History of the House

We go back to 1914: a little house, which opened up into a surprising number of rooms once you entered the front door, was built by a Swedish carpenter for a cannery manager living at George Point in Naden Harbour, on the north coast of what had then come to be called the Queen Charlotte Islands.

The cannery closed in 1921 and the house was floated, on logs that had been strapped together, eastward and south through Dixon Entrance, and then down Masset Sound, until it came to rest on the Watun River.

Eleven years later, Arthur Robinson bought the house and it set sail again – this time up to Masset Inlet. Two oxen named Olaf and Buster and a stump puller (whose name has been lost, alas) winched the building up off the beach and onto its present footing today, by the government docks in New Masset.

Robinson’s bride-to-be, Margery Fish, arrived from England in 1932, to reside in what had become the most unique building in town, with an interior redone with plywood (considered very chic at the time), a convenient in-house well, and a windmill for electricity.

The next family to own the house was Dr. Charlie Smith and his wife, Alice (née Harling), who had retired from the Cape St. James Lighthouse.  When David Phillips arrived in 1971 he found the Smiths’ gentle son, Sydney Harling Smith living alone and in need of care; David moved in, re-installed plumbing and electricity, strengthened the foundation, closed the well (which by that time “was just a hole in the floor”) replaced the roof, and added a floor at garden level. The structure and finish of the rest of the house, David carefully preserved at circa early ‘30s.

In 1986 the house entered into its most recent incarnation as the Copper Beech House. The rest, as they say, is history.

(Compiled from a story by April Johnson, published in The Observer, September 14, 2006)