This stop on the tour provides us with the unique opportunity to discuss a family which helped create the municipality of Surrey as we know it today, along with allowing us to discuss a larger worldwide debate on the preservation of heritage homes.
A Short Introduction
Surrey has been habited by First Nations peoples for centuries. This is a history which is too often ignored, but deserves to be told. As two examples, Kwantlen peoples caught seafood in Mud Bay, and Semiahmoo peoples fished the Fraser River [1]. The Glenrose Cannery area has evidence of being inhabited for over 8000 years [2]. First Nations peoples in general have settled these areas long before any new immigrant settlers came in and created the municipality as we know it today. Just like everywhere else across the country, these peoples have been pushed to the side for the creation of the new municipality, but they return today to turn Surrey into having one of the fastest growing indigenous populations in BC [3]. The Shannons were some of the first of the new settlers here and they played a substantial role in the creation of the city. This is the story of their family, the impact they had on the creation of the municipality itself, their home, and the global debate on the preservation of their home and ones like it.
The Family
The Shannon family began to migrate to Canada from Ireland in 1848 when Peter Shannon moved into Victoria, Ontario [4]. In 1872, Joseph and Samuel Shannon joined their brothers William and Thomas Shannon in Chilliwack, BC [5]. Joseph Shannon was the first to take up land in Surrey, Cloverdale in particular [6]. His brothers followed along and it was William Shannon who named the place; he called it Clover Valley [7]. He said, “I looked out at the wild clover which grew luxuriantly everywhere and at once thought of Clover Valley [8].” This region would end up being where most of the early major municipal activity took place. Thomas Shannon actually ended up being elected as the first Reeve (Mayor or Chief of Council) of Surrey in 1880 [9]. In 1874, he married Mary Robertson and they moved to Clover Valley in 1875 [10]. Mary Robertson was the daughter of Sto:lo leader Chief Ska Til [11]. This is a surprising First Nations link in the Shannon family that is often overlooked and shows that First Nations histories and urban histories are in fact linked. They are not as exclusive as they are usually thought to be.
The Home Itself and the Debate on its Preservation
The Shannon home itself was built by Samuel Shannon. He acquired the lands for it in 1898 and built it in the architectural style of 1910 [12]. The home has survived over a hundred years and is now being actively preserved by the City. It is a heritage site that you may visit to learn more about what it may have been like to live during the time. The question is whether or not this offers any additional valuable information on the families who lived in the home. Heritage homes can be seen everywhere. The preservation of these to act as a museum is common practice, but this preservation has now become a raging global debate on whether or not it is done effectively. Do they fulfill any needs of the community they are in, or are they a hindrance to the needs of that community [13]? Those in the heritage sector tend to want to preserve history for future generations and thus the logic behind these was never questioned [14]. There is also an issue with the declining interest: people are just not visiting these as they used to, and the large amount of these homes just makes visitors even less likely [15]. The homes will also not be in the same condition the owners left them in. To combat this, those managing the homes aim for ways to make them more authentic to what they think they times would have been like [16]. This does not create an authentic experience but instead creates a forced and overly organized experience that the public is not interested in [17]. Visitors and the communities that heritage homes are in need to create a fresh and interesting experience, otherwise they fail to truly teach anything new about the families that lived in them. Something as simple as allowing to people to touch and feel the objects instead of them being locked, or maybe something as radical as allowing overnight rentals of the home could make them much more interesting and informative.
In Conclusion
The point of including this new global debate on heritage homes is not to downplay the impact of the Shannon family. They were very important to the history of the new municipality and helped the creation of the place which has become the diverse community it is today. The reason for including the debate is to question whether it is the best way to talk about their impact. Does the preservation of the home truly teach us more about their family, or are their better ways to do this? And why aren’t places that are important to First Nations protected by the same preservations, and guided by tours as well? Regardless, the Shannons are important to the Surrey municipality, and their impact is felt to this day. Without the new settlement, Surrey would not have been able to become the global city it is today, with connections to Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
–––––––––
Endnotes
[1] K. Jane Watt, Surrey: A City of Stories (Surrey: Surrey Heritage, 2017), 5.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Jon Hernandez, “Barriers remain for Surrey's growing Indigenous population: report”, CBC, 27 February 2018, accessed 20 March 2018. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/barriers-remain-for-surrey-s-growing-indigenous-population-report-1.4554701.
[4] "Joseph Shannon Typewritten Document", 170.72 - Shannon, Surrey Archives
(hereafter SA), F125-0-22-4-2.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7] “Place Names of the District of Surrey”, Place Names, SA, F125-0-23.
[8] Ibid.
[9] “Joseph Shannon Typewritten Document”.
[10] K. Jane Watt, Surrey: A City of Stories, 44.
[11] Ibid.
[12] “Samuel Howard Shannon House”, City of Surrey, accessed 12 March 2018. http://www.surrey.ca/culture-recreation/3379.aspx.
[13] Gretchen Sullivan Sorin (Foreward), Franklin D Vagnone, Deborah E Ryan, Anarchist’s Guide to Historic House Museums (Walnut Creek California: Left Coast Press, 2016), 10.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Ibid., 10-11.
[16] Ibid., 11.
[17] Franklin D Vagnone, Deborah E Ryan, Anarchist’s Guide to Historic House Museums (Walnut Creek California: Left Coast Press, 2016), 14.
*The audio clip above uses the track "house ambience with radio music" by nixeno, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0 License, and available at https://freesound.org/people/nixeno/sounds/416001/.
The text of this tour is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution CC BY.