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How Burkeville Came to Be

The Sea Island Heritage Society invites former and current residents of Burkeville to share their families' experiences and memories with us.

The Boeing plant on Sea Island, hired hundreds of workers from all around the Lower Mainland. Many would come to the Marpole terminal, and then on to the plant via the ‘cattle car’. To have housing closer, Boeing Canada, under the direction of the federal crown corporation Wartime Housing Ltd., set in motion the housing project on the south end of Sea Island, now known as Burkeville.

map of Burkeville with street names

The Burkeville houses

The houses were designed by the architectural firm McCarter and Nairne who also designed the Marine Building in Vancouver, British Columbia.

And the site planning along crescents and cul-de-sacs, represented a notable departure from the customary grid patterns. The streets and roads were named after various wartime aircrafts such as "Anson, Boeing, Douglas, Catalina".

According to Al MacNeill, Smith Bros and Wilson were the contractors that built the 328 houses. Construction began in 1941 and continued through to 1944. The subdivision was named BURKEVILLE after Stanley Burke, President of Boeing Canada.

There were three models of homes available. The first style was the small fours. It had a gable roof. The big fours had a cottage roof, and there were a few sixes with two rooms upstairs, gable roofs and a window on each end of the upper floor. Most of the sixes were on Douglas Crescent.

All of the houses had a utility room, which was ground level and was accessed via an outside door (for the storage of wood, etc.). It was also accessed from the inside by a small vertical sliding door (about 3'x3’). They all had a large wood/coal heater in the front room and a wood burning kitchen stove in the kitchen. There was a deep laundry-type sink in the kitchen, thick wooden countertops, and cupboards with no doors.

Because of lumber rationing during the war, you were only allowed enough lumber to build a 1,000 square foot house and this included both porches. All of them only had a small 30 amp service for 4 to 15 amp glass fuses, and lots of spare fuses because of the new electric irons and toasters.

Grant Thompson recalls that there were dirt crawl spaces under the houses, with small pads for support posts. And, as plumbing became available after the war, those deep laundry sinks in the kitchens were replaced. The houses were the bare minimum.

The Burkeville houses were first rented to workers from Boeing for about $20.00 per month. The first completed house was at 300 Lancaster and finally occupied on January 11, 1944 by Mr. and Mrs. Morris Nevile and their 3 children.

In the early days of the subdivision, there was a pay phone at the end of each lane. The women of Burkeville would be waiting for their phone calls with their coffee cups in hand.

Later the houses were sold by Wartime Housing to returning servicemen and their young families. The price was set at $4,500.00 for the small homes. The Lidkea family were one of the lucky ones, and bought into the neighbourhood in 1950. Mrs. Lidkea related that the list of potential home purchasers was very long, and you had to have two children in order to be considered.