An excerpt from a Vancouver Sun article on Saturday, May 3, 2025 by John Mackie.
This Day in History, 1910: Hype Abounds During Vancouver's Biggest Population Boom
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But the biggest real estate excursion was out of the Lower Mainland, to the “Sands of Savary Island.”
“Be sure and bring your towel and bathing suit,” read an ad that ran in multiple newspapers. “We guarantee the water around Savary Island to be warmer now than the water at English Bay at midsummer.”
This is true — the small island near Powell River is located where two tidal streams meet in the Gulf of Georgia, and the water is hyped as the warmest on the West Coast “north of Mexico.”
“Savary Island Park is to be the prettiest summer resort on the coast north of the famous Catalina Island,” said the ads. “Arrangements are being made for a complete water system, electric light, glass-bottom boats, etc.”
The excursion cost $4 aboard the CPR steamship Joan, “meals and berth extra.” It left the CPR wharf at the foot of Granville Street at 2 p.m. on Saturday, May 7, and you could either return Sunday evening or Monday morning.
The ad was taken out by “The Savary Island Park Association,” which sounds like a homeowners group but was actually a real estate company headed by Charles R. Townley, whose listing in Henderson’s Directory reads: “Real estate, timber mines and notary public.”
The Savary Island hype never stopped in 1910. Much of it ran in the Saturday Sunset, a weekly whose owners started The Vancouver Sun in 1912.
A Saturday Sunset ad on April 2, 1910, referred to “Sun Kissed Savary Island, Vancouver’s Beautiful Summer Resort,” where the “ideal conditions” on its beaches and waters made for “ABSOLUTELY SAFE BATHING, ESPECIALLY FOR WOMEN AND CHILDREN, (AS) COULD POSSIBLY BE IMAGINED.”
An April 23, 1910, ad dubbed Savary “A Summer Resort of a Country Worthy of Big Things,” and featured a “bird’s-eye view” map showing the small island and its large sandy beach, “extending from its shores three-quarters of a mile at low tide.”
For some reason the Savary ads stopped in 1911 but resumed in 1912, when the Savary Island Park Association seems to have been replaced by The Savary Island Co.
Evidently people had been subdividing some of Savary’s lots, which were quite deep: an ad tells buyers not to be “misled” into buying a “dinky half-lot” over the bigger Savary Island Co. lot.
To read the entire article and see the early advertisements about Savary, go to https://vancouversun.com/news/this-day-in-history-1910-hype-abounds-during-vancouvers-biggest-population-boom
