Fonds F-353 - Doering / Mutter family fonds

The Doering / Mutter family can be traced back to Charles Doering's move to British Columbia in the 1880s and the marriage of his daughter Beatrice to George Mutter in 1910.

Carl (Charles) Gottfried Doering was born in Leipzig, Germany in 1856. He emigrated to the United States around 1875, going first to Colorado, then San Francisco, before moving to Victoria BC around 1881. By 1883 he was splitting his time between Victoria and Vancouver (then called Granville), settling permanently in Vancouver in 1888. In that same year, Doering married Sarah Jane Helgesen, daughter of the former Member of Parliament Hans Helgesen. The couple had a daughter, Beatrice, born August 30, 1889. A second daughter, Kathleen Mary, died in infancy in 1893. Sarah Jane died in 1906 from complications arising from tuberculosis while the family was travelling in Germany. Doering later remarried, wedding the widow Mary Reid in 1911.

In Victoria, Doering owned and ran the King's Head saloon from about 1883 to 1888. In Vancouver, he established the Stag and Pheasant in 1886, the first of several hotels and saloons he would own until his death in 1927. But in Vancouver, Doering is primarily known for his role in developing the local brewing industry. Doering established the Vancouver Brewery at Scotia St. and 7th Ave. in 1888. One of Vancouver's first breweries, it would become the largest of the Brewery Creek operations and one of the most successful breweries in the city. Doering was joined by Danish brewer Otto Marstrand in 1892, renaming the company Doering and Marstrand. In 1900 it merged with John Williams' Red Cross Brewery to form a new company, the Vancouver Breweries Ltd. Just over a ten years later in 1911, Vancouver Breweries in turn merged with three other brewers to form the British Columbia Breweries Ltd.. Doering shut down the plant in Brewery Creek, moving all production to a new state-of-the-art facility at Yew St. and 11th Ave. This plant had been built in 1909 by Henry Reifel's Canadian Brewing and Malting Company, one of the founding partners of BC Breweries. Doering ended his involvement in BC Breweries (and the brewing industry generally) around 1912, with the sale of the company to a group of British investors. Under the new management BC Breweries struggled, Doering and Williams became embroiled in a legal dispute with Reifel (eventually settled out of court), and the company went into receivership in 1915 before being reorganized under Reifel in 1918.

In 1910, Doering's daughter Beatrice married George William Mutter. Mutter was born in Argyllshire, Scotland, in 1880 to parents James Mitchell Mutter and Isabella Allan Morrison. The family moved to British Columbia in 1891, settling in North Cowichan on Vancouver Island. Mutter worked for Charles Doering in various capacities. From ca 1910 to 1914 Mutter served as manager of Doering's Hat Creek Ranch, a property on the old Cariboo Wagon Road near Cache Creek that Doering had acquired in 1910.

Doering originally purchased Hat Creek Ranch as a wedding gift for Beatrice and George. Beatrice, however, preferred to live instead on another property Doering had acquired, Fairburn Farm on Vancouver Island near Duncan. With Doering's remarriage in 1911 and his withdrawal from the Vancouver brewing industry following the BC Breweries sale, Doering increasingly spent time at Hat Creek, expanding the property and its ranching operations. After World War One, Doering's stepson John Basil Jackson became manager of the ranch.

Doering died of a heart attack in Vancouver on April 15, 1927. Ownership of Hat Creek Ranch passed to Jackson and his wife Dorothy, and they ran the ranch from 1930 to 1977, when Jackson died. In 1978 Dorothy sold the property to BC Hydro.

Beatrice and George Mutter mainly lived at Fairburn on Vancouver Island after 1914. In 1915 Mutter and two of his brothers (James Islay and Alex Allan) purchased the Esquimalt Brewing Company. They leased it out, but the brewery burned down in January 1916. The Mutters had seven children before divorcing in 1929. Both continued to live on Vancouver Island. George died in 1946, Beatrice in 1974.

Beatrice and George's second son George William Morrison Mutter was born in 1912 (died 1992). It was to his son Jerrold Douglas Mutter (Doering's great-great-grandson) that many of the family papers eventually passed.