PEOPLE

PRINTS OF SNOWSHOES -

. George Little’s arrival marked

the beginning of something big

A minor celebration took place at the Old Bridge Properties site Tuesday, with Edith Kawinksy _ spinning recollections of her father, George Little, for a group

of news people, the mayor and others. The occasion was the anniversary of George Little’s

_ arrival in Terrace, the town he eventually founded and built up. Old Bridge Properties by the Skeena is where Mrs. Kawinsky says Little first arrived in what was to become Terrace.

. " Bighty-seven years ago this week, on March 10, 1905, George

' Little arrived for the first time in the area where the town of Ter- race would eventually grow up.

According to’ George Little's |

only daughter, Edith Kawinsky, George first arrived in Kitimat, then snowshoed down the Kitimat - Trail to Tom. Thornhill’s cabin. After a few days rest he crossed the river and landed on the site

where Old Bridge Properties (for- |

-merly The Motel) is now located. That site is where he had his first pre-emption and built his first cabin.

The lumber for George’s first

_ cabin came from Prince Rupert on the riverboats. George carried it piece-by-piece up from the river

~ by hand as he had no horses or other means to transport it at

that time. George: lived in that cabin for about four years, then built his first house on Lakelse Avenue, '' where the Inn of the West is now located. When he first arrived, George cut hemlock for ties for. the railroad. He decided, with all the lumber in the area, it would be a good place to start a ‘sawmill, George had pre-emp- ted all the property from the bridge to

‘Edith Kawiinahs, and her father at age 36.

where the Terrace

Shopping Centre is now, and the sawmill was built on Lakelse Avenue where Canada Safeway now stands.

George went to visit an old

friend from his Yukon days, J.K. Gordon in Seattle. At that time he talked J.K. Gordon into building the Terrace Hotel, the first hotel in Terrace. Also at that time he met Clara, a friend of a niece of Mrs. Gordon’s, George and Clara were married in Seattle in June 1912. When Clara moved to Ter- race in 1912, arriving by train, George was living in the house on Lakelse Ave. Mrs, Kawinsky says it was just a small place but did have a bathroom, which not too

64 Terrace Review — March 13, 1992

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many houses had at that time. When George and Clara’s. first

- child, Dudley, was born in 1914,

they decided they needed a bigger house. Clara designed the house and it was built beside the smaller one on Lakelse Avenue. In the 1940’s George imported maple trees in from Ontario and planted them on Lakelse Avenue and along the highway, from

‘where the Royal Canadian Legion

is now to the Skeena Bridge. Apparently the trees were mostly destroyed by the army soldiers, who cut them and used them for walking sticks. George had also

_ planted some maple trees on the.

hillside along the highway but

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