Craigdarroch Castle, with views of Victoria, is lit up at night/Craigdarroch Castle

For author Moira Dann, the challenge was to consider more than 8,500 treasures in the Craigdarroch Castle collection and then choose just 21 favourites that would tell important stories in her new book.

Stained glass made the cut because it let her delve into stories of 19th century art glass design and manufacturing, and prompted detective work to learn who created “this translucent beauty that’s everywhere in the castle.” A pencil-on-paper drawing of the fictional character Goody Two-Shoes by one of the women who lived in the castle made the cut because she was later committed to an asylum by her husband and spent more than four decades institutionalized. Spurs and a sabretache (a satchel on a long strap worn by some calvary officers) let Dann explore the way young men once faced intense military expectations. 

Craigdarroch Castle in 21 Treasures tells the story a Vancouver Island castle that was built for coal baron Robert Dunsmuir, his wife Joan and their 10 children between 1887 and 1890 on a hill overlooking downtown Victoria. It’s a “bonanza castle” — an oversized mansion built as a success symbol for wealthy North American industrialists during the late 19th and early 20th centuries — and it boasts a Scottish Baronial design plus an eclectic blend of elements borrowed from other architectural styles.

The castle later operated as Craigdarroch Military Hospital, Victoria College, the Victoria Conservatory of Music and the offices of the Victoria School Board before becoming a house museum. Parks Canada designated Craigdarroch a national historic site in 1992 because “it’s an imposing landmark and a fine and early example of an eclectic mansion in the west” and it marks “an age when the conspicuous display of wealth was the accepted norm.”

Stained glass crafted in San Francisco for Craigdarroch Castle/Craigdarroch Castle

Dann is a Victoria-based writer, editor, speaker and president of the Craigdarroch Castle Museum Society board. She grew up in Montreal with a “history nut” dad whose colourful stories gave her “insight into how other people lived and what life was like in another time and place.” A castle tour of Scotland with her mom, when she was nine, was another important event.

“I was lucky enough to have parents who had inclinations for storytelling,” says Dann. She spent much of her writing career at newspapers, learning all the “very interesting routes to take into a story.” She’s now studying for a Master of Arts in Public History.

Inspired by A History of Canada in Ten Maps by Adam Shoalts and A History of the World in 100 Objects (a BBC/British Museum podcast partnersip that became a book), this book came about when Dann seized on the idea of using a “limited number of objects to do a deep dive into the story” of the castle and “to follow my own twisted trail of curiosity.”

Choosing just 21 objects was much harder than it sounds, but the goal was to represent the castle’s different eras and stories. Dann was particularly interested in stories about women, so she dives into “dance cards” and the various ways wealthy women were expected to lure in men for suitable marriages.

“I was saddened by everything I had to leave out,” admits Dann. “I’m wondering if there’s a volume two here — and I might have to go and write fiction about the women.”