The History of Dilworth Mountain, Kelowna

Dilworth Mountain, Kelowna

Dilworth Mountain's story is really the story of Emil Anderson — a Swedish immigrant who founded a road-building company in 1938 and spent the next five decades paving some of BC's most difficult terrain. After helping construct the Alaska Highway in 1942 and winning a contract for a stretch of the Hope-Princeton Highway in 1945, Anderson's company relocated permanently to BC and became one of the province's largest infrastructure contractors, eventually overseeing the expansion of the six-lane Highway 97 corridor through Kelowna itself. It was that same earth-moving expertise — the equipment, the engineering knowledge, the willingness to attempt what others wouldn't — that made Dilworth Mountain's development possible when other developers had written the steep hillside off as impractical. In 1988, Mike Jacobs, great-grandson of Emil Anderson, joined the family business specifically to manage the Dilworth Mountain Estates project, marking the company's first major foray from road-building into residential land development. Emil Anderson Construction acquired the hillside and prepared it with roads and services; Dilworth Homes — the residential subsidiary — built the houses. The company has since constructed over 1,500 homes in the Okanagan under the Dilworth Quality Homes name, all of them traceable back to a paving contractor who looked at an impossible hillside and saw a neighbourhood. The views that Dilworth Mountain homes command today — south across the city, west to the lake, north into the valley — are a direct result of the elevation that once made development seem out of reach.