Address: 3140 Balfour Avenue; ex 3140 Emma Street
Built: 1914
Householder: Charles Cousins, window and door manufacturer
Photo credit: Vickie Jackson, July 2012A building permit for this California Craftsman-style home was issued to Charles Cousins on 9 March 1914. The permit authorized the construction of a wood frame dwelling, with five rooms, at a cost of $2,700. (The permit identifies the property as 3140 Emma Street. The name of this street was changed to Balfour Avenue in 1917.) Previously, Cousins had been living at 609 Speed Avenue and 547 Hillside Avenue, both places within the present-day boundaries of the Burnside Gorge neighbourhood.
Charles Cousins was a partner, with his older brother Leonard Cousins, in a window sash and door factory on the corner of Garbally Road and Portland Avenue, near the Selkirk Water on the Gorge. (Portland Avenue has disappeared but was close to 417 Garbally Road, the site of the Victoria City Public Works yard today.) The firm known as Cousins Brothers produced the decorative doors, windows, bannisters and stairs which adorn this house. This house must have served as an advertisement for the high-quality building materials produced at the Cousins Brothers' mill.
Building plans for many houses constructed in Victoria are on file at Victoria's City Hall. Volunteers with the Victoria Heritage Foundation [VHF] have catalogued the plans. The building plans for this house are described by the VHF as follows: "Five room house with two bedrooms. Full width front porch, with heavy pillars at corners, centred stairs with curved bannisters. Window seat in front entry. Octagonal bay in dining room, piano windows either side of fireplace. Pocket doors between living room and dining room, pass through pantry/scullery, with swinging door on dining room side. Possible basement and attic with interior stairways."
Architectural historian and VHF member Nick Russell, has described the architectural elements of this house. He points to the “clinker brickwork and a full-width front balcony with a curved arch.” He notes the large brackets that support the slightly flared roof; the tall, corbelled brick chimney; and dormers on the front and rear of the house. Other notable features include a cantilevered box-bay with pent roof on the left side of house; and matching side-lights on the main entry. The front stairs are flanked with low, wide balustrades.
Charles Cousins, his father and his brothers, were well-known in the building and lumber manufacturing trades in Victoria. They were enumerated here in 1891, 1901 and 1911 and so we have some record of the family history. The patriarch, Leonard Cousins, senior, was born in England in 1850 and immigrated to Canada in 1884 with his wife Sarah (b. 1851, England). He was enumerated as a carpenter on the 1891 census and as a millman on the 1901 census. Leonard, junior, was born in England in 1877 and came to Canada with his parents in 1884; he was 23 years old and employed as a millman, according to the 1901 census. Charles Cousins was born in Victoria and was attending school when the 1901 census was taken. According to that enumeration, he was born in 1885. But the 1911 census states that he was born in 1883. When the census was taken in June 1911, he was residing with his recently widowed mother, Sarah, and younger siblings at 632 Dunedin Street. He and a brother were described as “mill hands” on the 1911 nominal census schedule.
In 1912 – when Mrs. Cousins moved to the home of her eldest son on Graham Street – Charles Cousins, his younger brother Henry (b. 1889), a joiner, and sister Lucy (b. 1887), a seamstress, moved to 609 Speed Avenue. A couple of years later, in 1914, Charles started building this substantial home at 3140 Emma Street/Balfour Avenue. He was only 30 years old and his business must have been thriving.
Marriage records for Henry Cousins and Lucy Cousins can be found on the BC Archives Vital Events registry, but a record of the marriage of Charles Cousins and Kate Eleanor Simpson has not yet been located. They were probably married in 1913 and the sacrament may have taken place outside the province of British Columbia.
The marriage ended tragically. Kate Cousins drowned on the ill-fated Princess Sophia in the Lynn Canal, near Juneau, Alaska, on 25 October 1918. Everyone on board, over 340 people, died when the CPR steamship foundered on a reef during a fierce snowstorm: it was the worst maritime accident in the history of British Columbia and Alaska. Apparently, Kate Cousins had accompanied her husband on a business trip to the Yukon. He was unexpectedly delayed and so she embarked on the Princess Sophia without him for the return voyage to Victoria. After the ship was lost, Charles Cousins made his own way to the site of the disaster and spent over a week searching for his wife's body. Her remains were never found. To add to this family tragedy, Charles Cousins died in Victoria a few months later, on 15 January 1919, during the Spanish Flu epidemic. There were no children from his marriage and the house was unoccupied for several years after his death.
This house was recently (2012) added to the City of Victoria's Heritage Register.