Salt Spring Island Archives
J.T. Collins arrived on Salt Spring Island in 1895, with his wife Mary and their three sons and daughter. They first lived in a cabin on Mr. Bullock’s property, very soon buying land on the east side of St. Mary’s Lake from Levi Davis. They converted a barn on the property into a butter factory and built a creamery and cheese factory (with the main building measuring 30 x 30 ft. and machinery brought from England). There is reference to complaints that he kept a piggery close beside the creamery; perhaps that partly explains why the short-lived Salt Spring Island English Creamery closed in 1898.
In the fall of 1896, Mr. Collins was a founding member of a new club, that met once a month for dinner and a social evening and whose object was “the progress and improvement of Salt Spring Island”. In 1897, the provincial government passed an Act providing for the establishment of Farmers’ Institutes to encourage and improve “agriculture, horticulture, arboriculture, manufactures, and other useful arts”. Salt Spring Island formed its own Institute that same year, with Mr. Collins as its president for several years. He is also listed as the President of the newly amalgamated Farmers’ Institute and Agricultural & Fruit Growers Association in 1918.
Collins’ daughter Alice was the organist at St. Mark’s Church for 25 years. She apparently might have married Mr. Bullock but for a legal dispute between him and her father, with Mr. Collins spending some time in gaol over an action to recover the sum of $4329. (Rumor had it that most people sided with Mr. Collins in the dispute).
Mary Collins died in 1929.
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