The development of a city

The Kelowna Story: An Okanagan History (2nd edition)
by Sharron J. Simpson

Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing, 2025
$38.95  /  9781998526208

Reviewed by Harold Rhenisch

*

The Kelowna Story collects entertaining stories you might tell a new resident to Kelowna over lunch to give them a lay of the land. It is enriched by beautiful historical photographs

One of my favourite stories tells how Growers apple cider used to be made by fermenting cull apple juice and then dropping in chunks of dry ice until it had just the right amount of carbonization. How splendid!

Overall, this is a history of a kind we rarely get to see: less a history of a city of people than of its built environment, written from the point of view of the urban business class that built it. It is a great resource for anyone interested in the culture of development in British Columbia.

The colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia were created not just to take in English immigrants but to actually be England. One of the most British of settlements in the project is Kelowna. Over time, it has blended British, Canadian, American, and Prairie strands of English North American culture into an LA-North, complete with traffic and its own Napa Valley.

Sharron J. Simpson tells this story of development with pride. She loves her city and presents it in bright light. Along the way, she touches lightly on Okanagan history as a whole.

It’s a romantic approach. For example, the back cover, a famous photograph of women picking apples in the Pritchard orchard in the fall of 1914, is given without context. Men who would normally have picked that fruit were in trenches or graveyards in France. The lack of context leaves the tragedy of these brave women unnecessarily silent.

She also connects her stories to explain historical developments. Unfortunately, superlative praise for W.A.C. Bennett (BC premier from 1952-1972) and his son Bill Bennett (BC premier from 1975-1986), doesn’t make for particularly strong history. Their governments were always hotly contested — an opposition, rooted in labour, is largely silent here.

The Indigenous Syilx are also on the verge of silence in Simpson’s story. She opens with a brief history (a bit wobbly on nomenclature) of Syilx culture before and during colonial settlement. It also marks few extensions of Syilx culture into contemporary Kelowna. She even includes a lovely photograph of women rolling cigars in Kelowna’s tobacco days, without mentioning that they are Syilx women or that they are transferring traditional skills to a new world. Her interest is more in charting attempts to grow Kelowna industrially than in the struggles and stories of the workers that made it possible.

Kelowna’s long-time major industry, fruit growing, gets a cursory treatment as well. The stress of new farmers trying to survive on orchards that wouldn’t see income for ten years, and the hard work of immigrants, for whom orchards were one of the only open routes to cultural belonging, is reduced to comments about farmers failing to secure good prices because they were growing too many small, cull apples that no-one wanted to buy.

It’s true, but it’s also simplistic. To say that the volumes of fruit the industry produced were largely culls, when they came from the dominant form of fruit production in the world at the time, is a political distortion. In an industry that awkwardly blended socialism and capitalism, fruit packers and centralized selling played their own roles in the industry, both towards its success and towards its decline.

On a side note, Simpson’s family was intimately involved: they made the millions of wooden boxes that the apples were shipped in every year. A large and fascinating section of the book is devoted to this history. And think of it: a huge volume of apples that were culled out and never saw a box would certainly have impacted the family’s finances and would be fair cause for conversations within a family trying to turn a profit and pay its workers. It must have been hard to keep things in balance, when the boxes were needed on the spot, yet one never knew how many. Talk about stressful!

Simpson’s tight cultural focus creates other silences as well. For example, her portraits of the Rutland and Glenmore districts of Kelowna stress that in both of them English middle class settlement was vigorously defended. That Rutland evolved instead into a working class district, and from that into a proudly ethnic one, gets little air here. Similarly, in Glenmore’s post Second World War period, more than a few English upper middle class houses and orchards became German, before they evolved into the middle class suburbs they are today. The German continuation of the English dream played a role in the city’s development, but like the Syilx, the Métis, the Sikhs, and workers in general, it is underrepresented here.

A story present in more detail is Kelowna’s founding myth: the Oblate priest Charles Pandosy started agriculture in Kelowna in 1859 (or 1860, depending on how you count things). That’s important history. The part of it Simpson tells is important, too: the myth created by realtors in 1898 to make the land appeal to English horticultural settlers.

