The History of Glenmore, Kelowna

Glenmore, Kelowna

Before anyone called it Glenmore, settlers and surveyors referred to this high valley north of Kelowna by two names that told you everything you needed to know: "Starvation Flats" and "Dry Valley." With an average annual rainfall of only 12 inches and no reliable source of water, the land was considered nearly worthless for farming — the kind of place that broke homesteaders who tried to work it. Everything changed in 1910, when the Central Okanagan Land Company laid an extensive system of concrete-lined irrigation ditches, steel flumes, and wood pressure pipelines across the valley, finally making reliable agriculture possible and opening the land to serious settlement. The same year, two women — Mrs. Annie Morrison of Dry Valley and Mrs. Janet C. Walker of Kelowna — independently submitted the same entry in a community naming contest, splitting the $100 prize: Glenmore, from the Scottish Gaelic for "great valley." It was a bold name for a place that had just been called Starvation Flats, but it stuck. With water and a name, settlers arrived from Eastern Canada and the orchards that irrigation made possible took root across the valley floor. Glenmore remained a farming community on Kelowna's northern edge for much of the 20th century, its fields producing the fruit and cattle that had originally seemed impossible. As the city expanded northward through the post-war decades, agricultural land steadily gave way to the residential streets that define Glenmore today — but the name carries a quiet irony that only the valley's early history reveals.