Maple Tree Square

Maple Tree Square lies at the corner of Water Street and Carrall Street, amid Gastown’s low-rise brick development. This corner grew out of an industrial fringe by a sawmill: just beyond its boundary began the lot visited by workers and sailors from ships entering the harbor. When colonial surveyors laid out streets here, Carrall Street became one of the axes of the new townsite. The present two-story Burns Block occupies the old corner lot and makes the intersection stand out among the neighboring facades.

On September thirtieth, eighteen sixty-seven, John Deighton arrived here by canoe with his family, two chairs, and a barrel of whiskey. The former river steamboat captain now lived on tavern earnings and needed a new venture: while he was taking the waters at mineral springs, the man Deighton had entrusted with his bar in New Westminster spent the cash register’s contents celebrating the Fourth of July and treated customers at the owner’s expense.

Deighton chose the shore by a sawmill. Workers and sailors needed a place to drink, and just beyond the boundary of the land occupied by the business, the sawmill owners could no longer stop him. Local legend says that Deighton offered the workers free whiskey if they helped with construction. In one day, they knocked together the plank-built Globe Saloon—the new bar was given the name of the ruined establishment in New Westminster.

The legend about one day cannot be verified, but the rest of the venture was quite real. Sawmill workers and crews from ships entering the harbor provided Deighton with a steady income. Visitors knew the owner as Gassy Jack—Chatty Jack: he could talk for a long time about sea voyages and goldfields. The settlement around the bar came to be called Gastown.

In eighteen seventy, colonial surveyors laid out the townsite of Granville here—the official name given to the expanded Gastown. Carrall Street, laid out by them, ran directly through Deighton’s first bar. He occupied the land without formal title and could not dispute the plan. Deighton then bought a lot at the corner of Carrall Street and Water Street and built the two-story Deighton House, with a bar, a billiard room, and rooms for lodgers. An enormous maple tree grew in front of the veranda.

The tree became a shared landmark. People arranged meetings beneath it, notices were posted on its trunk, and in the spring of eighteen eighty-six a notice about the first city elections was placed there. That very maple tree gave Maple Tree Square its name.

Deighton himself did not live to see the elections. He fell ill during another expansion of the hotel and died in eighteen seventy-five. The heirs received little more than three hundred dollars from the business that had already given its name to an entire district. Deighton’s only son died before the court completed the estate proceedings.

On June thirteenth, eighteen eighty-six, the city fire destroyed both Deighton House and the old maple tree. After the fire, real estate dealer George Burns built the brick Alhambra Hotel on the cleared lot. The present two-story Burns Block occupies the site of Deighton’s establishment. The maple tree is no longer here; all that remains of it is the square’s name and the intersection that once had to be laid through the first Globe Saloon.