On May 4, 1912, the Canadian Highway Association gathered motorists and civic leaders at Alberni on Vancouver Island to promote an audacious idea: a highway extending across Canada from the Pacific to the Atlantic.
First western post, planted by Canadian Highway Association, at Alberni, British Columbia on 4th May, 1912. Source: UK Archives (HS85-10-25463).
Albert E. Todd, president of the Victoria Automobile Association, helped plant a simple white post near Alberni Inlet. It carried the words “Canadian Highway” and an arrow pointing east toward Halifax. No such highway existed. The post marked a national ambition rather than an actual road.
It also became a prize in the rivalry between Alberni and the neighboring city of Port Alberni. According to Thomas Wilby’s A Motor Tour Through Canada, men from Port Alberni removed the post two days after the ceremony and replanted it about a mile and a half away in their own community.
The theft caused “consternation in Alberni.” Before residents could carry out their threatened revenge, the post was returned on a cart and restored to its original position. To discourage another raid, a bull terrier was chained beside it.
The treasured post was tenderly restored to its rightful place on the inlet, and a bull terrier, fierce and aggressive of disposition and sharing the local indignation, was chained to it to keep watch and ward over the outward symbol of a road that is yet to ‘weave province with province, to interlace people with people.
Thomas Wilby
A Motor Tour Through Canada, Introduction, p. 276.
When Wilby and Jack Haney arrived in Alberni later that year, the post represented the symbolic destination of their transcontinental automobile journey. “Further than Alberni I could not go,” Wilby wrote on page 275. Beyond the town lay Alberni Inlet and the open Pacific.
A bull terrier, fierce and aggressive of disposition, was chained to the historic post. Source: A Motor Tour Through Canada, P.277.
The sign also exposed the central irony of their expedition. Wilby and Haney had attempted to cross Canada by automobile, but Canada did not yet possess a continuous road. They had been forced to travel by steamer and train north of Lake Superior and briefly enter the United States in British Columbia. The post pointed toward Halifax, but between Alberni and the Atlantic lay thousands of miles of disconnected roads, trails, railway tracks and wilderness.
The national highway envisioned at Alberni would take another half-century to become a reality. The Trans-Canada Highway officially opened in 1962. Alberni and Port Alberni, meanwhile, ended their rivalry by amalgamating in 1967.
The incident remains a wonderfully human beginning to the history of the Trans-Canada Highway. Before the asphalt, bridges and familiar green-and-white signs, Canada’s highway dream was represented by a wooden post, two competing towns and a bull terrier guarding the road to the future.
Wilby’s book is the principal source for the theft-and-return story. The photograph confirms the presence of the dog, but Wilby did not witness the theft himself, so its more theatrical details should be attributed to his account rather than presented as independently verified fact.