The Old Vance House in Downtown Telegraph Creek in 2022
The old Vance house in downtown Telegraph Creek in 2022 is in a very sad state of disrepair. Can it be restored? Follow our blog as we see!
As some of you know, we had been trying to buy the old house since the early 1980s, hoping to get it back into the family (Kathy’s granny grew up in it), but the owner was unwilling to sell. In fact, his original plans were to tear it down and replace it with a trailer!
Thankfully, that did not happen.
But the years in between have not been kind. The lumber-frame wing on the west side of the house had already begun to collapse when we first tried to buy it. Most of the metal roofing, the doors, and all the windows had been removed by scavengers. There were no shingles left on the northeast end of the house, so the elements began to take a toll.
In 1980, the bottom log was already rotting on the northeast corner. The rest of the log structure was still in pretty good shape, as were the rafters and floors, so we were quite optimistic about it then.
But fast forward some 40 years later, and the north end of the house is beginning to collapse. Multiple logs are now rotted, and the top logs on each side are starting to roll to the west. The roof will soon “pancake,” or drop flat down the centre as the rafters pull free from the sides.
The upstairs floor is sill hanging in place – which is amazing, considering that rather than being built on logs dovetailed into the walls, it is hanging on 2x4s nailed to the logs. Kids being kids, as we all once were, have been “bowling” large rocks down the steep slope from above, which have launched off the road through the upstairs window, and through the upstairs floor, to continue their damaging descent to the main floor, below.
All processes combined have served to severely damage the northernmost third of the old house, making any kind of restoration a real challenge.
We would particularly like to save the old bay window overlooking the creek at the south end, but may now need to salvage everything we can in an ordered tear down and rebuild. Anything less may no longer be feasible.
Another issue is the property, itself. Over the years, due to the variations in the steep slope and creek, the roads on both sides have been repaired with no regard for access to the abandoned homestead. As a result, there is presently NO access for a vehicle onto the lot to do any work on the Vance house, and no place to park a vehicle beside it. We are looking at options at present for make at least a rough access we can create for our pickup truck.
Our plan is to build a cabin first, roughly on the footprint where there was once an ice house behind the old homestead house, itself. Charlie Vance used to cut ice at Sawmill Lake, just a short distance from Telegraph Creek along the old route to Glenora. He hauled it to Telegraph Creek on a rough sled pulled by horses.
The blocks of ice were put in the ice house and covered with sawdust. This would keep them well into the summer. People with iceboxes, the forerunners of refrigerators, would buy ice to keep their perishable food cool in the heat of summer.
Our plan is to build our cabin to fit the profile of the old icehouse as found in photos from that era.
Stay tuned!
