Description of Historic Place

The Port Haney Post Office is a modest one and one-half storey, front-gabled wood-frame commercial structure oriented towards the Fraser River and the railway tracks. It is located in the centre of the historic commercial district of Port Haney, B.C. It is sited adjacent to another historic commercial building, the Bank of Montreal, now the Billy Miner Pub.

Heritage Value

The Port Haney Post Office is one of the last active commercial buildings in the historic core of Port Haney and has aesthetic social, cultural and historic valued for its commercial Arts and Crafts style and its associations with the historic precinct and with Mary Berry Charlton Storey. Port Haney is a reminder of the early history of the City of Maple Ridge and the development of its original small town centres. The early settlement of Port Haney was centred on the Fraser River, which provided the earliest access before the development of roads through the area.

After the arrival of the CPR, significant commercial and residential development occurred and Port Haney became a major historic transportation hub in the region. In 1931, the completion of the Lougheed Highway-a make-work project that connected the Fraser Valley communities by road-signalled a shift in the location of Haney's commercial activity. A devastating fire in late November 1932 destroyed much of the existing business centre, hastening the shift of businesses up the hill. There was initially some reluctance in relocating the post office, due to its convenient proximity to the railway station; in 1933, the Port Haney Post Office was built across from the station to replace the one that had been destroyed in the fire. Public demand led to the construction of another post office in 1939 in the new town centre area. The earlier Port Haney Post Office therefore remains as a representation of the transitional period that marked the end of the dominance of the railway industry and the emergence of road-based transportation that allowed greater flexibility in land development and heralded new development throughout the Fraser Valley. Following its redundancy as a post office, it served for many years as a single-family residence, until its conversion back to commercial use (today the Billy Miner Pizza Cafe).

The Port Haney Post Office is also valued for its association with an important historic personality, Mary Berry Charlton Storey, who built the post office and acted as Post Mistress. Well known as an ambitious early entrepreneur, she was the wife of Alfred Charlton, a retailer and post office operator in Port Haney. After his death in 1907, she assumed his professional responsibilities, taking on the role of Post Mistress, harbour master and retailer in addition to raising her children. Additionally, she is important to the history of Port Haney for opening the first bank in the community, cementing Port Haney's prime position in the river-based life of the early twentieth century.

The Port Haney Post Office also has aesthetic value for its modest scale, indicating the shifting nature of the area's economy. It demonstrates the late persistence of the influence of the Arts and Crafts style, popular as a domestic style but reflected here in a way that tied the building to an emerging residential context.

Little remains of the historic downtown streetscape of Port Haney, which increases the value of this building as one of the only intact commercial buildings from the early days of settlement. Port Haney remains as a heritage precinct and a reminder of the origins of the City of Maple Ridge, and this building remains a vital part of the local neighbourhood.

SOURCE: Maple Ridge Planning Department

Character-Defining Elements

Key elements that define the heritage character of the Port Haney Post Office include its:
- original siting and orientation to the street, and its proximate relationship to the railway and to an adjacent heritage structure
- commercial form, scale and massing, including its one and one-half-storey height, front gabled roof with a skirt roof at the front, rectangular floor plan and offset front entry
- wood-frame construction including lapped wooden siding with cornerboards
- late influence of the Arts and Crafts style including triangular eave brackets at the front and rear, open soffits and exposed rafter tails
- internal red-brick chimney with corbelled top
- original windows including: wooden-sash window assemblies of double casement windows with arched three-part transoms; double-assembly, double-hung wooden-sash windows on the east side; and 4-paned double sliding windows at the rear