There’s a lot of chatter about when we might get a new bridge, given the traffic our area is experiencing today. This is what the Sooke River bridge looked like in the early 1940s, during the Second World War.
Since Michael Muir got the first contract to build a bridge in 1872, a series of bridges have been built to carry horse-drawn wagons first, followed by motor vehicles. We do not have a photograph of that first bridge, but imagine the stories it could tell if we did. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we did?
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This particular bridge, the one Saseenos kids walked over daily, was built in 1921 to replace a similar bridge that a runaway log boom had damaged. Foliage on the hillside prevents us from seeing the pillars of the historic four-storey Sooke Harbour Hotel, which stood on the higher level. The hotel was built in 1912. After 1927, it was run by the Robillard brothers and called the Belvedere, and sadly burned to the ground in 1934.
The structure on the left started out as a simple stable to house the horses used by hotel guests for trail riding. After the hotel burned, the lower site was bought by the Milligan logging family, who, during the 1930s, built it into a beer parlour called the Sooke River Hotel. In the intervening years, this structure has been enlarged and served many different business ventures.
The property of the Charters is out of camera range on the right, so if we kids were heading to the Sooke Flats for All Sooke Day, we would follow a trail through their place at the river’s edge to reach the bleachers for the logger sports. Nobody minded a bit of trespassing, and we certainly did not do any damage.
This bridge served until 1946, when a new one was built, and the pictured bridge was dynamited and the timbers towed away, where many of them were re-used. The current bridge that sees so much traffic today was built during the tenure of the Honourable Phil Gaglardi, the highways minister, who undertook a major road-building program in the 1950s and 1960s that changed British Columbia. Our current bridge, Built in 1967, has served almost six decades.
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Elida Peers is the historian of the Sooke Region Museum. Email historian@sookeregionmuseum.com.