Looking back article from September 2018

*The image features Hal Menzies and his family.

This September edition of Looking Back from the Pitt Meadows Museum was supposed to be a look at some of the early interesting business of the newly created community’s council.  But with the imminent destruction of a heritage home in north Pitt Meadows in the works, we have shifted our theme to have a look at it.
 
William Henry Menzies and his first wife, Mary arrived in the Pitt Meadows/Maple Ridge area in 1891, living first at the Codd Island flats and then at McKenney Creek.  By 1898 the family had homesteaded on 160 acres of land on what we now call Sheridan Hill but has since that time also been known as Menzies’ Mountain.  When they arrived they built a log cabin for their home but sometime before 1911 they replaced the cabin with a wood framed house and that house remains on the site to this day and is a designated heritage building. 
 
William and Mary had a number of children with the most written about in our local history being William Halbert (Hal) Menzies, Maple Ridge’s first realtor.  Hal Menzies had a number of his own children and one of these, Wilma Robinson (nee:  Menzies) was the last of the family to reside on what was left of the original homestead, having returned there in 1960, until her death in late 2012. 
 
Much of the acerage that Mrs. Robinson lived on was donated to the City of Pitt Meadows to be used as a park, and, as such should remain protected for the enjoyment of the community and for the protection of wildlife in the area.
 
However, the old house that had been built by her grandfather and the surrounding land had been sold many years before and the property has recently been sold again, this time to a party who is preparing to level the structure.  This has stood for more than 100 years in an area of Pitt Meadows that was at one time a hostile environment for settlers.  The house cannot be seen from McNeil Road, but it is there above you as you travel the road around the mountain.  Built when there was little more than a dirt trail into the area, the house was built above the level of the annual freshet flooding that took place in the area prior to the arrival of the Dutch who finally tamed the water. 

Leslie Norman, Curator at the Pitt Meadows Museum