August02_2010

Botanical Glossary - Home - References Cited

Photos - Continuing east along Highway 6 a very old house on a ranch property attracted my attention. One of the interesting features of this house is a trellis in the back yard and one in the driveway at the main entrance. Each of these wooden structures has little scale model buildings attached to the top like they are part of a Norman Rockwell town. Parked prominently in the front yard is an old freight wagon undercarriage and a white picket fence separating the driveway from the lawn.

This is the Duteau House at 5575 Highway 6 (Lavington Ranch) in Lavington BC. The Duteau house has two large wall dormers placed symmetrically on the front facade, and its "salt box" shape, it is easily recognizable as a very old, "vernacular" rural building.
Nelson Duteau reputedly visited the White Valley in the 1860s, during the era when Cornelius O'Keefe in Spallumcheen and Tom Ellis in Penticton were assembling their huge cattle ranches, and when Father Pandosy's Okanagan Mission was one of the few spots of European settlement along Okanagan Lake. However, Duteau did not buy his 800 acres here until 1883, and at some point over the next decade built the house (the first confirmed report of its existence was a visit by H.R. Denison to the ranch foreman, Reuben Swift (source, OHS 1949 page 150). Like Barrington Price near Keremeos and Eli Lequime and Mr. Brent in Kelowna, Duteau built the first grist mill in White Valley on a creek near his house, an essential feature of an established farming community.
Reuben Swift married one of Duteau's daughters, inherited part of the property and later bought out the other family members, but around 1905 he sold the entire ranch to a man named James Buchanan, an investor in Coldstream Ranch. Lavington Ranch (the name now attached to the community just east of here) came from Buchanan's home at Lavington Park, Petworth in Sussex.
The reference to the building being of squared logs is not immediately evident, as the house was sheathed with drop siding, to give it a more contemporary look a century ago.

Click here for more photos of Highway 6 for this day.