H. Pettigrew House

This house has value for its important connections, through the Pettigrew family, with local jewellery businesses, the Kelowna Fire Department, and municipal service; for being a representative middle-class single-family house of the early twentieth-century; for its recent connections with the Kelowna School Board and neighbourhood residents' association; and for the value the community placed on it by conserving it.

Hannah Pettigrew, a widow with a family of eight children, arrived in Kelowna from Winnipeg in July 1907. Her oldest son, James 'Jim' David Pettigrew, who had trained as manufacturing jeweller, obtained a job with J.B. Knowles, Kelowna's first jeweler. Pettigrew later set up his own wholesale jewellery shop upstairs in the Casorso Block on Bernard Avenue. Jim Pettigrew was an original member of the Kelowna Volunteer Fire Department when it was formed in 1909, and served as Kelowna's fire chief for twenty-five years, from 1920 to 1945. He was also an alderman for eight years, and mayor of the City of Kelowna in 1945 and 1946.

Jim Pettigrew built this house in 1908 for his mother and his siblings. The underlying form is a 'foursquare' house, with a square plan and hipped roof (truncated to have a flat top). The regularity is interrupted by gabled dormers, a porch, a projecting bay, and a shed wing at the rear, characteristic of picturesque sensibilities of the late Victorian / early Edwardian era. As with most houses of the time, it originally had no electricity and was lighted by coal oil lamps. Water came from a well and there was a pump in the kitchen. The outhouse was at the back fence, and the 'honey cart' came round once a month.

Most of the children moved out as they grew up. W.W. 'Bill' Pettigrew established his own retail jewellery store on the ground floor of the Casorso Block. Ida Pettigrew was one of Kelowna's first telephone operators. The house was occupied for about seventy years by the Pettigrew family, primarily Hannah and her widowed daughter, Olive (Mrs. Arthur Neill). Hannah Pettigrew died in 1961 at the age of 96.

The house was acquired in 1979 by School District 23. In 1998 the school district leased the building to KSAN, the local area Resident's Association, to allow for its restoration, showing the value placed on the house by the community. The house was situated at the former Kelowna Senior Secondary School but has been relocated to its current site on DeHart Avenue.