Henry Wilburn “Harry” Lobb

1890s

Born 30 December 1891 in the Holmesville area of Huron County, Ontario, the fourth of thirteen children of Thomas Lobb and Lorena Gill Moore.

1900s

About 1898 the family moved from Ontario to Vancouver, British Columbia, on the Canadian Pacific Railroad. Harry attended Mount Pleasant School. His older brother Clarence died in 1907 after being kicked by a horse — a loss family memory says hit Harry hard — and that same year he began work as a helper for Campbell & Campbell Electricians.

1910s

Trained as an electrician in Chilliwack, active in the Baptist church and civic life, and courting Gladys Kipp — then enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force in 1915 and served through Ypres and the Somme with the Canadian Railway Troops, returning to Chilliwack in 1919.

1920s

Crossed into Blaine, Washington, on 6 July 1919; married Gladys Kipp that August. Became resident manager for Puget Sound Power & Light in Ferndale in 1924 and opened his own electrical shop.

1930s–1940s

Grew Lobb Electric into a hardware and appliance business; broke his back in a 1944 fall from a utility pole; sold the business that same year. Naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 1939.

1950s–1960s

Deeply active in Ferndale civic life — the Lions Club, Masonic Lodge, Boy Scouts, PTA, March of Dimes — and wintered with Gladys in Arizona; toured Europe in 1964, revisiting the WWI battlefields where he had served.

1969

Died 19 January 1969 at St. Luke's Hospital, Bellingham; buried at Woodlawn Cemetery, Ferndale.

Childhood and Youth in Ontario and British Columbia

Henry Wilburn “Harry” Lobb was born on December 30, 1891, in the Holmesville area of Huron County, Ontario, the son of Thomas Lobb and Lorena Gill Moore. He was the fourth of what would eventually be thirteen children, growing up in a large, close-knit family in the farming country around Holmesville and Clinton. Around 1898, when Harry was still a young boy, the family left Ontario and travelled west on the Canadian Pacific Railroad, settling in Vancouver, British Columbia. It was around this same time that the family's religious life shifted as well — Harry's future employer, Sam Pugh, was instrumental in converting the Lobbs from Methodism to Advent Christianity, a faith that would remain part of Harry's life for decades.

Harry attended Mount Pleasant School in Vancouver around 1900, and the family settled into a working-class life on the city's east side, with the Lobb children — Harry had ten surviving siblings, plus two others who died young — active in the neighborhood's social life, attending parties and events together. Tragedy struck the family in February 1907, when Harry's older brother Clarence died in Vancouver of appendicitis after being kicked by a horse. According to family memory, Harry had followed Clarence around “like a puppy dog,” and the loss affected him deeply. That same year, Harry began working as a helper for Campbell & Campbell Electricians in Vancouver, and by 1908 he had advanced to the position of electrician — foregoing the completion of high school to start earning a living. He later gave his father $1,000 of his saved wages one Christmas, in part as a gesture connected to the family's grief over Clarence.

In November 1910, the Lobb family relocated from Vancouver to Chilliwack, British Columbia, though Harry himself lingered in Vancouver for a period before following. It was in the Chilliwack area that Harry came into his own as a tradesman. From about 1911 to 1915 he worked as a home wiring electrician for Sam Pugh's Electrical Emporium, eventually becoming Pugh's business partner — a relationship that had begun back when Pugh arrived in town on the Canadian Pacific Railroad in 1898. Harry boarded for a time with the family of Ed and Sarah Kipp in Chilliwack, a connection that would prove significant: it was through this Chilliwack community that he met Gladys Myrtle Kipp, the woman who would become his wife.

These were also Harry's most socially active years in Canada. He played on the Chilliwack Tigers baseball team, took a memorable trip to Portland, Oregon in 1913 to see the Rose Festival (including a hot-air balloon ascension), and became deeply involved in local civic and religious life. He served as Vice-President of the Chilliwack Young People's Temperance Union, was elected Missionary for the Baptist Young People's Union, served as Superintendent of the Baptist Church's Sunday School, and was an officer in the Loyal Orange Lodge No. 1470. By early 1915, local newspapers described him as an active and popular member of the Baptist congregation, well liked especially by the children of the church.

The First World War

On March 11, 1915, Harry enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, joining the 47th Battalion in New Westminster before transferring in October to the 1st Canadian Pioneer Battalion (later renamed the 9th Battalion, Canadian Railway Troops). He trained in British Columbia before shipping out from Winnipeg to England in November 1915 aboard the SS Metagama, and crossed to France in March 1916. Over the next several years he served in some of the war's most harrowing sectors — Ypres, the Somme, and the railway and pioneer work that supported the front lines — rising in rank from Private to Lance Corporal (November 1916) and then Corporal (December 1917). He was briefly attached to the 1st Canadian Motor Machine Gun Brigade on two occasions, was hospitalized with trench fever in 1917, and kept detailed diaries throughout his service that survive as a rich record of his day-to-day experience, his brushes with death, and the friendships he formed with fellow soldiers, including several from Chilliwack. He returned to Canada in early 1919 and was discharged from service in Vancouver on March 10, 1919, arriving back in Chilliwack to a hero's welcome from his family, who had rented a limousine for the occasion.

Immigration, Marriage, and Early Years in Washington

Just months after his discharge, Harry crossed the border into the United States. On July 6, 1919, he arrived in Blaine, Washington via the Great Northern Railroad, initially intending to stay only a month. Instead, this marked the beginning of the rest of his life. On August 23, 1919, Harry married Gladys Myrtle Kipp in Mount Vernon, Skagit County, Washington — family lore holds that the couple eloped, riding a motorcycle across the border to be married. The couple settled first in Bellingham, where Harry worked as an electrician and later as a millwright electrician at the Bloedel-Donovan Sawmill. He formally began the naturalization process in 1921, though his U.S. citizenship would not be finalized until October 3, 1939, when he took the oath of allegiance before a federal judge in Seattle, relinquishing his status as a British subject.

The couple's early married years in Washington were marked by frequent visits back across the border to see Harry's parents in Rosedale, British Columbia, and Gladys's family in Chilliwack — a pattern of cross-border family visits that would continue for the rest of Harry's life. Harry also had a serious motorcycle accident in Bellingham in March 1920, when he was struck by a truck near the Bloedel-Donovan Box Factory.

Building a Business and a Family in Ferndale

In 1924, Harry's career took a defining turn. Puget Sound Power & Light Company proposed that he become the resident manager for Ferndale, Washington, overseeing customer billing, meter reading, repairs, and operations for the town on behalf of the power company. Harry and Gladys moved to Ferndale, living above his new electric shop, and Harry spent the rest of his working life there. In 1924 he also began operating Lobb Electric Company as an independent electrical contracting and sales business, which for its first several years split profits with Whatcom County Power & Light Company as Harry worked toward full ownership.

The business grew steadily through the following decades, evolving through several names and expansions: Lobb Electric Company (1924–1931), Lobb Electric and Hardware Company (1931–1944, after Harry purchased the Bollman Hardware Company's stock), and finally Lobb Electric & Appliance (1944–1951). Over nearly three decades, the shop sold and serviced everything from radios to Frigidaire and Kelvinator appliances, water systems, plumbing supplies, farm implements, and sheet metal work — truly a hub of small-town commercial life in Ferndale. Harry also worked directly as a lineman for the power company, a job that nearly cost him dearly: in December 1944, he fell fourteen feet from a utility pole while running service wire to a widow's cottage, breaking a vertebra in his back. His obituary later recalled how, even in the worst weather, “Harry as the manager-lineman would drive through drifts... to try to give service,” climbing poles to restore power even in bitter winter storms.

Harry and Gladys raised their family in Ferndale — sons and daughters who would go on to careers in medicine, nursing, insurance, and social work — while moving through a series of homes in and around town, from their first apartment above the shop to houses on Sterling Avenue, Olympic Drive, Malloy Avenue, and eventually Vista Drive. The family also kept a cabin and later a cabana in Phoenix, Arizona, where Harry and Gladys would winter for months at a time in their later years, a pattern that began in the mid-1950s and continued into the mid-1960s.

Harry sold his hardware and appliance business in 1944, focusing afterward on rental property he owned in downtown Ferndale, and by 1951 had sold that building as well. He continued working in various capacities afterward, including a stint helping his brother Warner with a shingle and roofing sales business in Arizona and California in the late 1950s.

A Life of Civic Involvement

What stands out most about Harry's decades in Ferndale is the sheer breadth of his community involvement. He served as Scoutmaster of Ferndale's first Boy Scout troop in the early 1920s, and later spent years on the executive board of the Mount Baker Area Council of the Boy Scouts of America, chairing courts of honor across northern Whatcom County. He was a longtime member — and eventually president — of the Ferndale Commercial Club, served multiple terms as an officer and treasurer of the Ferndale Masonic Lodge No. 264, and was a founding charter member of the Ferndale Lions Club in 1941, later serving as the club's president in 1954. He was active for decades in the Kulshan Post of the American Legion, chaired Whatcom County's March of Dimes campaign against infantile paralysis for several years running in the early 1950s, and served as president of the Ferndale PTA in the late 1930s. On the religious side, he moved from his early Baptist affiliation in Canada through the Ferndale Congregational Church (where he served as deacon and trustee) to the United Church after a 1949 merger, and finally to the Advent Christian Church in Bellingham in his last years — a faith tradition that, fittingly, traced back to his family's conversion in Ontario decades earlier.

Harry also briefly entered electoral politics, running unsuccessfully for Ferndale town councilman in 1944, and remained active in Republican Party circles in Whatcom County into the 1950s and 60s.

Later Years and Death

Harry and Gladys continued their pattern of wintering in the American Southwest — Arizona, and occasionally California — through the 1950s and into the mid-1960s, punctuated by an extensive tour of Europe in 1964 that included a nostalgic return to the Belgian battlefields where Harry had served nearly fifty years earlier. Health problems increasingly shadowed his final years: by mid-1967, Harry was seeing specialists in Seattle for kidney issues, complications from what was ultimately diagnosed as hyperparathyroidism-related renal disease. He died on January 19, 1969, at St. Luke's Hospital in Bellingham, of congestive heart failure brought on by his declining kidney function. He was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in Ferndale, Whatcom County — the town where he had spent nearly forty-five years building a business, raising a family, and serving his community, a long way from the Ontario farm country where his story had begun.