Former Home Bank - Fernie, BC
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T0SHEA
N 49° 30.182 W 115° 03.709
11U E 640326 N 5485183
Ensconced in what was once the home of the Home Bank, the Fernie Museum & Visitor's Centre stands on the downtown corner of Second Avenue and Fifth Street.
Waymark Code: WMPW81
Location: British Columbia, Canada
Date Posted: 10/28/2015
Views: 2
Governed by the Fernie and District Historical Society, founded in 1964, the first Fernie Museum opened August 4, 1979, the date of Fernie’s Diamond Jubilee, in the former Catholic Church rectory. It operated from this location until 1999 when the Church again required the use of the space. For a while the museum's collection was in storage, operated sporadically in temporary locations. In 2009, the City of Fernie bought the former BC Hydro building, which was originally the historic 1910 Home Bank building. Operating under a 25 year lease, this is the present home of the museum and Fernie Visitors' Centre.
Built in 1910 as the Fernie Branch of the Toronto headquartered Home Bank, the building continued in use by the bank until its collapse on Friday, August 17, 1923. Chartered in 1854, the Home Bank was never operated by knowledgeable and responsible directors, issuing bad loans and making ill advised investments, ultimately resulting in its collapse. The collapse of the bank was a severe blow to the children, working and retired persons who were its depositors, a great many of whom had been depositors with the bank their entire lives and lost their entire life savings. It was, in part, the failure of the Home Bank which provided the impetus for stricter banking oversight in Canada.
The first few paragraphs of the story of the bank's demise are reproduced below.
Follow the link given to read the entire story.
The Home Bank’s House of Cards
Its collapse in August 1923 wiped out thousands of Canadians' savings.
On the morning of Saturday, August 17, 1923, the head office and main branch of the Home Bank of Canada — an imposing stone building on King Street just west of Yonge — didn’t open as usual. Instead, a white cardboard placard scrawled with “Bank Closed. Payment Suspended” in blue letters was nailed to the door.
The Home Bank’s failure impacted more than 60,000 depositors across the country, who lost their life savings.
The effects were felt immediately in households in Toronto and across the nation. A Mrs. Hill, of Toronto’s working-class Corktown neighbourhood, lost the money she and her two small children needed for the “winter’s supply of clothing and coal.”
The closure of the branch in Fernie—the only bank in the British Columbia mining town—devastated residents, including disabled miners who lost the funds needed to cover their medical costs. In Blairmore, Alberta, 10 miners’ widows lost their pension money. Charles Fitzpatrick, a 30-year-old farmer from Maidstone, Saskatchewan, committed suicide after losing his life savings.
“Never at any time in its career,” liquidator G.T. Clarkson wrote after thoroughly examining the Home Bank’s affairs, “was an experienced and trained banker at the head of the bank and in control of its affairs. It can be said that the [bank management] utterly failed to pay regard to or impose elementary safeguards in protection of the business of the bank.”
From The Torontoist