How much did Patrick Lumber Co. sell for?

The sale of the Patrick Lumber Co. mill at Crescent Valley, BC in 1911 along with its timber assets to the British Canadian Lumber Co. financed the creation of the Pacific Coast Hockey Association. But the sale price is a matter of some question.

At the time, it was universally reported as $1 million (something north of $22 million today). But later on, lesser amounts were cited.

• Archie Wills, in the Victoria Daily Times of Oct. 15, 1949, said it was “a shade under $340,000.” But in the same paper of March 22, 1957, Wills said Joe Patrick “received an offer of $300,000 for his mills and timber holdings. The offer was accepted.”

• Bruce Hutchinson, writing in Macleans magazine on March 1, 1950, said it was “something under $350,000.”

• Denny Boyd, in his History of Hockey in BC (1970), said it was $340,000.

• Eric Whitehead, in The Patricks: Hockey’s Royal Family (1980), said: “The sale price has been variously reported as anything between $400,000 and $1 million but the actual sum was $440,000.” The $400,000 figure was given in an unpublished memoir by Lester Patrick that Whitehead cited in his previous book, Cyclone Taylor: A Hockey Legend. But he didn’t say how he established the actual price. Nor did any of the other writers.

If the price was not the $1 million initially reported, what advantage would it have been to either the buyer or the seller to inflate the amount? My best guess is that $340,000 to $440,000 represented the portion of the sale that went to the Patricks while the rest went to other investors. It is also possible Patrick Lumber had serious debt, and $340,000 to $440,000 is what was left once the creditors were paid, although that seems unlikely.

In a 1935 memoir serialized in the Boston Globe, Frank Patrick said that out of the sale (which he pegged at $1 million), his father gave him and brother Lester $25,000 each. He added: “As he also had helped me make a timber turnover by which I netted about $35,000, there I was at age 25 with nearly $60,000 in my jeans. I immediately bought a big new car and blew a good part of the suddenly-found fortune in racing around.”

The Patrick Lumber Co. sawmill at Crescent Valley, BC, with the Slocan River in the foreground, 1907. (Slocan Valley Historical Society 2013_01-2357)

If the sale of Patrick Lumber was indeed for $1 million, it is probably just a coincidence, although an interesting one, that the Vancouver club of the PCHA became known as the Millionaires.

Hoping to pin down the exact sale price, I requested Patrick Lumber’s corporate file from the BC Archives. Unfortunately, it doesn’t answer that question. I have posted the whole thing below, but the only information it provides beyond the usual boilerplate is the roster of founding directors, namely John W. McConnell, H. Markland Molson, William C. McIntyre, Frank J. Knox, and Joseph Patrick, all of Montreal.

No other paper trail seems to exist from the Patrick Lumber Co. No correspondence, no financial records, nothing. (Although the late Bob Cunningham, whose father worked as a bookkeeper for the company that bought the Patrick mill, claimed to have seen a letterhead.) Perhaps it was all shredded. Or, if it lasted long enough, maybe those records were lost in the fires that consumed the Vancouver and Victoria arenas in 1929 and 1936, respectively.

Speaking of which: how much did it cost to build those arenas? Several different figures have been cited, which reflects at least in part the projected cost versus the actual cost.  

• Vancouver Daily World, March 10, 1911: Vancouver rink projected at $250,000, Victoria rink projected at $100,000 (also Calgary and Edmonton rinks projected at $50,000 each).

• Edmonton Journal, March 14, 1911: Vancouver buildings and plant to cost $200,000.

• Vancouver Province, Nov. 22, 1911: Vancouver rink expected to cost $175,000 

• Archie Wills in Macleans, April 1, 1928: Vancouver cost $350,000 and Victoria $120,000

• Archie Wills in Victoria Daily Times, Oct. 15, 1949: Victoria cost $110,000 (site purchased for $10,000).

• Archie Wills in Victoria Daily Times, March 22, 1957: Lester paid $10,000 for six lots and awarded a construction contract worth $125,000.

• Eric Whitehead in Cyclone Taylor: A Hockey Legend (1977): Victoria cost $11,000 (clearly he was missing a zero).

• Whitehead in The Patricks: Hockey’s Royal Family (1980): Vancouver cost $210,000 (site purchased for $27,000) and Victoria cost $110,000 (site purchased for $10,000).

• The Official National Hockey League 75th Anniversary Commemorative Book (1991): Victoria cost $110,000. Vancouver budgeted at $210,000 but cost close to $300,000.

• Thomas D. Picard in Total Hockey (1998): Vancouver cost $175,000 (possibly based on the Province of Nov. 22, 1911)

• Stephen Cole in The Canadian Hockey Atlas (2006): Vancouver cost $270,000 and Victoria $110,000

• Howard Shubert in Architecture on Ice (2016): Vancouver cost $275,000, citing Contract Record of Oct. 18, 1911, and Victoria $110,000, citing Whitehead.

Frank Patrick also claimed in the Victoria Daily Times of Jan. 27, 1920 that the “Coast arenas represent an investment of roughly $800,000,” but that seems way too high, unless it includes substantial later additions. Dick Beddoes, who interviewed Frank Patrick a few times, wrote in The Vancouver Sun of June 30, 1960 that “the Patricks spent $600,000 building arenas in Vancouver and Victoria,” which also seems unlikely.

Jon Chi-Kit Wong definitively established the cost of the Vancouver rink in Coast to Coast: Hockey in Canada to the Second World War (2009) by examining the corporate file of the Vancouver Arena Co. at the BC Archives. The building alone was $191,710, but the final price tag was $226,382, presumably once the ice-making equipment was added. Furniture was another $1,399.50. While Whitehead claimed the lots cost $27,000, Wong could not find any evidence the company owned them until the 1920s.

The Patricks tried to find investors for their pro hockey venture, but had very little luck. So if they spent about $350,000 building the two rinks, how much did that leave when they started signing players from Eastern Canada to lucrative contracts? While ticket sales would have helped pay some salaries, they had another surprising source of income, as I’ll explain in a forthcoming post.

Updated on Jan. 5, 2025 to add the discussion around the cost of the rinks. Updated on Jan. 18, 2025 to add the $800,000 figure cited by Frank Patrick. Updated on Feb. 13, 2025 to add more figures from Archie Wills. Updated on May 21, 2025 to add a figure from the NHL 75th anniversary book. Updated on June 11, 2025 to add figures from the Cyclone Taylor book.