Written by Timur Radman 2022 Cohort
Last week, we went to the Roedde house in downtown Vancouver as a Halloween activity and an opportunity to learn more about the history of Vancouver. The house had a 19th-century look, but it was impressively well-maintained thanks to the people taking care of it. We had a tour, and during that tour, we learned a lot of new things, including the term “Victorian architecture,” which is described as an old-looking style from the 19th century. However, the guide said that what made the house more unique was that some of its rooms had an asymmetrical design.
One of the essential characters in the house with a mustache that the guide seemed to admire was Gustav Roedde, whom I will talk about in more detail. Gustav Roedde was born in 1860 in Grobbodungen, a small village in Germany, and he learned bookbinding in Leipzig, another city in Germany. Later, he immigrated to Canada through the US, where he met his future wife, Matilda, who came from Heligoland, an archipelago in Germany. Together, they travelled northwest to Victoria and then to Vancouver in 1881.
Two years later, Gustav Roedde opened his first bookbindery in the city, which was founded in 1886. Lucky Gustav profited a lot during the prosperity of the newly established city, as there weren’t any other bookbinderies around, allowing him to afford the particular Victorian-style house he built with the help of an architect. He had seven children, including the young Anna, that died at age four when she ate poisonous berries.
The image above is Gustav’s favourite private room, where he smoked his pipe, listened to classical music, played his Victrola, and bathed his St. Bernard dogs in a large tin tub. Two of Gustav’s sons wanted to go and fight in World War 2, which he did not approve of because the war was against Germany, where he was born. Gustav died in 1930, but his family stayed in the house for a while afterward. Eventually, it ended up being a residential house for years, after which it was restored and refurnished in the 1980s and has been opened to the public as a museum since 1990, allowing us to take a tour there.
It was a unique experience, and it had a spooky feeling knowing that some tragedies had occurred there. Nevertheless, it was hauntingly beautiful.