Here is the latest newsletter installment of an image and quote from the museum’s award-winning book Watershed Moments – A Pictorial History of Courtenay and District.

Photo credit: Florence Harmston and Sam Cliffe both sailed to Vancouver Island on the Silistria in 1862 and married a decade later in 1872. Photo: CDM 974.78.1 Page 14.

Photo caption: “Ten years after his 1862 voyage, in April 1872, Sam Cliffe married Florence Harmston, who had made the same voyage on the Silistria at the age of six with her parents, William and Mary Harmston. According to family stories, the Harmstons had intended to continue their voyage on the Silistria to arrive in April in Port Clemens, New Zealand. They changed course when they noticed an ad for prairie land in the Comox Valley. Florence, born on the Isle of Man, had fifteen children with Sam. Ten survived to adulthood. Florence and Sam took over the Lorne Hotel in 1883. Sam died in 1908, and Florence twenty-one years later, in 1929.” Page 14.