The History of
Lumby - Planning the Town
Louis
Morand came to the
Okanagan in 1882 and no doubt made friends with the
French-Canadian settlers in White Valley very soon.
In 1892 Louis bought forty acres from Quinn
Faulkner. Together the two
men laid out a town site. This new town site ran
from the south west corner at the water field,
behind the Motel, in a northerly direction, along
the alley between Park and Grandview Avenues to the
Adams property, east along Mabel Lake Road and
Maple Street to the gravel pit, south through the
P. C. Inglis land and the weigh scale to
Robatzek's, west between Bell
Pole and Ohashi
Brothers to Whitevale Road, north along Whitevale
to the old Sigalet house, then west to the pin on
the water field. The first time it was called Lumby
was August 25th, 1892.
There are two
versions of how the name "Lumby" was chosen. The
family story is that when Louis became a partner in
the hotel-under-construction with Faulkner, he
applied for a liquor licence from the Government
Agent in Vernon, promising to name the town after
him if the permit was obtained.
Others felt both
men admired Moses Lumby for his successful
endeavour in bringing the S&O Railway into the
Okanagan and that Louis had been a friend of Moses
Lumby when he lived in Vernon.
In 1892, Quinn Faulkner received a
permit to erect a two story building, forty by
forty feet, with an attached kitchen. Barnes and
Morand were the contractors. The name was to be the
"Ram's
Horn" after a
temperance newspaper published in Chicago, to which
Faulkner subscribed. We may assume that he was,
therefore, a teetotaller. A short time later Morand
had an interest in the hotel and supervised the
construction. In 1894 the hotel was destroyed by a
fire. A new hotel was started as soon as the site
was cleaned up and was ready in the spring of 1895,
this time with Morand as the sole owner.
Morand set aside a
room that the visiting doctors could use as an
office. Drs. Beckingsdale or Reinhard of Vernon
made a weekly visit to look after patients.
In 1902 Louis sold
his hotel to T.A. Norris. Almost immediately he
commenced building a new temperance hotel, the
"Morand" next to the Ram's Horn. It was more of a
boarding house than a hotel. When the Dominion
Government Telephone Company brought the telephone
line from Vernon, a switchboard was installed in
the Morand Hotel in 1912.
In June of 1895
Samuel
McIlvanie, along with Louis
Morand, Pierre
Bessette and Charlie
Levasseur proposed to built
a cheese factory. There were about three hundred
milk cows within a radius of three miles around
Lumby. Just previous to this decision, Murdoch
MacKay formed the White Valley Creamery and had
shipped butter to the Hudson's Bay Company. The
proposal looked good, but no sooner had they
started on their plans when Manitoba shipped butter
and cheese to the Okanagan which sold at a lower
price than the locals could meet. It was not until
1904 that a creamery was built on Catt's land
by Federal Government funds. It was an up and down
local business for many years.
"Dure Meadows
Road" just west of Lumby, was named for an early
pre-emptor, Aneas
Dewar (pronounced
'Dure').
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