Turner House is a small attic storeyed timber framed board and batten cottage, built by Royal Engineer George Turner in the 1870s; The building has since been relocated to Clayburn Village, near the site of the first brickworks.
Constructed circa 1875, the Maple Grove Farmhouse is significant as the only surviving house from the first phase of European settlement on Matsqui Prairie. Despite its age, the home retains a high degree of original integrity and is valuable as an example of Craftsman-style architecture. A precise date of the building’s construction can be established as a result of several mentions of it in the Alben Hawkins diaries held in the BC Archives (CA BCA MS-0441). The property’s association with George Turner, a surveyor with the Columbia attachment of the Royal Engineers (1858-63), and one of the area’s earliest European settlers, gives the structure historic significance. Turner, who was an important early surveyor in his own right, and whose work is closely associated with the early development of the Abbotsford area, was granted this land as part of his 160-acre lot for service with the R.E. in April of 1870.
The location of the house is historically significant in that it reflects the settlers’ sensible choice of high land free from the threat of floods known to engulf the prairie, and because Mr. Turner himself surveyed one of Abbotsford’s main arteries to run from the steamboat landing to this property. The building is highly representative of a very early farming property. Between 1886 and 1888 the farm was the home of Maple Grove Dairy Company, one of the area’s first cooperatively run farms, owned by some of the community’s first European settlers, including the Downes and Sims families. Further significance is gained by the property’s association with Alex Cruikshank, who was instrumental in the early development of Matsqui, and his son George, who served as a reeve of Matsqui and as a liberal MP.
