Edgar Allen Kipp

1860s

Born 8 April 1867 on Kipp Road in Chilliwack, British Columbia. He learned Chinook jargon before English, since the only nearby children to play with were First Nations.

1870s

Went to the first school in the Chilliwack area — half a day in Chilliwack, half in Atchelitz. In 1879 he placed 8th of 40 on the province's honour list.

1880s

Worked as a carpenter, building houses around Centreville and Cheam and, with a partner, the superstructure of the new Methodist church at Cheam.

1890s

Married Sarah Jane McConnell on 21 October 1891 at her father's house; the guests threw rice. He completed a house on Westminster Street that the Chilliwack Progress called “one of the finest residences in the city,” and turned increasingly to farming, winning prizes for his Berkshire hogs and cabbages at the Chilliwack and Westminster fairs. He served the municipality as juror and pathmaster.

1900s–1920s

A prominent Chilliwack farmer and stock-breeder; the family moved to a larger farm at Cheam in 1898.

1940s

Died at Chilliwack General Hospital on 26 August 1948.

A Chilliwack Childhood

Edgar Allen “Ed” Kipp was born on April 8, 1867, on Kipp Road in Chilliwack, British Columbia — a road named for his family — and learned the Chinook trading jargon before he learned English, since the only children nearby to play with were First Nations. His mother was often away at night providing medical care to neighbors, and if a younger sibling needed nursing while she was out, young Ed would carry the baby to her on horseback in the morning so it could be fed. He attended the first school in the Chilliwack area, splitting his days between the schoolhouse in town and one at Atchelitz, and made the province's honour list in 1879, placing eighth of forty students examined.

Carpenter, Farmer, and Champion Breeder

Ed worked as a carpenter through the late 1880s and into the 1890s, building homes and barns around Chilliwack — including his own house on Westminster Street, finished in 1891 and praised by the Chilliwack Progress as “one of the finest residences in the city.” He married Sarah Jane McConnell at her father's house on October 21, 1891. From 1894 he turned increasingly to farming, first on his father Isaac's old homestead and from 1898 on a larger property at Cheam, and became one of the region's most decorated livestock breeders: year after year he swept the Chilliwack, New Westminster, and Victoria exhibitions with his Guernsey cattle, Shropshire sheep, and Duroc-Jersey and Yorkshire pigs, at times winning nearly every prize in a category outright. By 1902 his operation included two large silos, 170 laying Brown Leghorn chickens, and a 2.5-acre prune orchard descended from the first apple tree ever planted in Chilliwack — by his father, in 1864 — and he shipped his fruit as far as Winnipeg and sold breeding stock throughout the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia.

Public Life in Chilliwack

Ed's civic involvement in Chilliwack ran for decades and across a striking range of institutions. He served repeatedly as a municipal pathmaster in the 1890s, sat on the executive of the Chilliwack Liberal Political Association from 1894, was a longtime director and officer of the Chilliwack Agricultural Society (which ran the annual fair), helped found and direct the Chilliwack Farmers' Exchange and the Chilliwack Fruit Shippers' Union, and was for years a trustee and later vice-president and director of the Chilliwack Co-operative Creamery Association. He was active for over twenty-five years in the Independent Order of Odd Fellows' Excelsior Lodge, rising to Noble Grand in 1892 and receiving a Veteran's Jewel for twenty-five years' membership in 1914. In July 1912 he personally rescued a child, Jack Henderson, from an oncoming car at the Chilliwack Merchants' Picnic.

Manager of the Elk Creek Waterworks

From 1910 to 1919 Ed served as local manager and superintendent of the Elk Creek Waterworks Company, overseeing a major expansion of Chilliwack's water system during a period of rapid growth — by his own account, some twenty-five miles of new mains laid in a single stretch between March and July of 1912, with crews of forty-five men at work, plus new mains for the outlying communities of Rosedale, South Sumas, and Sardis. He responded to the fire chief's 1911 complaints about inadequate water pressure by adding a new twelve-inch main across town, and to a nearly two-week outage caused by an ice storm in January 1918. He resigned the post in March 1919.

Family and Final Years

Ed and Sarah's daughters scattered south across the border as they married — Gladys and Mabel to Ferndale and Bellingham, Washington — and Ed made regular trips to visit them for decades after Sarah's death in 1933, including a family reunion with four of his daughters at the International Peace Arch on the U.S.–Canada border in 1941. He returned to carpentry in his later years, working as a contractor into his seventies before retiring around 1940. Ed died at Chilliwack General Hospital on August 26, 1948 — the same date, fifteen years apart, as Sarah — leaving an estate of roughly $8,450 divided evenly among his children. His grandson Ray remembered him as a man who liked to play checkers and read cowboy stories, and who had taught his daughter Gladys the Varsovienne, a folk dance he had likely learned from his own father.