Isaac Kipp

1830s–1850s

Born November 1839 near Burford, Upper Canada. Left for the California gold fields in 1858.

1860s

Came north to the Cariboo gold rush in 1862, then settled in the Chilliwack valley that fall. Drove cattle to the gold towns, planted the valley's first apple tree, and married Mary Ann Nelmes in 1865.

1870s–1890s

Built one of the valley's leading farms, sat on its first school board and early councils, and led the push for dikes after the 1894 flood.

1900s–1910s

Retired to town in 1899, ran a shingle and excelsior mill with his son-in-law, and was elected president of the Chilliwack Pioneers' Society in 1910.

1920s

Died in Chilliwack on 17 May 1921.

Ontario Roots and the Gold Rush

Isaac Kipp was born in November 1839 near Burford, Brant County, in what was then Upper Canada, the son of Benjamin Kipp and Elizabeth Force. His parents worked their sons hard on the family farm and allowed no dances or secular music. The boys could go to the circus when it came to Woodstock each spring only if every chore was done by May 24th. Isaac found his fun anyway: he later claimed to have worn out three pairs of shoes step-dancing on his voyage around the Horn, a boast his family took as an exaggeration. He went to a backwoods school with his cousin Jonathan Reece and a friend, Edward Dougherty, both of whom would also end up in British Columbia, and he grew up beside his future wife, Mary Ann Nelmes. He asked her to marry him before he went west, but her father made her wait.

In November 1858 Isaac and his brother Hamilton helped themselves to the money their father kept hidden (they later repaid him five or six times over) and set off for the California gold fields. They sailed from New York, crossed the Isthmus of Panama by dugout canoe and then mule, and reached San Francisco in December. For the next few years Isaac worked the diggings at Forest City and Downieville. He never struck it rich, and he later said he lost nearly everything he made.

From the Cariboo to Chilliwack

In 1862, with the Union Army pressing the young men in the California camps to enlist for the Civil War, Isaac and his brothers sailed north to Victoria on the steamer Brother Jonathan and headed for the Cariboo gold rush. He spent the summer on Williams Creek, sleeping outdoors the whole time, but arrived too late to get a good claim. On one trip a companion broke his leg; Isaac and the other man left him with a fire and supplies and pushed on, then felt so bad about it that they turned back to fetch him. By October Isaac was $200 in debt. He and his brother Henry went to their cousin Jonathan Reece, now raising cattle on the lower Fraser, to ask for a loan. Reece offered them work looking after his cattle instead, and that fall Isaac paddled a canoe up the Fraser to the valley that would become Chilliwack.

Local histories count him as the district's second white settler, after Reece, and the first to lay out a townsite. In late 1862 he and four other men took up five pre-emptions totaling 840 acres, and he acquired the 480 acres that later became the Chilliwack townsite itself. He and his cousin James built their first cabin on what is now the corner of Hodgins Avenue and Ashwell Road. In the winter of 1864 Isaac was the only white person living in the whole valley.

Cattle, Trails, and Neighbors

The early money was in beef for the gold-rush towns upriver. With a local Indigenous man and Reece, Isaac cleared some fifty miles of trail toward Yale. Oregon steers bought for eighteen or twenty dollars were shipped to Whatcom, lowered over the ship's side in slings to swim ashore, driven overland to the valley, fattened on the valley's green winter rushes, and then herded up the trail to be butchered at Reece's shop and sold for twenty-five cents a pound. Five dogs worked the herd, one in front and four driving, and an old ox named Lamb walked at its head. He was powerful, clever, and gentle as a lamb, but people called him the Judas ox because he led the other cattle to the slaughter: up the trail, across the Fraser near Fort Hope, and down Yale's Main Street to Reece's corral and butcher shop. On one cattle-buying trip Isaac and Jim Bertrand slept in a hut at the Nooksack River crossing near what is now Ferndale, Washington, and were upset to learn afterward that its Indigenous owner had died there of smallpox. Canoeing on toward Whatcom, they were capsized by a sudden squall in the bay and lost their provisions and the canoe, but they reached Fort Bellingham, where they were given help and met Isaac's cousin Jonathan Reece, and drove the cattle home without another loss. In 1864 he planted the valley's first apple tree, a Bellflower that was still bearing fruit nearly forty years later, and registered his cattle brand, a "K" on the right loin.

