Heritage Value

The Inland Cigar Factory is significant for its ties to the agricultural history of Kamloops and is 
symbolic as the centre of a one-time thriving cigar manufacturing industry. George A. Borthwick 
(1866-1927), who hailed from Victoria, established the Inland Cigar Factory in 1894. The 
following year, the company was restructured and refinanced by Marshall Pollock Gordon 
(1862-1929), who owned a local furniture store and served as Kamloops mayor for three terms.
That same year, 1895, this building was erected as the headquarters and factory for the company. 
Tobacco for the cigars was imported from Cuba and then blended with locally grown tobacco. 
To demonstrate the technique of rolling authentic Cuban cigars, the company brought in a
number of consultants from Cuba. At its height, the company employed a staff of twenty-five 
who produced up to 4,000 cigars per day. The Inland Cigar Factory continued to operate in this 
space until 1913 when they moved next door; this space was then taken over by the Model 
Bakery. 

The Inland Cigar Factory is valued for its connection with Kamloops’s first commercial district. 
Its location on First Avenue was once the center of Kamloops’s thriving downtown commercial 
district, which was situated on Victoria Street West. Over time the commercial district has 
shifted further east down Victoria Street. Additionally, the Inland Cigar Factory is valued 
architecturally as an example of a vernacular industrial structure from the Victorian era. The 
walls are constructed of an early locally-made red brick.

Character-Defining Elements

Key characteristics that define the heritage character of the Inland Cigar Factory include its:

• prominent corner location on an angled lot at the corner of First Avenue and Victoria Street 
  West
• commercial form, scale and massing as expressed by its two-storey height, symmetrical front 
  façade, rectangular plan and flat roof, with no front or side setbacks 
• wood-frame and masonry construction, with common red-brick cladding with flush-struck 
  mortar joints, segmental arched second-floor window openings, blind arched opening above 
  central entry, with rubbed brick outline and herringbone infill, and corbelled cornice
• early prefabricated galvanized drainage scuppers at rear