School Name History

John Cunningham Maclure was born in Wigtownshire, Scotland in 1831. He married Martha McIntyre in 1854 and then became part of a Corps of Engineers working for the British Government. He volunteered to leave his home and country for the new colony in British Columbia. The Royal Engineers’ mission was to travel to the new colony, survey and build roads, construct bridges and homes, and keep order. He set sail for North America on the La Planta on September 2, 1858. The ship crossed the Isthmus of Panama and came up the west coast, eventually arriving in Esquimalt, B.C.

Maclure helped survey the area of Queensborough (now New Westminster) with the other Royal Engineers. In Fort Langley on November 19, 1858, he witnessed Governor James Douglas proclaim that the areas of New Caledonia (central region) and Columbia (the southern region) were now the Colony of British Columbia.

Martha left Ireland to join her husband in 1859 with her three-year-old daughter Sarah and baby Susan. They had a long voyage, six months and three days around Cape Horn. She was greatly relieved to find her husband was alive and well and there to greet her.  The family lived in Sapperton for the first nine years. Sapperton, now a neighbourhood in New Westminster, was a settlement that grew up where the Royal Engineers had their original camp for their soldiers, also known as sappers. John Charles Maclure (known as Charles to avoid confusion with his father John Maclure) and his brothers Samuel and Frederick were born in Sapperton.

While surveying, John Cunningham travelled to the Matsqui area and fell in love with the beauty of the surroundings. He decided he would make this area his home and claimed six hundred forty acres of prime land.  John and Martha Maclure and their children were the first Europeans to settle in the Abbotsford area. in September 1868 Maclure, Martha and their two daughters came by paddle steamer Reliance from New Westminster and docked at St. Mary’s Mission (now Mission City) on the Fraser River. They noticed hazelnut trees, full of nuts, growing on a hillside as they approached Abbotsford. They named their new home “Hazelbrae” after the Scottish word, “brae” or “hill.” They were transported there by two First Nations paddlers who took them across the Fraser River and up Matsqui Creek. Until they got a log cabin built, the family lived in a tent. The First Nations people helped them settle in Eventually the family built a two-storey house.

Maclure resigned from the Royal Engineers and started a new career building the Collins Overland Telegraph. Before the telephone was invented, the telegraph was used to send messages along wires using Morse code. The first message on the completed telegraph line reported an historic event, the assassination of the American president, Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865. John Maclure was put in charge of Western Telegraph. His children all became proficient in Morse code, because there was a telegraph station operating from their home. His daughter Sarah was only fourteen when she sent reports on the Franco-Prussian War. She later became the first woman editor of a daily newspaper, the Vancouver World.

John Cunningham Maclure was an important part of Abbotsford’s development, but so too was John Charles Maclure; some of his brothers and sisters also had a role in B.C.’s history. In their early days, the children had chores to do, but they roamed the land freely. At age twelve, the boys were given guns and they all became expert shots. Sam and Charles rowed to St. Mary’s Mission across the Fraser River to get the mail.  Frequently the boys visited the First Nations reserve about eight kilometres down the Fraser River. From their Sto:lo friends there, they learned to speak Chinook, the fur trade language that was a mix of many languages.  The nearest school was in New Westminster, so the children had little formal schooling until Charles was eleven.  A Mission priest noticed Charles could read but not write and urged the parents to send the boys to New Westminster. They attended school there for a year, then in 1873, a school was built for the children of the three settler families in the area. After six years of schooling, at age sixteen, Charles went to work as a telegraph operator in Cache Creek.  In 1883 he took his brother Sam’s place as an operator in the village of Granville, now downtown Vancouver.  Soon after, he moved to Victoria to work for the Robert Ward Company, eventually becoming a director of the insurance company.

During a holiday visit to Hazelbrae in 1904, Charles heard from his father that the Canadian Pacific Railroad was likely to build a branch line from Sumas.  John Maclure probably knew this from his friendship with Henry Braithwaite Abbott who was the General Superintendent of the Canadian Pacific Railroad in B.C.  Charles saw a business opportunity. He bought one hundred sixty acres of land from his father.  He sold most of his interest in the property to his associates at the Robert Ward Company on the condition that they would build a railway station in Abbotsford Village.  He wanted to ensure that a town centre would develop and grow at Abbotsford. Subsequently, the C.P.R. was given the right-of-way on eight and a half acres of the land and the railway station was built. Charles named the town Abbottsford in honour of his family’s friend Henry Abbott.

The railroad was not Charles’s only contribution to Abbotsford’s development. In 1905, on another visit to Hazelbrae, Charles noticed clay in a hole that Sara and Fred were digging to make a root cellar in the hill behind the house.  He had that clay tested, but it wasn’t good for brick making. Still, he decided to go prospecting with his pick across the Matsqui Prairie to the hills.  He discovered a seam of good quality fireclay on Sumas Mountain.  He and his family formed the Vancouver Fireclay Company.  This led to the establishment of the clay mines at Kilgard, named for the tall chimneys that marked the kilns (ovens) of the brick plant there.  Charles designed a railway system that ran on trestles down to the C.P.R. so that the bricks could be easily shipped to markets around the world. Clayburn, the first company town in B.C., was built there to house the workers of the brickyard.  There was a church, a school, a general store, and brick homes for the workers designed by brother Sam, a prominent B.C. architect.

The brick plant at Clayburn closed in 1930, but the plant in Kilgard continued.

John Cunningham Maclure died in 1907 and was known as the “grand old man of Matsqui.”