Ferguson Point's most interesting decade wasn't spent building a beach. It was spent defending one from artillery. Twice in the twentieth century the Canadian military set up guns on the point that is now Third Beach's southern anchor -- first in 1914, then again from 1938 through 1945 -- and the second time, Vancouver's own city planners fought to keep the guns out, and lost.
The first battery, 1914. Ferguson Point's military use began in 1914, when naval reservists set up a temporary two-gun battery near Siwash Rock, a response to fears that the German East Asia Squadron might attack the coast. It came down once that threat passed. The point stayed quiet for a generation, long enough that when the army came back, it looked to the city like a fresh intrusion rather than a return.
A fight over "a favourite beauty spot," 1938. In February 1938, construction began on a concrete two-gun battery at Ferguson Point. Vancouver's Town Planning Commission did not approve, calling the site "a favourite beauty spot in the park." The Vancouver Sun joined the opposition, warning the battery could become "a permanent blot on the scenic beauty of the area." Neither objection stopped construction. On August 27, 1939, the 15th Coast Brigade's 31st Battery occupied the site, as war approached. A historical marker at Ferguson Point later credited three Royal Canadian Artillery units with manning the post through 1945 -- the 31st, 58th, and 85th Heavy batteries -- though the most detailed contemporary account of the fort centers on the 31st alone and never mentions the other two. A soldiers' camp built for the battery's crews occupied what is now Third Beach's parking lot.
Two accounts, one battery. The gap between those sources is itself worth noting rather than papering over. A local military-history site (Vancouver Gunners) tells the 31st Battery's story in detail -- construction dates, the planning commission's objection, the newspaper editorial -- and never brings in the 58th or 85th Heavy batteries the historical marker names. The marker, in turn, gives no month-by-month account of what any of the three units actually did at the post. Both can be true at once: a marker naming three battery designations that manned Ferguson Point across six years of war, and a detailed narrative built almost entirely around the first of them. Which unit was where, and when, at any specific point in the war is simply not part of either record.
Stand-down, 1945-1948. The battery's guns and most of its buildings came down in September 1945, as the war ended. The land itself, though, was never the Park Board's to reclaim on its own timeline: Ferguson Point sits on federally owned ground that Ottawa had leased to the City of Vancouver for a nominal sum since 1887. It took the Park Board until April 1948 to win its fight for full restoration to parkland, after which the gun emplacements were levelled and buried.
What's left. Ferguson Point's military past is mostly buried, literally, under the parkland the city fought to get back. The clearest surviving link is architectural rather than martial: the Teahouse restaurant at Ferguson Point occupies the site of the battery's former officers' mess. There is no marker on Third Beach's own sand pointing this out, and no public accounting of how many soldiers passed through the camp on what is now a parking lot full of beachgoers' cars.
The tension here is bureaucratic, not violent: no battle was ever fought at Ferguson Point. What was fought, twice, was a paperwork war between a park board defending scenery and a wartime government defending a coastline. The board's own planners lost the argument in 1938, then got the last word by 1948, and the point has been parkland -- and now a sandy beach -- ever since. The parking lot where visitors leave their cars today is the site's most literal inheritance from that fight: it was built to house the men who occupied the ground the city didn't want them on in the first place. Nobody who parks there today is told that. The sign, if there is one, is at the Teahouse, not the lot.
It is also worth sitting with what didn't happen. Ferguson Point was armed for war twice and fired on nothing; the guns' only recorded adversary was the city's own planning commission. That makes Third Beach an unusual kind of coastal-defence site: the fight that shaped it wasn't between Canada and an attacking navy, real or feared, but between two arms of the same government arguing over who got to decide what a beauty spot was for. The federal lease that made the whole argument possible is still the legal basis for the parkland today, a nominal-rent arrangement now well over a century old. Third Beach's sand gets the postcards. The parking lot behind it is the part of the site that actually remembers the fight.
