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The first commercial boats to ply the waters of Okanagan Lake began service long before Penticton had been officially incorporated as a town. One of the first was a rowboat, the Ruth Shorts, captained by Thomas D. Shorts and used to haul freight across the lake. It first launched in 1883, and was a sign of things to come. Captain Shorts went on to launch the first steamboat on the lake three years later, the Mary Victoria Greenhow.
But it was not until the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) became involved that transportation really took off across the region, and Penticton's role as a transportation hub truly began. In 1892, a rail line built by the Shuswap & Okanagan Railway reached Okanagan Landing, at the north end of the lake. This line stretched to the CPR's main line at Sicamous, connecting the northern part of the Okanagan to the wider world via rail. All that was needed to breach the gap between the northern and southern parts of the region was a boat, and in 1892, CPR president William Van Horne announced that the Okanagan would get one.
The first CPR vessel to take to the waters of the Okanagan Lake was the SS Aberdeen, which ran between Okanagan Landing in the north and Penticton in the south. As one historian said, this new service transformed the region: "It was just as if the CPR had opened a branch line extending all the way from Okanagan Landing to Penticton. People living in communities down the valley had direct, reliable, comfortable access to the CPR main line."¹
The popularity of the Aberdeen increased as farming and mining grew in the South Okanagan towards the end of the nineteenth century, and the service gradually expanded. Soon, the Aberdeen was making three return trips each week between Okanagan Landing and Penticton. The SS Okanagan was added to the route in 1907, allowing for daily steamer trips.
Then, in 1910, two years after Penticton was incorporated as a town of 600, transportation in the South Okanagan changed forever with the beginning of construction on the CPR-funded Kettle Valley Railway (KVR). On June 21, 1910, railway officials met with locals in Penticton, and an agreement was made to make the town the railway's headquarters.² Penticton's destiny as a transportation hub was confirmed; the wharves and railway station on the shores of the Okanagan Lake would become the economic drivers of the town, propelling its growth and prosperity.
By 1914, the railway line between Penticton and Midway had been completed, and that same year, a brand new steamboat launched at Penticton: the SS Sicamous. The Sicamous was larger and more luxurious than the boats that had come before it, with amenities such as electricity and hot running water, which many of the local homesteads did not yet have. Travelling aboard the Sicamous was more of an experience than a simple act of transportation. The food cooked aboard was luxurious, the furnishings were rich and elegant, and passengers could even have hot baths for the small fee of 50 cents.³
As one passenger, Mary Orr, said when recalling the steamship, "...the SS Sicamous provided a stateliness, a dignity, a peacefulness, a nobility, to our lives that many of us will never forget."⁴

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Since the first arrival of European settlers in the Okanagan, they have been farming. They didn't begin with grapes or fruit, but cattle. Around Penticton, Irish settler Tom Ellis preempted land in 1866 and established a successful cattle ranch that would one day earn him the title "Cattle King of the Okanagan Valley."¹ By 1888, he was the largest landholder in the South Okanagan, his holdings amounting to some 31,000 acres. Ellis also became one of the first white settlers in Penticton, along with the first storekeeper, postmaster, and magistrate in the area.
The transition from cattle ranches to orchards was gradual. The first orchard in the region was planted just south of the international border, near Osoyoos, in 1857, by Hiram F. Smith, who imported over 1,000 fruit trees. Up by Penticton, Ellis planted his first apple trees in 1869, but they remained for many years a small side crop as he focused on his cattle ranch.
In the following decades, others beside Ellis entered the industry. In 1905, the Ellis family retired to Victoria, selling most of their land to the Shatford Brothers for the tidy sum of $405,000. The brothers went on to form the South Okanagan Land Company.
The Shatfords transformed some of this land into orchards, hiring Chinese immigrants to clear the land of timber and paying them rates far lower than they would have had to pay white workers. This hiring decision angered white settlers and caused them to form a mob thirty men strong to drive the Chinese workers out of Penticton. Five of the white leaders of this mob were later convicted of intimidation and fined $25 each or imprisonment in Kamloops for one month.² Work on the orchard continued.
Despite these labour disputes, orchards continued to spread across the region. Yet it was a difficult business to succeed in. D.V. Fisher of the Dominion Research Station in Summerland described the challenges faced by early settlers in this industry:
"Great hardships were endured by the pioneer orchardists because of totally inadequate irrigation systems, recurrent winter freezes, the planting of numerous and unsuited varieties, minor element deficiencies, the invasion of codling moth which became an epidemic in 1925, and above all, by repeated failures to establish a sound marketing system backed by unified grower support."³
Due to these challenges, fruit farming did not develop into a sustainable business in the Okanagan until the 1930s, when improved irrigation systems, increased knowledge, and new technology made the industry more viable. In the 1930s, the biggest difficulty faced by orchardists remained getting their goods to market: Transportation and packing was complicated and expensive, and farmers produced more fruit than the people of the Okanagan could possibly consume.