Unlike most settlers, who got by in the simple Chinook trade jargon, Isaac learned Halkomelem, the language of the local Stó:lō people, and became close friends with many of their leaders. He fed their livestock and families in hard times, as his son Frank remembered, and brought boxes of apples to their potlatches. Soon after Mary Ann arrived, the two of them bought ten boxes of apples to give away at one and stayed most of the night feasting and dancing. "You'd never meet finer men anywhere than those old fellows," he said; "you could trust them with a thousand dollars any time." Once, when a constable arrested an Indigenous man for a killing that was permitted under his own people's law, and the community warned that hanging him would cost two settlers' lives, Isaac went to Victoria himself to warn the government that the settlers might have to abandon the valley. The man was released with a warning.

Marriage and Frontier Family Life

On March 22, 1865, Isaac married Mary Ann Nelmes in New Westminster, the day after she arrived from Ontario following a month-long journey by sea and across Panama. They reached Chilliwack the next day aboard the steamer Onward, with snow on the ground, and rode to the house in a wagon with planks laid across it for seats. For years theirs was the only sizable house in the valley. In winter, when the frozen Fraser forced travelers to walk the valley trail to and from the Cariboo, it became the standard place to spend the night. Guests included Judge Matthew Begbie, the colony's chief judge, Judge Walkem, the "cattle king" Jerome Harper, and Captain "Gassy" Jack Deighton, for whom Vancouver's Gastown is named.

The house was also where the valley first gathered for worship: the first sermon preached to its white settlers, in February 1865, and its first Methodist service that June, led by the Reverend Ebenezer Robson with a congregation of eight. In 1869 Isaac was one of the first eight members of the Methodist church board and a trustee of the new church at Atchelitz. On Sundays his neighbors would leave their horses at his place and canoe upriver to services. In 1866 the Kipps' daughter Mary Jane, said to be the first child of European descent born in the Fraser Valley, drew Indigenous visitors from all around who were curious to see the pale baby. More children followed, until Isaac could boast in 1902 of having "enough grandchildren to load a steamboat."

Christmas in the 1870s began on Christmas Eve at the Chilliwack schoolhouse, with a big public party: a tree, a Santa Claus handing out presents, a basket supper, games, and singing. Stockings and presents were opened by the tree in the morning, and at about two o'clock some twenty-five Kipps sat down to two geese or turkeys, a ham and a chicken, mince pies, English plum pudding, cider, and the milk pail of doughnuts Mary Ann had fried the night before. Every fall Isaac slaughtered cows and pigs for the smokehouse, and before Christmas he took the team and sleigh out to find the biggest tree he could, which the family hung with chains of popcorn grown on the farm. A granddaughter remembered an elderly Indigenous man who worked on the farm and walked in for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner. He would rest in the rocking chair by the kitchen stove, and Isaac gave him a full plate of turkey, goose, and all the trimmings.

Farmer, Stockman, and Civic Pillar

Isaac broke his land with a twenty-six-inch California breaker plow pulled by seven or eight oxen, harvested his first crops by hand with a cradle scythe, and in 1865 took delivery of a Buffalo-Pitts grain thresher, thought to be the first in British Columbia. By 1894 the farm ran to some 600 acres of grain, hay, orchard, and pasture, with a herd of Guernseys, Jerseys, and Durhams and a cellar lined with jars of preserved cherries. He brought in Ayrshire cattle, Shropshire sheep, Yorkshire pigs, and carloads of horses from Ontario, and for decades he was one of the most decorated exhibitors at the Chilliwack, New Westminster, and Victoria fairs. He even sent his fruit east to the Toronto Industrial Fair and his wheat to the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, which he visited himself that fall. "There is no greater hustler in the valley than Mr. Kipp," the Vancouver Daily World wrote in 1895; "he is always ahead with his seeding, haying, and harvest."

