A proposal is afoot to have East Wellington Park renamed to Pearse’s Plain.
The park, located in a low-lying area along the Millstone River next to East Wellington Road between Maxey and Holland roads, is a 12.7-hectare property purchased by the city in 2014.
With planning for the park currently underway, Bill Merilees, a retired biologist, and Dave Wallace, a non-practising member of the Association of B.C. Land Surveyors, want to see the park renamed to Pearse’s Plain after Benjamin William Pearse, who surveyed of much of Nanaimo in the spring of 1859.
“Many years ago, in doing some research and so on, I found out a place up on the Millstone River was called Pearse’s Plain and I thought it was Buttertubs, to be honest with you,” Merilees said.
Merilees discovered that location was wrong, so he went to Nanaimo Community Archives, where the original copy of Pearse’s field journal is kept, which lists the location that East Wellington Park is now part of.
According to the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Pearse came from England to work for Joseph Despard Pemberton, the Hudson’s Bay Company’s engineer and surveyor on Vancouver Island, in 1851. He became assistant surveyor in 1852 and maintained the position after his employment transferred to the colony of Vancouver Island in 1855.
Pearse produced two public reports of his survey of the Nanaimo area in April and May of 1859 and his original field manuscript diary of the survey and field book are preserved at in the archives.
“This area that he found there … is the actual Pearse’s Plain and, as he said in his notes, it was a wide field with rich soils and long grass,” Merilees said. “Well, there’s not much grass in early Nanaimo, so of course, it probably had some value for fodder in the early community.”
Pearse’s hand-written field diary contains his notes about his journey by ship from Victoria to Nanaimo, including stops he made on the way at Chemainus Harbour and Nanaimo to purchase supplies and how he “hired men to compile my muster of 6 and left at 10 a.m. for ‘Departure Bay.’ Retraced line Nanaimo District as far south as Millstone River, set men to make footbridge, ‘explored’ Pearse’s plains and returned to camp at 5 p.m.”
According to Pearse’s diary, place names, such as Millstone River and Departure Bay, were apparently already well established by 1859, but Pearse also noted the existing First Nations names for places he was visiting or surveying, transliterating them into English. Examples, as written in his diary, included Tslalup for Departure Bay, Tlelsletsa for Millstone River and Quamquamqua for Nanaimo River.
Merilees and Wallace proposed the name suggestion in a letter to the mayor and council in hopes of commemorating someone who was directly connected with the early development of Nanaimo.
“We’ve got so many Welllingtons in town, you know. East Wellington, North Welllington, God knows what else,” Merilees said. “I just thought … if we have a park there now why call it East Wellington? Let’s commemorate somebody who really contributed something to this community and who was a pillar in the colonial life of British Columbia … it just seemed like it was such a nice fit.”
READ ALSO: City of Nanaimo drafts designs for East Wellington Park
Richard Harding, city general manager of parks, recreation and culture, said that the planning process for the park is currently underway and its current name will not necessarily be formalized.
“Whenever we take parkland we kind of just name it based on the road that it’s beside, so it’s no formal naming, it’s just an identification,” Harding said. “We’re doing the master planning process right now, so what we could do is indicate in the plan that there’s a desire to name it, but people can come with naming requests, as per that policy, any time.”
Park name recommendations are ultimately brought before city council for consideration.
To learn more about East Wellington Park planning, visit bit.ly/2uL9PLC.
photos@nanaimobulletin.comLike us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter
