On the corner of St. Laurent Avenue and McLean Street, this DQ is in Gardner Centre, a strip mall which staged its grand opening on July 8, 1972. When it opened it was known as Gardner Shopping Centre. The DQ, as well as most of the other businesses in the mall, opened for business at about the same time. This DQ is old enough that until recently it didn't call itself a
Grill N Chill or any other more contemporary name, but a
Dairy Queen Restaurant. Obviously, it has never had a drive through, and never will.
The ad below is from July of 1972, back in the days when Dennis the Menace was a DQ mascot and sundaes were
Scrumpdillyicious. It was the very first ad placed by the Quesnel Dairy Queen, published on page 4 of the July 5th, 1972 Gardner Centre Supplement of the Quesnel Cariboo Observer. When the ad was published, it would still be another few days before Quesnel residents could sample DQ sundaes for themselves.
The 12 page Gardner Centre Supplement contained the full story of the centre, its construction, the stores, the contractors, the suppliers, the people associated with it and the story of John Gardner, which begins below. Read the full story in
the supplement.
The namesake of Gardner Centre, John Herbert Gardner, was an Albertan who came to the Cariboo, eventually starting a sawmill which grew into a large sawmilling and building supply business serving much of central British Columbia.
Centre Named After Pioneer
July 5, 1972 | Quesnel Cariboo Observer
A man who traded his first sawmill for a cow eventually became the founder of the largest combined sawmilling and building supply business in the Central Interior.
That man was John Herbert Gardner, the first Gardner in Quesnel, a family whose name has been given to the new Gardner Shopping Centre.
When H.J. Gardner came to the Cariboo from Alberta in 1902 he acted as a sheriff, covering the northern part of the Cariboo and even ranging as far north as the Parsnip River. In 1905, Mary Adams travelled all the way from England to become his bride and the couple were married at Kersley and moved from there to Stanley where Mr. Gardner took a position as store-keeper.
It was at Stanley that their five children were born and the foundation for one of the Cariboo's most famous family enterprises was laid.
About 1915, during World War I, the family moved to Beaver Pass where Mr. Gardner tookover the operation of a roadhouse catering to the freighters working on the long haul in to Barkerville. Eventually, in 1926, the first sawmill was started mainly to cut lumber for a new barn, though some was sold to placer operations near Stanley and at Slough Creek.
Sawmilling at Beaver Pass was not too lucrative an occupation and Mr. Gardner couldn't resist the temptation to trade-off his small mill for a cow in a deal made with Frank Kibbee, well-known oldtimer of Bowron Lake who was one of the few men to tangle with a grizzly bear and live to tell about it.
From the Quesnel Cariboo Observer