Telegraph office future home for Dawson Museum Director

By Chris Beacom

Originally appeared in the Yukon News in December 2003.

Dawson City ­ One of Dawson’s oldest and most underrated buildings is a year away from being fully restored.

The old telegraph office, located at 7th Avenue and Firth Street, will be finished “in the next year or two,”

Another historic Dawson building is being renovated at last. Photo by Dan Davidson

says Doug Olynyk, the historic sites coordinator for the YTG heritage branch.

The building is undergoing a complete renovation that will cost “between $150,00 to $200,000,” Olynyk said in an interview in December.

The house was designed and built by Thomas W. Fuller ­ the same architect who built the commissioner’s residence, the original post office, the government administration building and the Anglican church.

Fuller’s father, also named Thomas, designed the parliament buildings in 1859 and was chief architect for the dominion of Canada from 1881-1896.

His son also served as chief architect for the federal government in 1927.

Fuller lived in Dawson from 1899-1902, and the telegraph office ­ which also served as Fuller’s residence - was the first building he designed in the Klondike.

Jim Williams has been hired by the Yukon government to do the primary restoration work. He said Fuller’s design is from the “federal” period, during a tour in December.

“A lot of this stuff, in the United States, they would have called it federal, which is sort of about 1780 to 1850 ­ that time frame,” he said. “The Europeans called it Greek revival.”

The building originally sat on Front Street with the other government buildings, said Olynyk. “It was located in the same government compound as the commissioner’s residence and Fort Herchemer, which is the remains of the Northwest Mounted Police post, and the court house and the territorial administration building.”

Around 1908, the building was sold and moved to its present location, where a basement was dug.

Williams has been working on the house since October 1. He has gutted the building, straightened and replaced the structure and installed insulation. And he has done it as historically as possible.

“We corrected all the framing,” he said. “The way I determined where things went was just old nails. Where there was a stud missing, you could tell. If there was one that was too damaged but I didn’t want to remove it, then I would sistern it on, and put a new one next to it.”

The building was originally built in three distinct sections. A tall, two-story bay was the space for the telegraph office, which measures about three meters wide and seven meters long.

On each side, two identical “wing” like offices, measuring just over three-square meters, also housed federal workers.

Upstairs, in the bay, there was a bedroom, bathroom and storage areas.

Behind the telegraph office was a kitchen.

And in the back, an addition was built for further storage.

Williams wasn’t sure who put in the back rooms.

“I don’t know about Fuller,” he said.

The professional carpenter is far more interested with the office space and hip-style roof. He was especially mesmerized with Fuller’s drafting office, located in the right wing.

When he pulled molding from the roof, he found signs of architectural wizardry.

It appears Fuller created four identical cubic offices in the tiny room, each measuring just a little over two square meters.

“This pattern on the ceiling indicates that there were partitions going off in all these different directions. Each little cubical would have had a window, except this guy here, which had a doorway.”

The tiny rooms appear to have been built on similar angles to each other and shared joists. The ceiling pattern shows that the partitions were built like spokes in a wheel, leaving an open space in the center. From the center, each room could be reached through four different doorways.

It was an amazing use of space, Williams said. “It’s interesting that he chose squares, because usually squares are not good for proportions, but this guy was good.”

Williams had difficulty figuring out what Fuller had done, until he began removing the wall material.

“I pulled it off the way they put it on so I wouldn’t damage it, so I had to find out where they started it. It was confusing because it started here and it went that way and it started there and it went another way. Each room was done differently so I had to find out where they did it each time.”

What remains a mystery is how the center was reached by the workers.

Williams thinks a “narrow passageway” existed off the main entrance, “but I’m just guessing.”

The house is being fully restored and will be the future home for the museum director, Olynyk said. Another plan is to make the former office areas open to the public.

“That’s our intention,” he said. “There are a couple rooms on the ground floor which are interesting architecturally and would be open to the public. We are right now thinking of potentially interpreting the career of the architect who built the place.”

The upstairs will be strictly for the museum director. The kitchen will also be restored on the main floor and the back storage area is being remodeled to house a bathroom, laundry area and furnace.

