Vernon’s small-town atmosphere is treasured by many, and as it turns out, our citizens’ appreciation for peace and quiet has spanned more than a century. In the summer of 1911, a meat shop called P. Burns & Co. Meat Merchants felt the blazing passion of Vernonites who gathered to defend the sanctity of their community.
P. Burns seemed, by many accounts, a perfectly acceptable and abundant source of good-quality meat. Its ads in the Vernon News promised “Fresh Killed Meats” and “Burns Quality Hams and Bacon.” They even offered special Christmas selections of Manitoba white fish, fresh oysters, shrimps, and crabs, and hurried all readers to order their holiday selections by December 24 (one year the ad, somewhat bafflingly, was run on January 5). Of course, P. Burns was by no means a pioneer of meat suppliers in Vernon — Knight & Co., located directly on Barnard Avenue (30th Avenue), was offering pickled pork as early as 1895, and the Vernon Meat Market was up and running even in 1891.
It was not this lack of originality that spurred people’s animosity; the issue with P. Burns was its ghastly smell. Public complaints about this “nuisance” were raised in June of 1911 and culminated in reportedly one of the largest signed petitions the city council had ever seen. The man who spearheaded the complaint wrote that “the place is a menace to public health, the stench being very bad, and the existence of such a place is having a considerable effect on property values in that section.” The location in question was Mission Street, or modern-day 34th Street.
Alderman Smith of the Health Department was put on the case and conducted multiple inspections of the P. Burns slaughterhouse. He agreed that the site was indeed unseemly, accruing loads of bones, hoofs, and other byproducts, and claimed that it would need to move beyond city limits sooner or later. He also discovered that the offensive smell was not entirely the fault of the workers: their efforts to keep refuse containers tightly sealed were being foiled by the pigs attempting to rummage through those very contents.
By July 20, little had been done to fix the problem. Developments slowed to a stop as the City Council waited for P. Burns representatives, who seemed to be dragging their feet, to arrive from Calgary. However, some mysterious supernatural force (perhaps) appeared to lose its own patience with the situation and take matters into its own hands. On July 29, a horrible fire in the Grand Forks area destroyed multiple businesses, and among those listed under suffering “entire loss” was the infamous P. Burns & Co. Meat Market.
Although damage was not dealt to the Vernon location, the company undoubtedly felt the weight of its misfortune. Curiously, P. Burns resurfaced in the Vernon News ten years later, this time as a dairy products department bent on taking over creameries in Armstrong and Salmon Arm. No fire was apparently strong enough to keep this company from causing mischief around our community.
Rebeka Beganova, Museum Ambassador