendidly named Ebenezer Vining Bodwell. Bodwell has a direct connection with the present day: his grandson is MP Garth Turner.

As an indication of The Board’s fragile youth, note that a local businessman, CPR executive William Salsbury, stepped in at a time when members found it difficult to raise money for rent, and donated the use of a meeting place. Salsbury—who would be the CPR’s Pacific Division treasurer here for 35 years—could claim to be a pioneer among pioneers: he’d arrived locally on July 4, 1886, aboard the first train to Port Moody, nearly a year before the railway got to Vancouver. He was president of The Board in 1892. A Vancouver street is named for him.

Despite its parlous financial situation The Board carried substantial clout from the beginning. Following its first annual dinner on March 5, 1889 the Daily News-Advertiser, in reporting on an event that lasted two-and-a-half hours and that featured 43 separate menu items—all 43 were listed on Page One—printed the name of every single guest at the banquet. They included politicians, headed by BC’s Premier A.E.B. Davie and most of his cabinet, the mayors and reeves of a dozen towns, senators, CPR biggies William Van Horne, Thomas Shaughnessy and Sir Donald Smith, judges, business leaders, consuls, military men and more, in tiny print covering a third of the front page.

The Board’s original 40 members were in a very much smaller city, and at the beginning decided to meet just four times a year. From the beginning some of the same concerns The Board deals with today were on the agenda: costs of transporting goods, foreign competition, tourism and the search for new business. The December 5, 1888 News-Advertiser reported that The Board had received a letter from a “large tanning firm in Glasgow, Scotland as to the prospects for a tannery in Vancouver and asking for details as to hides, bark, etc. The Board’s secretary would gather the data and pass it along to the Council at its next meeting.”

Getting together every three months wasn’t quite fast enough for inquiries of this kind! At a regular meeting in late 1901 Board member W. Godfrey (who had been president in 1897) announced that at the next AGM he would recommend that the Board meet monthly, instead of quarterly. 1901 was a momentous year in another respect: The Board moved into a new home, with its own office, where the secretary, William Skene, could be “permanently located during business hours.” The new quarters were on the second floor of the Molson’s Bank Building, which went up in 1898 and stood where Harbour Centre does today, at the northeast corner of Hastings and Seymour. (Molson’s Bank had started in 1855 in Quebec, was taken over in 1924 by the Bank of Montreal.)

William Skene’s name stands out prominently in The Board’s early history. As secretary Skene was the Darcy Rezac of his day. He had begun as a member of The Board, then was hired as its administrator and toiled diligently and competently for more than 20 years in that post. The Board’s annual general meetings during his tenure never failed to lavish praise upon him.

The Board carried a big stick even in those early years: no fewer than four of the first 14 presidents (Oppenheimer, Tisdall, Buscombe and Malkin) had been or would become mayors of the city, and another (Hendry) had been mayor of New Westminster. One tradition continues to the present day: virtually all of the early presidents were very prominent in local business, men like Richard Alexander, Henry Bell-Irving and James Keith. Alexander ran the Hastings Mill, Bell-Irving led a company that became the world’s largest salmon canner and James Keith was a well-known realtor whose name lives on in the north shore’s Keith Road.

Incidentally, many of the names that pepper the early newspaper reports on The Board’s activities also, logically, turn up in Robert A.J. McDonald’s detailed history of the city’s early business growth, Making Vancouver 1863-1913 published in 1996 by UBC Press.

An indication that The Board had become an established force in the city’s business world is shown in an editorial in the December 12, 1900 Daily Province.

In a story headlined NORTHERN SERVICE the Province wrote: “If a stranger, whether possessed of business training or not, had have been present at the meeting of the Vancouver board of trade last night he could not have failed to grasp one of the strongest factors in the up-building of this region. In range of ground covered, in energy and directness of purpose, and high executive ability, the board stands second to none in the dominion.”

And as an indication of the growth of The Board note that it began with 40 members. At that 50th birthday celebration membership had grown to 1,450. Today membership stands at 5,600, highest in The Board’s history, and 140 times the original number!