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Beckwith farm at the heart of North Quadra

Saanich farmer recalls managing dairy cows on the fields of North Quadra
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Jack Burdge, 86, lives on Beckwith Avenue, where he’s been his whole life. Burdge remembers the family farmhouse (near Beckwith Park) being built in 1945 and still has the original blue prints and a photo of the house under construction. Travis Paterson/News Staff

In the front yard of Jack and Irene Burdge’s Beckwith Avenue home is a snake-rail fence that shows up in a 1937 photo of the expansive dairy farm.

It’s one of the only remaining sections of the old wooden fence that once kept the cows off Beckwith, a dirt road that bisected the farm.

“I’ve moved that fence and other parts of it a few times, it must be 100 years old,” said Jack Burdge.

The 86-year-old has been on the property since he came into this world. He grew up in the North Quadra neighbourhood when it was all farms, and remembers catching a ride to Cloverdale school in his dad Frank’s truck.

“We’d get dropped off at school in the morning, my dad would haul the surplus milk to Northwestern [Creamery] on Yates Street,” said Burdge, one of seven children. “[After school] we’d walk home, only about two miles.”

Burdge will attend the 100th anniversary of Cloverdale school on May 26 with his twin sister Joy. The two attended for eight years before finishing their schooling at the former Mount View high school in 1949.

This summer Burdge is making his family collection of farming photos, many of them over 60 years old, available to visitors of the July 18 Music in the Park event at Beckwith Park (this year’s band is Younger than Yesterday, playing Beatles and Rolling Stones covers).

The music is loud, and it’s nothing like the quiet days Burdge experienced as a young farmer in the undeveloped North Quadra neighbourhood.

Before the Burdges arrived, the fertile land along Beckwith Avenue, which abuts the Blenkinsop Valley, was only one generation removed from its traditional use by the Kosapsom First Nation. That changed with a treaty from Sir James Douglas to accommodate Hudson’s Bay Company settlers, according to the Saanich heritage register.

The Burdge family produced a lot of milk, delivering it around Saanich, and Burdge knew all the farms in and around the North Quadra area.

That includes the Walsh dairy farm adjacent to the north end of the property, the Rogers farm east to Glanford, the Wong family veggie farm at the west end of Beckwith (which later became the Street family farm), the Doney hog farm in Broadmead, and the Locke sheep farm in Broadmead, which the Burdges later ran (even owning Rithet’s Bog for a decade).

If it wasn’t for the nine-hectare Beckwith Park, with its vast soccer field and popular splash park, it would be hard to imagine the area as it was.

“The closest bus you could walk to was at Reynolds and Quadra, if you wanted to go downtown,” Burdge recalls.

If his tractor ever broke, Burdge either fixed it himself – which he often did – or had the machine hauled to Mayhew Strutt and Williams, which repaired farm equipment.

The family took over the stead when Jack’s father, Frank Burdge, a farmer who relocated to Victoria in 1933 from Alberta, moved the family to Beckwith in 1936. They rented the heritage stone farmhouse at Quadra and Beckwith that was originally built by Josiah Bull Sr. in 1907. (Bull had built the house and ran the farm but his son, Josiah Bull Jr., favoured policing over farming, acting as the Saanich chief of police from 1938 until 1957.)

In 1945, the Burdges moved into their new farmhouse, where members of the newer Burdge generation still live today.

“It seems like eight years ago, not 72,” Burdge said.

They had bought the farm by that time, and installed the Island’s first milking parlour, a barn specific for the new cow-milking machines, Burdge said.

In his prime, Jack managed 65 dairy cows, but his dad started the kids off easy (well, relatively).

“My first job was to sweep out the barn.”

Subdivisions and major development crept into North Quadra in the mid-1950s. Most of Beckwith was developed by the early ‘70s, at the same time the land was set aside for Beckwith Park.

Today, the park and its splash pad remain a popular visiting spot for families, especially on hot days.