410 1st Avenue in downtown Ladysmith was built in 1905. It was occupied by the Rodgers family and the Ladysmith Trading Company from 1920 to 2007.

410 1st Avenue was added to the Ladysmith Community Heritage Register and the Canadian Register of Historic Places in 2010.

Here is a map showing the location of 410 1st Avenue:

Here is a Google Street View image of 410 1st Avenue:

Description of the Historic Place

The Ladysmith Trading Company is a two-storey, vernacular commercial building located at a prominent intersection on Ladysmith’s main commercial street. The historic place is confined to the building footprint.

Heritage Value

The Ladysmith Trading Company is valued for its long association with the Rogers Family and its continuous use as a dry goods store for almost 100 years. John Weaver Rogers arrived in Ladysmith about 1912 and operated several dry goods stores before moving to this location around 1920. Around 1929, Rogers founded the Ladysmith Trading Company.

In the mid-1950s, Rogers’ sons, Jack and Darrell, took over operation of the store. A true family business, John Weaver’s wife Mary continued working in the store, alongside her children and grandchildren, into her 90s. The Ladysmith Trading Company formally wound up after Jack Rogers’ death in 2007. For almost a century, the Rogers family served generations of local residents and the building has substantial value as a place of nostalgia and memory for those who once worked and shopped there.

The Ladysmith Trading Company is part of a grouping of largely intact historic buildings in Ladysmith’s commercial core. The building is the southern anchor of an almost continuous city block of similarly scaled, historic buildings that collectively create a cohesive streetscape.

Substantially renovated over the years, the building’s architectural value lies in its scale and simple form and the window and door arrangement at the street level, which typifies commercial buildings of this era. There are also iconic and aesthetic values in the building’s distinctive signage, consisting of large-scale, individually attached letters that spell out Ladysmith Trading Co. Ltd.

Character-Defining Elements

The character-defining elements of the Ladysmith Trading Company include:

• – the building’s form, scale and massing
• – the siting of the building as the southern visual terminal of the 400-block of First Avenue
• – the large windows and recessed entry doors at the street level
  – the signage on the front façade
• – the building’s location within a group of similarly proportioned, historic commercial buildings on the town’s main commercial street