Thomas Lobb

1850s

Born 18 June 1857 in Goderich Township, Huron County, Ontario, to George Lobb, who had come from Cornwall, and Mary Holmes.

1870s–1880s

Apprenticed as a blacksmith under Bill Murch in Holmesville, where he met Lorena Gill Moore. Married her at Fullarton Corners on 21 May 1884, with William Lobb and Luella Moore as witnesses. Ran his own shops at Gowrie and then Holmesville.

1890s

When a depression closed his Ontario shop, he took the family on a five-week train trip to Vancouver in 1893. He broke his leg soon after starting work, recovered, and set up a blacksmith and carriage shop in Mount Pleasant. In 1899 he built Vancouver's first ambulance.

1900s–1910s

Kept a string of blacksmith partnerships going in Vancouver, apart from a year on a Chilliwack farm in 1910–11.

1920s

Moved to Rosedale in 1919 to run a dairy farm, then bought the Rosedale blacksmith shop with his son Laurie in 1926. Taught the United Church's adult Bible class for about ten years.

1930s

Retired in 1930. Died of bladder cancer on 10 February 1933, after fifteen months of illness.

An Ontario Blacksmith

Thomas Lobb was born on June 18, 1857, in Goderich Township, Huron County, Ontario, to George Lobb, who had come from Cornwall, England, and Mary Holmes, and was baptized the next day. He grew up in a log house, went to the old schoolhouse in Holmesville, and joined the Holmesville Methodist Church as a boy. In 1879 he helped haul stone for its foundation, and later he helped build its stonework. He apprenticed as a blacksmith under Bill Murch in Holmesville and boarded with the Murch family. Lorena Gill Moore also worked at the shop for a time, and the two met while boarding at the same house.

His apprenticeship ended in January 1883. After three months at a shop in Seaforth he set up on his own in Gowrie, near Mitchell, and on May 21, 1884, he married Lorena at Fullarton Corners. In 1888 he came back to Holmesville and bought his old master's shop. The Clinton New Era greeted him as "a good workman, and a man worthy of the liberal patronage of the public." Horseshoeing was his specialty, at twenty-five cents a horse; one customer was Kepple Disney, an uncle of Walt Disney, but the local pastor started taking his horses out of town once he found out Tom wouldn't shoe them for free. Tom was also financial secretary of the Canadian Order of Foresters lodge for several years. In one of the lodge's debates he was assigned to argue that single life was better than married life, and he lost.

West to Vancouver

In the early 1890s a depression dried up his trade. Tom looked for work in Bowmanville and London, took jobs where he could, and in March 1893 even went to Minnesota for a position. Then his brother Will, who was already in British Columbia, found him a blacksmithing job in Vancouver and rented a house for the family. In late May 1893 the Lobbs, "poor as churchmice" in his daughter Raye's words, set out on a five-week train journey across the country with a hamper of food to see them through. They arrived on July 1, and Tom started work that day as the Mount Pleasant village blacksmith. Within weeks a horse kicked him and broke his leg. He was confined to bed for several weeks and lost the job, with Lorena's sister Adeline helping to nurse him. That fall he took work in Ladner before the leg had fully healed and came home only on weekends.

The family's first home in Vancouver was a single room with a potbelly stove in the middle, whose stovepipe once came crashing down in a cloud of soot. Their first Christmas, they went to cousins in Fairview and found everyone sick and the turkey not yet plucked, so they cooked the dinner themselves. Adeline and the four youngest children then missed the last train and had to walk six miles home.

Mount Pleasant Blacksmith

In 1894, with a loan from W. D. Muir, Tom opened his own blacksmith and carriage shop on Westminster Road in Mount Pleasant, and for the next twenty-five years he was one of Vancouver's steady tradesmen, working under a changing line of partnerships: Lobb & Co., Lobb & Muir, Lobb & Carlyle, Muir & Lobb, and Lobb, Rouse & Co. His shops shod horses and oxen, made ice creepers for men heading to the Klondike in 1898, and built wagons for bakeries, dairies, and laundries, iron-reinforced hardwood rigs decorated with scrollwork and painted with the owners' advertising. In 1899 Tom's firm won the bid to build Vancouver's first ambulance, beating three other bidders, for $250. It was a white, red-crossed hardwood wagon with a wheeled cot on tracks inside, and the council turned down the extra $60 for rubber tires.

The work was hard on him: in 1906 an unruly horse knocked him back and dislocated his shoulder. In the 1910s he suffered from asthma so badly that he sometimes had to sit down on the sidewalk to catch his breath on the two-block walk home from the streetcar. His son Laurie blamed the roll of fat around his neck on the marvelous milkshakes at a shop across the street. The family's big twelve-room house on 21st Avenue took in an old door-to-door peddler named Abram, who claimed to have once been president of a bankrupt English bank. Abram treated Tom's asthma by painting his spine with acetic acid and then massaging it with olive oil, and Tom's asthma did eventually go away. For his son Laurie, Tom made a hoop from an old buggy wheel rim and a slingshot from quarter-inch iron.

A Year in Chilliwack

In 1910 Tom decided he wanted to farm. After several scouting trips, the family left Vancouver that November on an old stern-wheeler up the Fraser, with livestock and household goods aboard, for a farm on Prest Road in Chilliwack. Family tradition says Tom bought the very first ticket sold for the new BC Electric Railway there. The farm was not a success. The heavy clay grew good crops but broke into hard lumps, the family was unhappy, and one day young Laurie fell asleep and tumbled out of the buggy on the way to town without Tom noticing until a passerby shouted. In October 1911 everyone but their son Harry moved back to Vancouver, and Tom went back to blacksmithing.

Faith and the War Years

Tom had been raised a Methodist, but by 1901 the family were Advent Christians. Family tradition says a fellow passenger, Sam Pugh, converted him on a train journey west, and J. D. Ross, who ran the Ross Mill, is also credited with getting him interested in Adventism. Tom and Lorena made sure their children went to Sunday school and Wednesday-night prayer meetings, and the family was active in Vancouver's new Advent Christian church. His partner Bob Muir, a man with a violent streak, became a churchgoer after a fire in their shop burned a hole through the ceiling and then simply went out; Bob was convinced Tom's faith had saved them. In November 1915 Tom and C. D. McLaren proposed a "Helping Hand Society" to create jobs and clothing for the needy. When their son Harry came home from the First World War, Tom hired a limousine to take the family down to the station to meet him.

Farming and a Final Trade in Rosedale

On March 1, 1919, Tom, Laurie, and daughter Gladys rode the old milk train out to Rosedale with half a railway car of furniture, farm tools, a horse, and a cow. There was a dusting of snow when they left Vancouver, but at Rosedale it was up to the children's armpits, and the Grigg family came for them by sleigh. The first place they rented was an odd one. Its previous owner, who had gone bankrupt and returned to Britain, had tried to turn it into a park with pens for swans, peacocks, and raccoons, monkey-puzzle trees, and a hundred yards of privet hedge. Its frozen pipes took Tom a long time to fix, and the first time he turned the water on it sprayed everywhere, because he had hooked up the old pipe instead of the new one. In 1920 he bought a stump-covered farm on Camp Slough, near the Rosedale–Agassiz ferry, and with Laurie doing much of the heaviest work, blasting stumps, clearing land, and milking eight cows twice a day, they built it into a dairy farm. A 1926 potato crop reached market just after the American growers' and ended up as cow feed.

That fall Tom's old Vancouver partner, Bob Muir, offered to sell him the Rosedale blacksmith shop for $1,200. Tom left the decision to Laurie, who took it, and on November 1, 1926, the shop opened under the two of them. It started with hand-powered forges and a foot-powered grinder, and in 1927 it became one of the first shops in the Chilliwack area with oxyacetylene welding. Soon it was busy with work from the highways department, including forge-welding worn grader teeth back together. Tom retired in October 1930 and left the business to Laurie, soon renamed the Rosedale Welding and Blacksmith Shop, though on Saturdays Laurie would still drive him over to show him what was new. "He was not the greatest businessman, he was not the greatest craftsman the world had ever known," Laurie wrote, "but whenever he made a transaction and he gave you his word, it was graven in stone as far as he was concerned. He was a friend to everyone."

Faith and Community in Rosedale

In Rosedale Tom became a pillar of the church. He was elected teacher of the adult Bible class in 1923 and taught it for about ten years, and the Chilliwack Progress called him "a faithful and very able teacher." He gave talks at socials and Sunday-school rally days, sang "Beautiful Valley of Rest" in duet with Lorena, coached a young people's debate team, and in most summers still made the trip to the Advent Christian camp meetings at Nooksack, Washington. In the evenings the Lobbs played crokinole against the neighbors. When Tom and Lorena left to spend the winter of 1930–31 with their son Alvin in Pasadena, the church gave them a farewell party, and Tom went home with a new club bag.

Last Illness

It was in California that Tom learned he had bladder cancer. His last fifteen months were, in Laurie's words, hell. He refused painkillers for fear of becoming addicted and was sure right up to his last week that he was getting better. On February 5, 1933, he was taken to the hospital, and he died on February 10 with nearly the whole family gathered; Laurie and Minnie arrived too late because their Model T had frozen in the cold. His funeral at the Rosedale church included his favorite solo, "Rest Beyond," and he was buried at Mountainview Cemetery in Chilliwack. His obituary remembered "a bright smile and a cheery word for his friends of whom he had scores," and one neighbor's tribute: "You couldn't find a better neighbor!" By local account, the roof of his old Mount Pleasant blacksmith shop caved in on the day he died.