A major conservation project on a historic Wharf Street retaining wall has uncovered long-lost artifacts from Victoria’s early commercial waterfront, while putting a famous local myth to the test.
The restoration, completed by Heritage Masonry & Conservation, focused on a retaining wall connected to two of the city’s earliest commercial buildings: the Hudson’s Bay warehouse and the Turner Beeton & Co. office, both constructed in the 1800s.
Holding layers of development going back more than 150 years, the site is a vital piece of the city’s early waterfront history. The project followed years of planning and condition assessments led by Herold Engineering.
Buried among the rubble behind the wall, workers made a tangible historical discovery: six intricately carved stone rosettes that once adorned the Turner Beeton & Co. building before its demolition.
Heritage Masonry and Conservation co-owner Liam Hall noted the artifacts stood out because of the immense craftsmanship required to create them from raw stone using only a hammer and chisel.
“When you look at a piece of stone, it was a hunk of stone and someone had an idea and a design and they grabbed a chisel and a hammer, and they hit it thousands and thousands of times to make it into what it is now,” he said.
The discovery prompted the team to research archival photographs, which confirmed the decorative stones had originally adorned the Turner Beeton & Co. building. Several of the rosettes were turned over to the city.
To leave their own mark, the restoration team installed a stainless-steel time capsule within the wall before sealing it. The capsule contains a crew photograph, engineering drawings, written notes, and a copy of the day’s newspaper.
The wall has long attracted attention due to an arched opening that fuelled rumours of underground tunnels beneath downtown Victoria.
When crews began restoration work, they used the arch as an access point, carefully removing the brick infill and entering a sealed cavity that had not been opened since the 1950s. Hall described the space as ‘dank and musty’, filled with cobwebs and heavy air that had not circulated in decades.
Despite hopes of finding evidence connected to the local myth, crews did not uncover any tunnels.
“We absolutely desired to find a tunnel,” Hall admitted. “We would have loved to have gone in there and said, ‘Here’s a tunnel.’”
However, crews did encounter an unexpected feature.
Roughly 10 feet inside the cavity sat a crude stone retaining wall constructed sometime after the original warehouse was built.
While Hall said it is possible the wall was erected to block an older cavity or opening, there is no evidence tying it to any illicit activities, ensuring the city’s infamous underground network remains exactly that: a myth.
Additionally, beam pockets from the long-demolished Hudson’s Bay warehouse were intentionally filled with a different style of brick to preserve the visible outline of the building’s past.
Hall explained the ultimate goal of conservation projects like this is to preserve tangible connections to the people who built the city.
“Every brick is placed by the hands of someone who’s no longer alive,” he said. “The point of it is that history gets passed down to the next generations.”
The restoration of the wall was officially completed last fall.
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