TIABC Voice of Tourism Newsletter – July 17, 2026

MESSAGE FROM THE CHAIR

Sam Ringo was a Black hotelkeeper and restaurateur whose dining room on Yates Street in Victoria brought travellers and locals together at the same table.

He was part of a remarkable migration that began in 1858, when hundreds of African American men, women, and children left California for Vancouver Island before the Civil War, seeking protection, opportunity, and belonging under British rule. Some were chasing gold, but many left a state that was free in name only, where prejudice still limited their rights and dreams.

Later accounts remembered Sam as formerly enslaved. As the story goes, he cared for his enslaver after he fell ill with smallpox, contracted the disease himself, and was left with a pockmarked face. Afterward, he was formally freed and made his way west to California. His life had already been marked by suffering, survival, movement, and reinvention before he ever reached Victoria.

Sam knew how to welcome people. Before Victoria, he lived in Oroville, California, and operated Ringo’s Exchange, offering accommodations for families and single persons and promising a table supplied with “the best the market affords.” By 1860, the Victoria directory listed him simply as “Ringo, Samuel, restaurant, Yates Street,” a street still lined today with restaurants, cafés, and bars. That modest listing hid the warmth and range of what his business did. Ringo’s hosted balls, suppers, meetings, funeral gatherings, and civic celebrations, including a dinner for members of Victoria’s early fire department after their parade. By 1861, Sam had moved into a larger building where he could offer “large, airy, and commodious bedrooms” to the travelling public, along with a table furnished with “all the delicacies that the market affords.” Ringo’s became part of the social life of a rapidly growing city.

Those delicacies connected Victoria to the wider world. Local advertisements listed Jamaica rum, Scotch whisky, Oregon cider, potted beef and ham, Golden Gate flour, and molasses from the Sandwich Islands, with butter and cheese arriving by steamer from California and Oregon. Victoria’s hospitality sector depended on dockworkers, steamship crews, merchants, grocers, butchers, bakers, brewers, and hosts who turned supplier relationships into a welcome for guests.

Ringo’s quickly earned a reputation for generous hospitality. After a Masonic Ball in 1860, organizers praised him for spreading “an excellent table,” adding that none knew better how to do it than Ringo himself. They admired the “artistic skill” with which he adorned tables “loaded with every delicacy and luxury,” evidence of his ability to provide guests with “creature comforts.” Years later, a writer recalled that every notable who came to Victoria was taken at once to Ringo’s for a “square meal.”

During the early days of the U.S. Civil War, two Americans, one with ties to the North and one with ties to the South, began arguing in his restaurant with pistols drawn. Sam was a large and powerful man, and when he came out from the kitchen, he wrapped his long arms around both men and held them until they agreed to put away their weapons and shake hands. He was a host with humour, no-nonsense directness, and an instinct for bringing people together.

Sam Ringo died young in 1864 at age 48, only five or six years after arriving in Victoria, yet that short time was enough to make him memorable. Long before British Columbia had a tourism industry, it had hosts: people who made others feel at home. Sam Ringo belonged to one layer of that history, in colonial Victoria’s hotels, restaurants, wharves, and boarding houses. But the deeper history of welcome on these lands reaches far beyond colonial Victoria, through Indigenous peoples who received, fed, guided, traded with, and hosted travellers before newcomers arrived by steamship. Sam’s story reminds us that British Columbia has been welcoming the world since before it was called British Columbia, and that some of its hosts deserve to be remembered by name.

Sources consulted: British Columbia Archives, probate records for the estate of Samuel Ringo, 1864; British Colonist/Daily British Colonist; Mirror of the Times; and Edward Mallandaine’s First Victoria Directory, 1860.

Sandra Oldfield

Chair, TIABC Board of Directors