09/22/2026
Most people in Victoria could not tell you what the Legislature cost, and almost nobody could tell you that the contractor who built it drowned before it was finished.
This is the first post in a new series we are starting, How It Got Built, where we take an Island building and go through the job that put it up.
The province promised $600,000 for it under an Act passed in 1893, when everything British Columbia collected in a year came to about $1.5 million. It came in at $923,882.30, and the design had barely moved the whole way through.
The job was meant to land under $550,000, and the bids came in at $617,574 before anyone had signed anything. Nobody raised the number and nobody shrank the building. Items came out of the plans, the bond requirement was dropped, and a Victoria man named Frederick Adams signed for the masonry at $380,000 when he had bid $454,508 himself.
A February frost split two thirds of the stone already delivered, and the supply stayed his problem. The replacement quarry could not deliver, so he went and quarried it himself. The architect who valued his work also judged his extras, and the holdback went from 5 percent to 25 while he was already short.
He missed payroll on the first of December 1894 and stopped work nine days later. On the night of 22 March 1895 the tug taking him up to the quarries went onto the rocks off Trial Island. Adams and five of the crew were lost, and his body was never found.
His widow Sarah and his bondsmen finished the contract, on a government arrangement that paid costs plus 15 percent.
The low price was never a saving.
Contract figures from the Hallmark Heritage Society. The last stone went in on 19 September 1896.