There are many versions of this myth. The version Simpson tells doesn’t mention earlier subsistence ranching by mixed blood Canadiens and notes that Pandosy chose his Mission site because it had better land than his original site at the edge of the Syilx village north of the Kelowna Airport. It doesn’t mention his frosty reception by the Syilx in the ongoing tensions of war in the Fraser Canyon and Eastern Washington, or the Mission’s residential school for Syilx children, in which the combination of communal sleeping quarters and a lack of immunity led to many tragic deaths.

The myth does mention that Kelowna was Pandosy’s home. Simpson openly dismisses the obvious, that it wasn’t, by saying he always came back “home” to Kelowna. That’s true. He loved Kelowna. It’s also true, though, that after spending the first half of his life founding twelve missions in Yakama Territory (in today’s Washington) and then founding Okanagan Mission, he was quickly tasked with founding and running missions on Vancouver Island, the Fraser Valley and the North). Unfortunately, the stress Simpson places on Pandosy as a visionary (which he was) looks past many of the people working to keep the mission afloat when Pandosy wasn’t around, which was most of the time.

All in all, this is a detailed book about a development of a city more than it one of its people developing a culture together across classes and backgrounds. With that in mind, this second edition is courageous. The first (2011) ended triumphantly with Kelowna’s arrival as an urban culture largely independent of its agricultural past. It celebrated the development of former industrial areas into elite housing towers, public artworks, the Entertainment District, a campus of the University of British Columbia, the replacement of money-losing orchards with romantic vineyards, and a new bridge across the lake. Kelowna, Simpson wrote, had found its heart. She didn’t write that much of that heart had fought these developments.

The new edition catches up on history since the ideal city went up, including, to Simpson’s great credit, criticism of how Kelowna has continued to develop, with the new bridge snarled with traffic, the highway a twenty-mile-long strip mall with difficult on-off access, and grave issues of affordability and homelessness. Those are Kelowna’s contemporary challenges, and Simpson doesn’t shy from them.

Ironically, in 1980, Simpson was on the Kelowna City Council. In an interview with NowMedia Group on YouTube, she commented that the business climate was so bad at the time that any development proposal that came across the city’s desk was automatically approved. A number of those strip malls date to that period. To speak of the resulting difficulties takes genuine courage, that is easily worth the price of the second edition.

The heart Simpson speaks of is ultimately the idea of Guisachan House, an English cottage that would not be out of place in Windsor, England: a bungalow, built in the style of the Raj. It boasts spreading verandahs set in the garden-like agricultural settlement in the wilderness that was the English ideal of Kelowna when the house was built for Lord and Lady Aberdeen in 1891. (Aberdeen would soon become Canada’s governor general.)

At the end of the first edition of The Kelowna Story, the colonial ease which Guisachan House represents was found again on the lake, for the late 20th century’s new settlers, just as it was a century ago, at the beginning of the real estate recreation of a valley of ranches and Indigenous and Métis people into an English, Canadian, and American paradise.

The paradise is long gone, but the dream is still heavily marketed and eagerly accepted. The cultural continuity is remarkable. The Kelowna Story is an exemplary guide to its bones.

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Harold Rhenisch has written thirty-five books from the Southern Interior since 1974. He won the George Ryga Prize for a memoir, The Wolves at Evelyn. His other grasslands books are Tom Thompson’s Shack and Out of the Interior. He lived for fifteen years in the South Cariboo and worked closely with photographer Chris Harris on Spirit in the Grass, Motherstone, Cariboo Chilcotin Coast, and The Bowron Lakes; and he writes the blog Okanagan-Okanogan. Harold lives in an old Japanese orchard on unceded Syilx Territory above Canim Bay on Okanagan Lake. [Editor’s note: Harold has recently reviewed books by Joe Enns, Tom Wayman, Estlin McPhee, Al Rempel, Hari Alluri, and Brian Day for The British Columbia Review. His newest book, The Salmon Shanties: A Cascadian Song Cycle, was reviewed by Steven Ross Smith, and recently won an award in the poetry category at Arts & Words in Gibsons.]