Charles Verheyden
Charles Verheyden built the 1871 wing of St. Ann's Academy.
Biography
Unfortunately, little is known about the life of Charles Verheyden. He was a Dutch Belgian, who apparently worked as an architect in Europe and the United States before coming to British Columbia. He was working and advertising in Victoria by the late 1850s, and he claimed to work in "the best style and architecture in the cheapest and best workmanlike manner." 1 However, he still listed his occupation as a "builder and contractor" in the 1868 city directory. 2 Victorians appreciated his work, and the Sisters of St. Ann commissioned him to construct a new schoolhouse and convent in 1871 to the sum of $12, 250. 3 Joseph Michaud had sent the plans from Quebec, and Verheyden followed Michaud's vision for a typical Quebecois convent style four-storey building. 4
The 1871 wing of St. Ann's was small in comparison to the final building, but it dominated the Victoria horizon at the time of its construction especially since the grounds and surrounding area had fewer trees. 5 It was an immediately impressive public landmark, but Verheyden remained a relatively insignificant figure in the community.
Verheyden continued to have a successful career, and he built a home for Robert Burnaby, an important BC personality, at the corner of Moss and Fort St. in 1872. (Since Demolished) Verheyden died in the same year. 6
Architecture
Very few of Verheyden's projects are known and even fewer of those still stand, so it is hard to determine his stylistic concerns and ideas about architecture beyond a tendency towards economy. Apparently, his work was liked, but overall he had a small impression on the people and architectural direction of Victoria. In this respect, he was like many of the early architects of British Columbia, who never reached the fame and respect of later visionaries of Victoria's cityscape. Since Verheyden worked during a recession in the BC building trade and before the professionalization of architecture in the Pacific North-West, he could not expect the community response to his work that some architects of the later nineteenth century received. 7
Nonetheless, Verheyden was an important part of Victoria's material history just like all the other known and unknown architects of pre-Confederation British Columbia. 8 Verheyden was a collaborator on St. Ann's, and he enabled the subsequent physical and metal construction of St. Ann's as a Catholic and French-Canadian place in a British colonial, Protestant province of Canada. Nonetheless Verheyden did not attain the same status as his work, but it would only be a in few decades after his death that an architect's name became as important as the building, itself, in Victoria.
Footnotes
1 Newspaper ad in Colonist. Quoted in Dorothy Mindenhall and Carey Pallister, "Verheyden, Charles: Died 1872," Building the West: the Early Architects of British Columbia, Donald Luxton, ed. (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2003), 485.
2 BCA, Victoria City Directory, 1868.
3 Hallmark, "St. Ann's Chronology 3rd Edition," 1986.
4 Martin Segger and Douglas Franklin, Victoria: A Primer for Regional History in Architecture (Watkins Glen, NY: Pilgrim Guide to Historic Architecture, 1979), 211.
5 BCA, "View of Victoria From Church Hill, Looking South," 1871, A-03432.
6 Carey Pallister, "Rockland: First Subdivision," Victoria Heritage Foundation, 2005,
7 G.E. Mills, Architectural Trends in Victoria, British Columbia, 1850-1914, Manuscript Report Number 354, (Parks Canada, 1976), 12.
8 Verheyden also built a theatre and the Hotel de France before St. Ann's (both since demolished). Mindenhall and Pallister, 522.
Photos:
BCA, "St. Ann's Convent, On Kanaka Street As Humboldt," c. 1872, A-04992.
BCA, Richard Maynard, "St. Ann's Convent, Victoria," c.1870, A-02584.