Lorne Street's four-block length from 27th Street to 32nd Street, was the location of a prison which later became an insane asylum.
Now the site of McDonald Park and Seaton School, the building was used during the First World War as an internment camp for Europeans who were considered "enemy aliens."
One of eight similar camps in southern British Columbia, the Vernon camp mostly housed families, including children, in 14-by-16-foot tarpaper shacks, bitterly cold in winter. Plots of land were allotted where the prisoners grew fruit and vegetables.
Lorne Street was named for the Marquis of Lorne, John Douglas Sutherland Campbell, Governor-General of Canada from 1878 to 1883, husband of Queen Victoria's daughter, Princess Louise.
Concerned by threats of secession emerging from Victoria and to promote Confederation, Lorne visited B.C. with Princess Louise in 1882, travelling himself extensively through the Cariboo and Okanagan, and visiting Vernon and the O'Keefe and Coldstream ranches.
Lorne's visit to the Okanagan seems to have been intended chiefly to indulge his interest in hunting. At Savona, he boarded the paddlewheeler Peerless, proceeding to Kamloops, up the South Thompson to Shuswap Lake, and then up the Shuswap River to Lambly's (or Fortune's) Landing – now Enderby. After some excellent duck and grouse hunting, the Governor-General's party travelled via Otter Lake to the O'Keefe Ranch where he spent several more days hunting. He was put up in a spare room of the log house Cornelius O'Keefe had built for his wife, Mary Anne.
As a gesture of appreciation, Lorne presented O'Keefe with a 12-gauge shotgun, now on display at the ranch.
Even while visiting the O'Keefes, Lorne had with him a message from W. C. Van Horne, vice-president of the C.P.R., that the Kicking Horse Pass route had been selected for the transcontinental railway.
His announcement at a banquet in Victoria produced outrage: Premier Beaven asked if Vancouver Island could become a separate kingdom with Princess Louise as Queen!
Returning to Ottawa, Lorne urgently pressed for an agreement that would guarantee a railway line on Vancouver Island.
Just as his vice-regal term expired in 1883, he had the satisfaction of knowing that a settlement had been worked out between the two governments, and was given a poetic tribute:
“No wasted years were these you spent,
We know your rule has made us glad;
No word you ever spoke but had
Some kindly aim, some wise intent.”