These challenges were eased in 1939 with the formation of the BC Fruit Growers Association. It established central selling and became the sole marketing agency for the industry within BC's interior. This centralized selling organization replaced 37 agencies that had previously handled the job.⁴ Previously, the various agencies had driven fruit prices down as they competed for the market. With the centralized system in place, prices could be set by the growers themselves, and the market remained stable.
But even as fruit growing was becoming more productive, grape growing and wine production was beginning to take hold as well. The first grapes in the Okanagan were planted by Father Charles Pandosy at the Oblate Mission near present-day Kelowna in 1859, and were used for sacramental purposes. After this time, several small vineyards began to take shape, but they were quashed by Prohibition in 1917, which forced early farmers to remove their vines.
After the end of the Prohibition in 1921, the wine industry gradually picked up speed in the Okanagan, but it was not until the premiership of W.A.C Bennett in 1952 that wine production got the boost it had been waiting for. Bennett was very interested (and personally invested) in the wine industry. He was, after all, one of the original partners of the Calona Vineyards near Kelowna. Calona, founded in 1932, is today the longest continually operating vineyard in the province.
In 1962, Bennett's government mandated that wines could not be labelled as BC wines unless they contained at least 50% BC grape juice. This number only increased as the decade continued, encouraging BC wineries to support the local vineyards of the Okanagan. By the end of the 1960s, BC wines had to include at least 80% BC grape juice to claim to be local wines. As a result, the province's grape harvest grew by leaps and bounds: in 1961, just 1,600 tonnes of BC grapes were harvested; by 1970, this number had reached 9,038 tonnes.⁵
The final event which brought vineyards to the forefront of the Okanagan's agriculture took place in the late 1980s: the rise of the European vinifera varieties of grapes. In 1989, the BC government sponsored local vineyards to pull out their native grape varieties and replace them with these vinifera varieties, which produced wines of a higher quality. This switch, along with the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement, which came into effect that same year, led to the rapid increase in the success and productivity of the Okanagan wine industry.
Today, the economy of the South Okanagan still centers around agriculture, although tourism is a big part of the story now too. Many of the region's old orchards have been replaced by sprawling vineyards and wineries, but the fruit industry remains a key part of the regional economy as well. And the occasional cattle ranch still nestles in the hills, a reminder of the early days of white settlement in the South Okanagan.

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In the 1900s, rodeos and horse races were popular across the South Okanagan, and Penticton had a race track, complete with a grandstand. The King's Park Rodeo Grounds, located where the Convention Centre is today, were a popular spot after their completion in 1910. The Penticton Turf Club, founded around the same time, organized rodeos and horse racing events that drew huge crowds of over 2,000. Hans Richter, a local champion rider from nearby Keremeos, also hosted travelling rodeos in Penticton, bringing with him his collection of about 40 bucking horses.¹
As the town of Penticton grew and flourished with the coming of the Kettle Valley Railway, which was completed in 1916, the want for an annual summer event in the town increased. Dominion Day, now known as Canada Day, provided a chance to celebrate, and a "Sports Day" was held on July 1st for a number of years. The event gradually grew larger, and in 1935 one of the biggest parades to be held in Penticton took place.
Yet the festival was not to last. Efforts to create a traditional summer celebration in Penticton fell to the wayside during World War II, as the community turned their attention to the war effort. It was not until 1947 that Penticton first organized what was to become the city's biggest, most popular summer celebration: the Peach Festival.
Held in mid-August to celebrate the ripening of Penticton's peaches, the festival was created to encourage tourism to Penticton and to promote the city's agricultural richness. The first festival, held in August of 1948, honoured Penticton's past with a rodeo, along with a parade and the crowning of a Penticton Queen (to be named Queen Val Vedette, after three varieties of peaches: the valiant, the veteran and the vedette). The celebration also included dancing, bands, and a midway with nine rides.
The Peach Festival was a definite success. By the next year, it was estimated that as many as 30,000 attended. New events were added in the coming years: wrestling and boxing in 1950 and square dancing in 1954. In 1971, a team of three jets put on a breathtaking acrobatic display during the festival—a team that would later become known as the Snowbirds.