Photo: Colin Dacre
A house in Rutland was badly damaged in a fire on Sunday evening, but much of the property’s history on the Kelowna City Heritage Register is inaccurate.
When a house in Rutland went up in flames under suspicious circumstances on Sunday evening, the community lamented a loss of history.
After all, the house was listed on the Kelowna City Heritage Register, with a rich history linked to association with early and prominent Rutland families.
But the descendants of one of the earliest families to settle in Rutland say the town’s heritage register is largely inaccurate, which shows how murky the history of Kelowna’s early days can be.
The Declaration of Significance of the Register of Inheritance states that the “Sproul House” at 180 Highway 33 E was built in 1906 for Sam Sproul, an early pioneer of Rutland, and sold in 1914 to Enoch Mugford, who was responsible for the formation and operation of the Black Mountain irrigation area.
But Enoch Mugford’s granddaughter, 85-year-old Dorthy Jankulak, tells Castanet that her family never lived on 180 Highway 33 E. Her grandfather’s house was actually near the corner of Highway 33 and Muir Road and was expanded decades ago when Highway 33 was demolished.
Enoch Mugford owned a large piece of land between Highway 33 and Mugford Road and gradually divided the property over the years. He gave his son and Dorthy Jankulak’s father a piece of land where he built a house in 1934 – Jankulak’s childhood home.
“We used to walk through the fields from our house to our grandfather’s house,” said Jankulak, explaining that her father’s house is still on her Enoch Mugford’s original property and is still family-owned to this day.
Jankulak said Mugford Road was named after her family after her father called the phone company to get a phone line and they needed an address.
“They asked him which street they lived on and it had no name, just a long dirt driveway from Rutland Road,” said Jankulak. So it was called Mugford Road.
A 1906 photograph, published in the book Down Memory Lane Rutland, shows the “Sam Sproul Home” that would later become the home of the Mugfords. The house is very different from the one currently on 180 Highway 33 E.
Photo: Down Memory Lane Rutland
The “Sam Sproul House”, in which the Mugfords later lived, a very different home than the one on Kelowna’s cultural heritage register.
A 2018 heritage assessment of the house at 180 Highway 33 E also found that the Mugfords likely never lived there and may have bought a very different house from Sam Sproul.
Katie Cummer, PhD CAHP of Cummer Heritage Consulting, upon reviewing the property found that it was not entirely clear where the “Meaning Statement” attached to Sproul House at 180 Highway 33 E came from.
And while the statement of meaning said the house was built in 1906 by noted builder MJ Curtis, Cummer couldn’t confirm this with building records. An online BC assessment list states that the house was built in 1920.
The book Down Memory Lane Rutland states that in 1906 Sam Sproul had MJ Curtis built a house for his daughter Lillian, who married Ernest Dudgeon, which is the description of the house that currently stands at 180 Highway 33 E and would later become the office of the HR Funk excavation company.
Cummer was able to confirm through subdivision plans and archive photos that the house was owned by Joe Horning prior to the Funk’s possession in the 1940s and 1950s.
Since the source of the “Meaningful Statement” of 180 Highway 33 E is unknown, it is not clear how the Mugford family name was mistakenly linked to the property.
Jankulak also says the meaning statement is incorrect in that it says that Enoch Mugford died in his home in 1969 when he moved from the house to a retirement home in the early 1960s – which was confirmed by Cummer through Canada’s electoral roll.
Holly Richardson tells Castanet that her family rented the house on 180 Highway 33 E when she was the child of an Edward Bauer for three months in 1967. She wasn’t aware of any historical significance of the house until it caught fire on Sunday.
In Cummer’s 2018 report to the City of Kelowna, she said the “imprecise association of this building with Enoch Mugford” affects the property’s significance. “One could argue that its importance may be a little less.”
Even so, Cummer said the “intangible elements” of the house and the connection with the pioneering Sproul brothers are “elements of the building that are worth celebrating and promoting”.
It is not known why the significance statement was not corrected when the inaccuracies were discovered in 2018.
That year, the Kelowna City Heritage Committee turned down a motion from developer Studio 33 Properties to remove the home from registration. According to the developer’s plans, the facade of the house was integrated into a mixed-use condominium.
It is not known if these plans will be possible after the massive damage the house suffered from the fire.
Photo: City of Kelowna
A developer’s plans to try to maintain a historic home in Rutland