He was just as busy in public life. He sat on the valley's first school board in 1870, and the first schoolhouse was built on his land. He attended the first council meeting in 1873, was elected township treasurer in 1875 and councilor in 1879 and 1882, and served year after year as pathmaster and fence-viewer. He provided an acre for St. Thomas's Anglican Church, sold land for the enlarged fairgrounds, the school, and the creamery, helped found the creamery and the tramway company, and in 1891 was one of four old settlers chosen to turn the first sod for the tramway. That spring he sold off every lot in his part of the Centreville townsite. In 1910 he was elected president of the Chilliwack Pioneers' Society.

The great Fraser flood of 1894 hit him harder than almost anyone. By June 6 he said he could not find a dry spot the size of a hat anywhere on his land. Sixty of his cows were sent to Popkum and dozens more were taken off by steamboat, and he piloted a boat himself for about a week. He lost nearly all of his 300 acres of grain and hay, 7 acres of roots, and most of his fencing. Afterward he became one of the loudest voices for diking: "I am in favor of diking, as I have now seen three floods, but this is by far the worst that we have ever had," he told a public meeting. "The country needs it, and the land is rich, and will pay for it." Two years later his own teams built nearly two miles of dike across his and his neighbors' land.

Gold, Mills, and Business

Isaac always had more than one iron in the fire. In 1867 he took a contract to oversee the placing of 4,500 telegraph poles along the Yale Road, and he never quite lost the prospecting bug: in 1885, during the Granite Creek rush near Princeton, he and his partner, Colonel Robert Stevenson, took $2,950 in gold out of a hole no more than twenty feet square.

In April 1899, after thirty-seven years on the homestead, Isaac rented out the farm and moved into town, to a house beside the Harrison House hotel. With his son-in-law William Knight he built a feed-chopping and shingle mill there, and in 1904 expanded it into Kipp, Son & Co., at the time the only excelsior plant in British Columbia. By 1906 the mill stood on Alma Street, east of the Harrison House. It shaved packing and mattress stuffing from Fraser Valley cottonwood and shipped it by steamer to Vancouver and Victoria, and in 1906 it beat out American rivals for a steady mattress-maker's contract. He sold the excelsior business in 1907, but the mill went on cutting some two million shingles in 1908. He sold his town ranch in the spring of 1904 and his livestock at auction that November, and by 1914, with Chilliwack grown up over the fields he had cleared, he had only five acres of his original land left.

A Long Retirement

Isaac and Mary Ann traveled widely in their later years: back to Ontario several times, across the Prairies and the American Midwest, around Vancouver Island by car, and for a winter in Southern California in 1913–1914, where they toured Los Angeles and Pasadena and drove to Tijuana in the middle of the Mexican Revolution, past armed men and buildings still scarred by bullets. At home he kept bees, collecting fifty-six pounds of honey from one hive in 1912, and had walnut scions grafted onto his butternut trees. In 1907 his pet parrot escaped and hid in the treetops for days, and a local man, William Hall, mounted it as a mysterious scarlet "cockatoo" before anyone realized whose it was. He judged baby shows at the Agassiz fair "with a surprising amount of satisfaction," and once went up on stage as a volunteer for a traveling magician. Christmas in the 1900s was still at the old couple's house. Isaac still brought home the biggest tree he could find, which was hung with popcorn and cranberry strings and little wax candles, and after giving the blessing he carved a turkey at the head of the adults' table while his son-in-law Will Knight carved at the children's. A granddaughter remembered that he always had white peppermints in his pocket.

In March 1915 he and Mary Ann marked their golden wedding with an open house decked in daffodils, where the Methodist board presented fifty roses and carnations and the mayor brought his own letter of congratulations. In 1918, nearly eighty, he visited Princeton again and found his old Buffalo-Pitts thresher still at work on a rancher's farm there, which he said was like visiting an old friend. In 1919 he and Mary Ann were invited to meet the Prince of Wales with other pioneers in Victoria, but they arrived too late and had to settle for seats near him in the stadium. Isaac signed his will on May 10, 1921, leaving everything to Mary Ann, and died in Chilliwack a week later, on May 17, at eighty-one. His real estate was valued at just under $4,000. He is remembered as the "Father of the Valley," the man who helped build Chilliwack from a canoe landing.