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~ ~ R.P. Rithet
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In 1887 Lawes and Rashdale established
a large flour mill at Lambly's Landing. the head of navigation on the Shuswap River. This
was the first big grist mill in the area. The flour mill was built on 10 acres on the
banks of the Shuswap River.
The Enderby mill building was five stories high. It was built in two sections of the same height with a space between them of about six feet. The machinery was installed by Noah H. Kenny and McCulloch of Galt, Ontario.
George Lawes came from an old milling family in the neighborhood of Salisbury, Wiltshire. England, where his father was still carrying on an extensive milling business Lawes had been in the flour milling business all his life, and managed a mill in Oregon before coming to the North Okanagan. He believed the local wheat was a"first class flour-making article and is in his opinion superior to Oregon grain. It is also superior to the grain raised in Manitoba and the North-West Territories."
The Lawes & Rashdale mill was capable of producing loo barrels of flour a day. It was built to supply the B.C. market, which at that time was importing over 50,000 barrels per day. But the greatest difficult facing Lawes & Rashdale was transporting their product to the market. Paddlewheeler traffic was at best slow, and extremely undependable. As Donald Graham explains:
"They commenced to grind in the fall of 1887, and during the winter of 1888 they had the flour hauled in sleighs to Sicamous. In 1888 they got backing form the Bank of British Columbia, and for a time the farmers were paid for their wheat with notes on the bank; but when the bank withdrew its support, the partners were forced into liqidation."
The flour mill was purchased by R.P.Rithet of Victoria. Mr. Rithet immediately built a small paddlewheeler, the Red Star, to transport his product to market. The small boat plied the Shuswap River with flour, passengers, and mail for three years. As an instigator and shareholder, Mr. Rithet was instrumental in bringing the Shuswap & Okanagan Railway into the Okanagan to provide dependable transportation between Sicamous and Okanagan Landing
Samuel Gibbs was the first manager of Rithet's Flour Mill, to be followed by Frederick Appleton and Frank V.Moffet. Graham Rosoman was the accountant between 1867 and 1904, and remembers that in 1894 there was "a queue of wagons at least a quarter of a mile long, waiting to deliver, one by one, their loads of wheat at the Enderby flour mill."
The Columbia Flouring Mills Company was registered as a joint stock company with limited liability on the lot of June. 1903. The capital stock itself was $100.000, divided into 1.000 shares of $100 each. These shares were sold to the general population of Enderby. The first shareholders were: T.H. Lawson, F.V. Moffet, R.P. Rithet, W.A. Lawson and R.J. Ker, all of which were from Victoria except for F.V. Moffet, who was described as a travelling agent of Tacoma, Wash.
H.M. Walker in his newspaper The Enderby Progress and Walkers Weekly wrote: "In manufacturing flour there are two grades of flour obtained from the same wheat as it is passed through the mill, No.1 and No.2. The No.1 product of flour from our B.C. Mills will find a market at home, where the No. 2 product is shipped over to the Orient or U.K., to be blended with native flour. or to be used along the way. There is an unlimited market and demand for the No.2 grade, but the market for the No.1 grade is restricted to the local or provincial field. As the mills do not want to produce more than is needed for their home market, preferring to keep the No.1 grade fresh and of high quality, their production of No.2 is curtailed to the level of the home market. Thus it is difficult to build up a large foreign trade simply because the requirements of the home market are so much smaller than the requirements of the foreign market."
The Columbia Flouring Mills Co. was the first flour mill to send a shipment of Canadian Flour to the Orient. The first shipment consisted of forty sacks marked "J3. Kobi Japan," and was shipped on the 28th of January, 1904.
Through 1905 and 1906, the newspaper carried several reports of flour from the Enderby mill being shipped to Japan or China. In April 1905, 6.000 sacks were consigned to the Japanese government at Tokyo and Yokohama "to feed Russians taken prisoner at the battle of Mukden." On Nov.3 1905. it was reported that 25 tons had been shipped on the S.S. Japan: 'These shipments of Canadian Flour, which are growing larger with each successive trip, are causing great satisfaction. and the indications are that the cheap American grade will eventually be ousted from the markets of Japan."
In February 1906, the Columbia Flouring Mill had been asked to quote on 500 cars (10.000 tons) of flour for immediate shipment to the Orient. (Feb. 23,1906) The Enderby Progress stated:
"Of course, the capacity of the mill will not permit immediate shipment of such a large amount. and it said that not a mill in Canada could fill the order under such conditions. With all that going on. there had been a concern raised in China: poor quality American Flour was being rebagged under Canadian brand names and that was giving Canadian Flour a bad name." (Dec 15, 1905)
The only reported Oriental orders in 1907 were for 24,000 sacks at the beginning of August: 'The major portions were for high grade flour. "Moffet's Best' predominating. This is just a sample of what each mail from the Orient is bringing to the company. There is no doubt but that the Columbia Flouring Mills Co. has become a household word in many parts of the Orient." There were also several shipments sent to the Fiji Islands.
The end of the flour mill, which had become a local landmark for more than 30 years, came in June 1918. Although there are limited details, there had been a last attempt to save and reopen the mill. A Local Food Conservation Committee was organized, and a trip to Vancouver was made by a local lawyer, A.C. Skaling, to negotiate with the Charles P. Coles Company Limited. City Clerk Graham Rosoman appears to have coordinated the attempt from his city hall office.
In the following years Rosoman wrote of the closing of the flour mill: "In the meantime a change had taken place in the agriculture of the Valley; wheat was no longer grown in the large quantities of earlier years, and there was not enough Okanagan grain to keep the Enderby Flour Mill running. The experiment had been tried of using Prairie wheat, intercepting it at Sicamous and bringing it into Enderby to be ground in its transit to the coast. But the cost of the double trip from Sicamous to Enderby and back again proved to be a greater burden than the product could bear; and the mill, which had for so many years been one of the principal sources of Enderby's prosperity, closed its doors.
"Later, the machinery was scrapped, and the building, which for thirty years had been a landmark throughout the district, to the deep regret of the citizens in general and of many an old settler in the surrounding woods, to whom "the mill" had for so many years seemed, as it were, an outpost of the civilization he had left - a little island of order, efficiency, resource and responsibility in the surrounding sea of what the writer once heard one of these old pioneers describe as "bush and nothing' - was torn down."
There was nothing else anyone could do. Everything had been tried, but the Mill had to be shut down. In 1887, North Okanagan farmers were growing wheat and looking to take over the coast market which was then being supplied from the U.S. A Flour Mill at Enderby was a natural. By 1905, the economics of the flour milling industry had changed, but the management was able to keep it going by improving its efficiency and by finding new supplies and new markets. By 1914, the industry had so changed that a flour mill could no longer operate here. The Columbia Flouring Mill, for thirty years an Enderby landmark, is now a photograph on the walls of the Enderby and District Museum.
The company ceased to do business and was struck off the Register of Joint Stock Companies on the 31st of May. 1923.
Malorie Nobbs, Jim Screen
ALF School 1989