Cedar Hill (Greater Victoria)

Cedar Hill, also referred to locally as Quadra-Cedar Hill, is a neighbourhood in the Greater Victoria municipality of Saanich. Like all neighbourhoods in the region, the boundaries are fluid, but generally speaking is bounded to the north by McKenzie Avenue, to the west by Quadra and Cook Streets, to the south by North Dairy Road, and to the east by Shelbourne Street. It derives its name from its two central thoroughfares, Cedar Hill Road and Cedar Hill Cross Road, which in turn derive their names from the local hill now called Mount Douglas, but was known in colonial times as Cedar Hill. The area includes smaller neighbourhoods such as Cedar Hill (closest to the original formation site of the area), Cook-Tolmie, Cloverdale, Swan Lake, Cook-Tattersall, Reynolds, Braefoot, and Craigmiller.

Prior to its development, Cedar Hill's gently rolling landscape was dominated by the typical parklike woodland common to the Greater Victoria region, distinguished by such species as Garry oak, arbutus, Douglas-fir, snowberry, manzanita, camas, and fawn lily. It contained a number of freshwater ponds, of which only one—King's Pond, on the north side of the Cedar Hill Golf Course - remains.

The Cedar Hill area was home to many pioneer farms, such as Hillside and Braefoot. By the mid-1860s, the first school (a small one-room building still standing on Cedar Hill Cross Rd.) and first church (St. Luke, on the corner of Cedar Hill and Cedar Hill Cross Roads) were constructed. The Cedar Hill cemetery of Congregation Emanu-El (Victoria, British Columbia) was dedicated in 1859. The area remained agricultural through the 1930s, when small-scale, large-lot subdivisions began to appear. Development accelerated in the post-World War II period, however, the neighbourhood continued to retain pleasantly distinctive homes, mostly on large lots. This characteristic led gradually to an evolution in the 1970s and 1980s from a mostly young, middle-class neighbourhood to an older, often retired, upper-middle-class one. By the end of the 1980s, there was no farmland remaining in the neighbourhood.

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Wikipedia