The basement was filled in when YTG replaced the foundation in the last decade, Olynyk said.

“It had just enough space to have head room and one of those octopus wood burning stoves and a root cellar.”

The basement “just wasn’t needed,” he added. “The government didn’t have any use and I couldn’t get any money to do anything with it.”

Interior finishing will begin next year, when Olynyk can find more money to continue the project, which has been financed incrementally for the last “seven or eight years.”

“If we get the money in the next year, we hope to finish the interior in the next year.”

Uffish Thoughts: Why Such a Big Surprise?

by Dan Davidson

Among the many things of which Dawson’s council was accused by Community Services Minister Glen Hart on December 30, I was most perplexed by his air of indignation as he enumerated what he apparently felt to be spending irregularities of which he had only recently become aware.

It’s the public pretence of having only just learned the sad, sad truth about where all the grant and debenture money went that offended my intelligence the most.

Anyone who has watched or attended Dawson’s councils over the past two years, since the appointment of the original financial supervisor, would have seen the frequent presentation of reports and recommendations from something called a Project Management Team (or PMT).

Council set up PMTs for each of its remaining major projects after the first one (the city/fire hall relocation) ran into problems. When the territorial government became concerned about Dawson’s financial future, it appointed a supervisor to advise and oversee the remaining allocation of funds, and it also, at Dawson’s request, appointed senior civil servants with a knowledge of engineering and procedure to sit on these PMTs.

There was always at least senior YTG official sitting, either physically, or on a conference call, at each of the PMT meetings after that. Each expenditure of funds related to either the recreation centre or the secondary sewage treatment plant went through thorough discussion at these meetings, at which lots of minutes were kept.

Each meeting resulted in a batch of resolutions which were then forwarded to Dawson council as recommendations to pay this or that bill as required. All of this paperwork was, in turn, filed with the Department of Community Services and available for interpretation by or to the minister.

This, in turn, was in accordance with a Long Range Financial Plan which was being developed and fine tuned all through this period, checked and double checked by auditors and accountants, including several independent audits required by the Yukon Party government once the changing of the political guard took place after the first fourteen months or so of the supervisor’s appointment had passed.

In other words, it is, was, and has been plain at each step along the way where the money for projects came from and where it was allocated to go. There were no surprises, and only a person who was not acquainted with the process being used would be able to find any.

All of the developments termed as “surprises” took place after October, after the government appointee who had been overseeing the process was dismissed (for something else entirely, or so the story goes) and had been replaced by someone who, no matter how able, could not possibly have followed all the ins and outs of the previous two years without a thorough briefing by the departing supervisor.

Bear in mind that the first supervisor’s work on this file was never criticized by his minister until after he was no longer an employee, and that this same person was told to make himself available to the new supervisor when called upon by him.

Also bear in mind that the new supervisor was instructed, so I am told, to contact the former one in order to obtain such a briefing. And that he had not done so up to the evening of December 30, when the Hart manifesto was delivered so bluntly in the YOOP Hall in Dawson.

It may be true that the new supervisor attempted to get some information from Dawson’s council during the last couple of weeks in October, and equally true that he got no answers. You may recall that there were municipal elections in the middle of that month. What you may not remember is that Dawson’s mayor and town manager, who are accused of not cooperating with the new supervisor during this period, were in Vancouver, attending arbitration hearings which kept them pretty occupied.

Further to this, the rest of the newly elected council was not sworn in until November 10, 2003, after which its members very quickly began to deal with the issues the supervisor was raising.

When Mr. Hart claims that Dawson made no response to the supervisor’s questions and directions until a memo written by town manager Scott Coulson on December 16, that is simply not true. I sat in chambers on December 2 and watched as council introduced, discussed and gave first and second reading to several resolutions which had been demanded by the new supervisor, and my story to this effect ran in the Star on December 3, 2003.

I have read Nineteen Eighty-Four. I know about memory holes and the backdating and revision of objective facts to suit new interpretations of reality. I haven’t seen it in action for about a decade, but I’m seeing it again now.