Clover Point is a park of about 10 acres (4 ha) owned by the City of Victoria located between Ross Bay to the east and Finlayson Bay to the west at the southern tip of Vancouver Island, about 2.5 miles (4 km) southwest of Oak Bay and 1.6 miles (2.6 km) southeast of downtown Victoria, British Columbia. The geology of Vancouver Island represents an amalgam of accreted terranes, collectively known as the Wrangellia terrane, that overly a subducting oceanic plate. Clover Point is a wave eroded platform consisting of gneiss and is part of a metamorphic rock complex underlying much of Victoria. The point was named for the abundance of Springbank Clover that grew here when James Douglas, the Chief Factor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, landed on the point in 1842. Hudson’s Bay Company employees routinely landed at Clover Point and walked north to reach Fort Victoria. Ross Bay is named for Isabella Ross, a Métis woman who was married to Hudson’s Bay Company trader Charles Ross, a founder of Fort Victoria. Following the death of her husband in 1844, Isabella was deeded 99 acres (40 ha) above the bay and was the first registered female landowner in British Columbia. Finlayson Bay is named after Roderick Finlayson who worked for Charles Ross in the building of Fort Victoria in 1843–1844, and in 1859 became the Chief Factor of the Hudson’s Bay Company.
Clover Point was a strategic location easily defended by prehistoric humans and historically was used by the Lekwungen First Nation at the time of European colonization when a tidal stream connected Ross Bay with the Victoria Harbour. Oral history indicates that people would use this waterway as an alternate canoe route and when the tides were high they would paddle from Ross Bay to the inner harbour thereby avoiding the heavy weather on the outer coast. In 1901, the James Bay Causeway blocked access to this route and the Empress Hotel was built on fill that buried the wetland connecting to a creek that ran into Ross Bay. As Victoria developed into a major administrative and trading settlement, Clover Point was used as a rifle range by a local gun club, and during World War I, soldiers used the rifle range for target practice. Fishermen built small boathouses on the rocks at Clover Point that were used until 1932 when they were destroyed by a storm. The City of Victoria prohibited the fishermen from making repairs or rebuilding their destroyed boathouses. Instead, the City Council agreed to lease an area to the fishermen to construct one new building to accommodate all their boats, on the condition they also supply boats to rent to the public. To accomplish this, the fishermen were incorporated under the Societies Act as the Clover Point Anglers Association.
The City of Victoria sewage was first piped to Clover Point in 1892. The first sewer line was made of bricks and flowed underneath Dallas Road, roughly following the coastline. That outfall pipe extended just 3 feet (1 m) below the low tide line at Clover Point, and a sewer pipe has been in continuous operation ever since. A pump station was built in the 1970s and pumped sewage directly into the ocean. By 2004, the city was discharging 40 million gallons (150 million liters) of untreated sewage per day into the Strait of Juan de Fuca. In 2016, under intense public pressure, the decision was made to build a sewage treatment plant at McLoughlin Point in Esquimalt to service the seven core municipalities of Victoria. The new sewage treatment facility came on line in 2020. Today, a new underground pump station at Clover Point provides bypass pumping to the existing outfall only during storm events. The expanded facility has been constructed out of materials that allow it to blend with the existing facility and surrounding area. The project includes upgrades to a number of public amenities, such as public washrooms, pedestrian and bicycle paths, bicycle facilities, a public plaza, street furniture, and road intersection improvements. Read more here and here. Explore more of Clover Point and Ross Bay here:
