Isaac Kipp

Born November 1695/10632, 1839, in Creditville632/Burford, Brant County (or Oxford County, 695), Upper Canada (now Ontario, Canada), near Gobles, Ontario. He married March 22, 1865, in New Westminster, British Columbia, Canada and worked as isaac had been retired by this point. He died May 17, 1921, in Chilliwack, British Columbia, Canada.

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 them no dances or secular music, and Isaac and his brothers had to finish all their chores before the traveling circus came to nearby Woodstock each spring. He grew up alongside his future wife, Mary Ann Nelmes, and attended the local backwoods school with his cousin Jonathan Reece and a friend named Edward Dougherty — both of whom, like Isaac, would eventually make their way to the Fraser Valley of British Columbia. Isaac proposed to Mary Ann before heading west, but her father insisted she wait. In November 1858, Isaac and his brother Hamilton took money secretly from where their father kept it — repaying him five or six times over on their first trip home — and set out for the California gold fields, sailing from New York, crossing the Isthmus of Panama by dugout canoe and mule train, and reaching San Francisco that winter. Isaac never struck it rich: he later said he lost nearly everything he made, including a thousand dollars he earned but then lost while prospecting in the Cariboo.

Founding Chilliwack

In 1862, with the Union Army pressing foreign-born miners to enlist for the Civil War, Isaac and his brothers left California for British Columbia. That October he paddled a canoe up the Fraser River and settled in the valley that would become Chilliwack — arriving two years after his cousin Jonathan Reece, making him the second white settler in the region, and the first to lay out a townsite. That winter Isaac was the only white person living in the valley. With a local Indigenous man and Reece, he helped clear some fifty miles of trail from Chilliwack to Yale so he could drive cattle to the gold-rush boomtowns, using an ox he nicknamed Judas — “because he led the other cattle to the slaughter” — to lead herds that were butchered and sold at his cousin's shop. He pre-empted 840 acres of land with four other men in the winter of 1862, later purchasing an additional 480 acres that became the Chilliwack townsite itself, and in 1864 planted the valley's first apple tree, a Bellflower still bearing fruit nearly forty years later. Isaac learned Halkomelem, the language of the local Stó:lō people, rather than the simpler Chinook trade jargon used by most settlers, and became close with Indigenous leaders in the valley — feeding their livestock and families in hard times, bringing apples to their potlatches, and saying of them, “You'd never meet finer men anywhere than those old fellows; you could trust them with a thousand dollars any time.” When a settler-appointed constable arrested an Indigenous man for a killing that was permissible under his own people's law, and the community warned Isaac that hanging him would mean two settlers' deaths in retaliation, Isaac traveled to Victoria himself to warn the colonial government that Chilliwack's settlers might have to abandon the valley — and the man was released with a warning instead.

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, rail, and mule train around and across Panama. The newlyweds reached Chilliwack the next day aboard the steamer Onward, greeted by snow on the ground and a wagon whose passengers rode on planks laid across its bed. Their home — for years the only sizable dwelling in the valley — became a standard overnight stop for travelers making the winter trek along the frozen Fraser to and from the Cariboo goldfields, hosting guests as notable as two future chief justices of British Columbia and the steamboat captain “Gassy” Jack Deighton, for whom Vancouver's Gastown neighborhood is named. It was also the site of the valley's first sermon to white settlers, in February 1865, and its first Methodist service that June, with a congregation of eight; Isaac remained a trustee and pillar of the local Methodist church for the rest of his life. In 1866 the couple's daughter Mary Jane, reputed to be the first child of European descent born in the Fraser Valley, drew curious Indigenous visitors from across the region eager to see the pale infant.

Farmer, Stockman, and Civic Pillar

Isaac built one of the most celebrated farms in the Fraser Valley, eventually running to some 600 acres of grain, hay, orchard, and pasture, and importing prize Guernsey, Ayrshire, and Shorthorn cattle, Shropshire sheep, and Yorkshire pigs from Ontario breeders. He was for decades the valley's most decorated exhibitor at the Chilliwack, New Westminster, and Victoria agricultural fairs, regularly sweeping the livestock and produce classes and once earning a “hustler” reputation in the Vancouver press: “There is no greater hustler in the valley than Mr. Kipp; he is always ahead with his seeding, haying, and harvest.” His farm hosted the valley's first mechanical grain thresher in 1865 — reportedly the first in British Columbia — which he later sold to an old friend in Princeton and visited decades afterward “like visiting an old friend.” Isaac served almost continuously in local public life: as a municipal councilor, school trustee, pathmaster, fence-viewer, and founding president of the Chilliwack Pioneers' Society, and he donated land for both St. Thomas's Anglican Church and, indirectly, for the town's early school and creamery. During the catastrophic Fraser River flood of 1894 — the worst he had ever seen, by his own account — he lost nearly all his crops and had to evacuate dozens of cattle by steamboat, afterward becoming an outspoken advocate for the dyking projects that would protect the valley from future floods: “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… The country needs it, and the land is rich, and will pay for it.” He also served as one of the original trustees of the Chilliwack Tramway Company and was chosen, alongside three of the valley's other oldest settlers, to turn the ceremonial first sod for the tramway in 1891.

Mills and Later Business

In 1885 Isaac spent a season prospecting for gold near Princeton, taking nearly $3,000 worth of gold from a single small claim with his partner Colonel Robert Stevenson. Around 1900, in retirement from farming, he partnered with his son-in-law William Knight to build a grain-chopping and shingle mill in Chilliwack, later expanding it into Kipp, Son & Co., British Columbia's only excelsior (wood-shaving) plant, manufacturing packing and upholstery material from Fraser Valley cottonwood and shipping it by steamer to Vancouver and Victoria; by 1906 the mill had outcompeted American rivals for a major mattress-maker's business, and by 1908 it was cutting two million shingles a year. Isaac sold the excelsior operation in 1907 and dissolved his remaining partnership in the milling business in 1913, by then having sold off the great bulk of his original farmland — down to just five acres by 1914 — as Chilliwack grew up around the homestead he had cleared from wilderness half a century before.

A Long Retirement

Isaac and Mary Ann traveled widely in their later years — to Ontario several times, across the American Midwest, and for a four-month winter stay in Southern California in 1913–1914, touring Los Angeles, San Diego, and even Tijuana by touring car during the Mexican Revolution, with armed guards and bullet-scarred buildings still visible from a battle two years before. In 1915 the couple celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary with an open house decorated in daffodils, receiving fifty roses from the Methodist church board and a letter of congratulations from Chilliwack's mayor. Isaac remained active into his eighties, keeping bees, grafting walnut trees, and returning to Princeton in 1918 to visit old mining friends and his old threshing machine, still in use on a rancher's property there. He signed his will on May 10, 1921, leaving his modest remaining estate — valued at under $4,000 — entirely to Mary Ann, and died in Chilliwack on May 17, 1921, at the age of eighty-one, remembered locally as the “Father of the Valley” for having helped found the community from a single canoe landing nearly sixty years before.