Ferguson Point's Buried War

Third Beach's sand looks untouched. The ground behind it is not. Twice in the twentieth century, the Canadian military set up artillery on Ferguson Point, the headland that anchors the beach's south end, and the second time, Vancouver's own city government fought to keep the guns out and lost. What's left of that fight is mostly invisible now: a restaurant in a former officers' mess, and a parking lot where a soldiers' camp used to stand.

A first battery nobody remembers, 1914

Ferguson Point's military history didn't start with the Second World War. In 1914, naval reservists set up a temporary two-gun battery near Siwash Rock, a response to fears that the German East Asia Squadron might attack. That battery came down once the danger passed, and the point went back to being parkland. It would be nearly a quarter-century before the army came back, and this time the city did not let it happen quietly.

"A favourite beauty spot," 1938

In February 1938, construction began on a concrete two-gun battery at Ferguson Point -- a permanent installation, not a temporary wartime response like 1914's. Vancouver's Town Planning Commission objected before a single gun was poured into concrete, calling the site "a favourite beauty spot in the park." The Vancouver Sun took the same side editorially, warning that the battery could become "a permanent blot on the scenic beauty of the area." Neither objection stopped the work.

On August 27, 1939, as war approached, the 15th Coast Brigade's 31st Battery occupied the finished site. A historical marker later placed at Ferguson Point credits three separate Royal Canadian Artillery units with manning the post across the war: the 31st, 58th, and 85th Heavy batteries. That is a wider cast than the most detailed surviving account of the fort gives -- a local military-history record that documents the 31st Battery's construction, its objectors, and its stand-down in detail, but never mentions the 58th or 85th at all. Nothing in the available sources resolves which unit was actually on the ground at any given point in the war. Both records can be true and still leave a gap: a marker naming three units, and a narrative built almost entirely around one of them.

Whichever batteries were actually there, they needed housing. A soldiers' camp went up alongside the guns, on the ground that is now Third Beach's parking lot. Visitors who park there today are parking on a wartime barracks site, with nothing on the ground to say so.

Stand-down and a slow reclamation, 1945-1948

The war that justified the battery ended before the battery fired a shot at an actual enemy. In September 1945, the guns and most of the battery's buildings were removed. That should have been the end of it, but the land itself was never simply the Park Board's to take back. Ferguson Point sits on federally owned ground that Ottawa had leased to the City of Vancouver for a nominal sum since 1887 -- long before any gun arrived, and still the legal basis for the parkland today. Getting full civilian control back took the Park Board until April 1948, when it won its fight for complete restoration to parkland. The gun emplacements were levelled and buried where they stood.

The Teahouse restaurant now standing at Ferguson Point occupies the site of the battery's former officers' mess -- the closest thing left to a marked reminder that any of this happened, and even that connection isn't advertised on a sign for beachgoers to read. No source consulted here gives a count of how many soldiers passed through the camp, what unit patches they wore on a given date, or when the last of the camp's buildings actually came down alongside the guns -- the record covers the fight over the land far better than it covers the people stationed on it.

A second, quieter argument over naming

Ferguson Point's fight over what belonged on the land has a smaller echo just up the seawall, at Siwash Rock. The sea stack carries two names: the one mariners gave it, Nine Pin Rock, for its resemblance to a bowling pin, and an older Squamish name, tied to a transformation legend recorded in Pauline Johnson's Legends of Vancouver. In 2017, Vancouver Park Board commissioner Catherine Evans introduced a motion to make that Squamish name the rock's official one, citing the existing name's derogatory colonial origin. It is a different kind of argument than the one over the battery -- about naming rather than land use -- but it is the same headland, asking the same basic question again: who gets to decide what belongs at Ferguson Point, and on what grounds.

What the history actually explains

None of this changes what Third Beach looks like today: a sandy swimming beach, a concession stand, a summer lifeguard season, a Tuesday drum circle. But it explains why the parking lot sits where it does, why a restaurant occupies a building with a specific and documented former use, and why the point's most photographed rock still doesn't have the name most of the record-keeping suggests it should. Ferguson Point has spent most of its documented history being argued over by people who never fired a shot at each other -- planners against soldiers, one Squamish name against a mariners' nickname -- and the beach that resulted is what was left standing once the last of those arguments settled.

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