By Margaret Carruthers1 First established in the 1950s, Gable Road begins at Carr’s Landing Road and ends at Gable Beach on Okanagan Lake. The road is named for the Gabel family, [but] as you can see the spelling is incorrect, the result of a slight pronunciation (or spelling) problem at the...
Just south of the old pilings for Carr’s Landing stands a heritage home known as Okanagan House. It was built in 1909 by H. R. Raymer of Kelowna for a young English adventurer Sir Edward Simons Ward and his wife Lois. Edward was educated at Eton and then travelled extensively. An avid...
‘Tis hard to believe that it’s been twenty years since the District of Lake Country was incorporated. In 1995 the four communities of Carr’s Landing, Okanagan Centre, Oyama and Winfield incorporated to form the municipality of Lake Country. It is interesting to look back at the...
“Colonel” John Brixton, an English man, lived across the lake before moving to [Okanagan] Centre where Dick Ash now lives. He took care of the lighthouse on the island in Carr’s Landing. Although a veteran of both the Boer and World War I he was not a real Colonel. That was a...
My grandfather1, John Brixton, was called The Colonel. No one really knows why, but it is likely because he resembled the picture of the sailor on “Players Tobacco” tins. Actually, the Colonel’s birth name was Mark Joseph Ellis. He was born in Islington, Middlesex, England in...
“The island [in Okanagan Lake] that many still call Whiskey Island has a colourful history. Legend has it that Interior Salish stored food and supplies on the Island in order to keep it safe from bears. Squaws who were left in charge were sometimes abducted by raiding Shuswap Indians, so it...
Allan Mills arrived in Sunnywold in 1909, joining his brother, William, who had been farming there since 1894. Allan and his wife added to their original Sunnywold pre-emption by purchasing their neighbours’ land, as it became available, from the Siddons, Whites and McLounies. The Mills’ 1340-acre...