Pull up a chair by the fire, good friend, and let us tell thee how this humble house came to be.
In the year of our Lord 1891, a hardy collier named Henry Sanders, having narrowly escaped a most grievous accident in the coal mines of Wellington, set his sights upon gentler ground. By way of the Crown’s pre-emption grants, he laid claim to a wild and wooded acreage here in Nanoose Bay.
With naught but his own two hands and an axe well sharpened, Henry felled the mighty timber and cleared the land for a dairy and an orchard. Near the crossroads that would one day be known as Brynmarl, he raised a snug cottage for his good wife Josephine and their daughters, among them young Amy, born in 1890. The little ones skipped along dusty trails that we now call Sanders Road.
Henry soon became a pillar of early Nanoose. He lent his hands to raising the very first schoolhouse and gathered the local farmers together in common cause. Upon this beloved land he dwelt until his final days in the 1940s.
When the pioneer days drew to a close, the land passed into new hands. Upon the very clearing where the Sanders family once tended their fields, a grand farmhouse of cedar and log was raised. Though Henry’s old cottage was in time lost to wind and weather, the fields, the towering old-growth trees and the gentle country spirit of the estate were lovingly kept just as they were.
In 1978, Arthur and Ada Knight, two Britons far from home, happened upon the rustic farmhouse and saw within its timbers the makings of a true old-world English pub. They set to work with gusto, adding dark wooden beams, a great stone hearth and all the proper trappings of a public house, while keeping the cosy country look out of doors. In fond tribute to the fine country inns of England, they named it the Rocking Horse Pub.
And so it stands today at 2038 Rocking Horse Place, just off Sanders Road. Within doors, it keeps the warm, homely feel of a farmhouse parlour, and out of doors, our patio rests upon the very fields Henry Sanders cleared more than 130 years ago.
So raise thy glass, good friend, to Henry, to the Knights, and to all who have kept the fire burning since. Thou art most welcome here.
