Cedar Hill (Greater Victoria)
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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 coloinal times as Cedar Hill.
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 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 80s 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.
Cedar Hill is a mix of older and newer residential subdivisions, with a commercial area located along Shelbourne Street to the east. It is dominated by the large, 18 hole, 5000 yard Cedar Hill Municipal Golf Course, which is itself surrounded by a 3.5 km walking trail. Other parks and recreation facilities include 6 ha Braefoot Park, on the corner of Braefoot Rd. and McKenzie Ave., and the Cedar Hill Recreation Centre at the southeast corner of the golf course on Cedar Hill Rd. The place is home to two elementary schools, a junior high school, and a branch of the Greater Victoria Public Library.
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