History
For 4,000 years the Songhees people inhabited the lands between Sooke and the Saanich Peninsula, which includes Gordon Head.
In 1852, with the signing of the Douglas Treaties, farmers began settling the hitherto densely forested Gordon Head area. By 1860, 13 men, including Michael Finnerty and John Work, owned all of the land. The region would become famous for its strawberries and later its daffodils. City water service was introduced in 1921, leading to a proliferation of greenhouses and vegetable farming. Agriculture dominated the landscape until about the 1950s, when Gordon Head began gradually developing into a residential neighbourhood.
Today, many homes located near the university have undergone a conversion from single-family to shared rental occupancy in order to meet the demands of the local student population.
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Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The best history is but like the art of Rembrandt; it casts a vivid light on certain selected causes, on those which were best and greatest; it leaves all the rest in shadow and unseen.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)
“It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.”
—Henry James (1843–1916)
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)