The Nelson boathouse fire of 1915
Intrigued by a photo of the charred remains of boathouses in Nelson, Michael Cone tracks down what happened.
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Michael A. Cone
- Mar 30
- 7 min
The remarkable steam launches of Captain Troup
While James W. Troup was renowned for building sternwheelers in the West Kootenay, Michael Cone recounts three steam launches he owned.
394 views2 comments
Greg Nesteroff
- Oct 30, 2022
- 3 min
The phantom miner of Crawford Bay
A ghost story from a local mine, presented for the first time in 121 years.
1,458 views0 comments
Jonathan Kalmakoff and Greg Nesteroff
- Aug 4, 2021
- 14 min
Doukhobors at Procter and Sunshine Bay
The 1918 and 1919 civic directories listed a Doukhobor beekeeping colony at Procter. Who were they?
1,333 views2 comments
Greg Nesteroff
- Jun 17, 2020
- 6 min
The Balfour store
The following memoir by Allison Holt of Victoria looks back on the store that her family ran at Balfour from about 1913-15 and 1919-45....
663 views0 comments
Greg Nesteroff
- Jun 7, 2020
- 5 min
The Housekeeping trestle
One of the chief set pieces of the movie Housekeeping, filmed in the fall of 1986 in and around Nelson and Castlegar, was a huge wooden...
2,070 views0 comments
Greg Nesteroff
- Dec 28, 2019
- 3 min
First mention of the Cody Caves
Prospector Henry Cody (1861?-1921) is said to have stumbled across the cave system near Ainsworth that bears his name in the late 1880s....
1,482 views0 comments
Greg Nesteroff
- Mar 23, 2019
- 17 min
The hotels of Pilot Bay
This week, a rare envelope from the Hotel Pilot Bay, postmarked 1897, sold on eBay for $115 US. Making it all the more appealing, it was...
3,297 views1 comment
Greg Nesteroff
- Mar 17, 2019
- 14 min
10 West Kootenay Boundary drive-in theatres
Is anything more nostalgic (at least to certain generations) than a drive-in theatre? From 1947 to 2003, at least 10 of them operated in...
6,332 views6 comments
Greg Nesteroff
- Feb 28, 2019
- 6 min
A Japanese-Canadian soldier’s grave
The most unusual military grave in the Nelson cemetery is the one seen below, which belongs to Usaku Shibuta, who died at the Balfour...
947 views2 comments
Greg Nesteroff
- Feb 22, 2019
- 2 min
Crystal Hall
It sounds like something out of Game of Thrones, but the evocatively-named Crystal Hall at Willow Point on Kootenay Lake was made of...
423 views1 comment
Greg Nesteroff
- Feb 8, 2019
- 1 min
First Nations faces in Procter
I bought the photo below about eight years ago. It shows a group on the lawn of the Outlet Hotel in Procter, long a popular spot for...
536 views0 comments
Greg Nesteroff
- Jan 21, 2019
- 3 min
An aquatic prodigy on Kootenay Lake
In 1923, Frances West (also known as Florence), the six-year-old daughter of Edbert West, manager of the Ogilvie elevator in Taber,...
1,362 views0 comments
Greg Nesteroff
- Jan 10, 2019
- 2 min
Clark Gable in Kuskonook?
Helena White’s 1984 booklet, Sixty Bloomin’ Years: A History of Creston, British Columbia contains this statement on page 21: “Moviegoers...
620 views0 comments
Greg Nesteroff
- Jan 1, 2019
- 5 min
Fake news, 1899: a wedding and a coffin on Kootenay Lake
The following story is completely fabricated. The names and circumstances were made up but passed off as genuine. It says something...
583 views0 comments
Greg Nesteroff
- Sep 30, 2018
- 4 min
The Balfour Bugle
At the bottom of this page is a rare copy of the debut issue of The Balfour Bugle, the newspaper published by and for convalescing...
1,441 views1 comment
Greg Nesteroff
- Sep 28, 2018
- 7 min
The Bluebell Grave
The dramatic story of the Bluebell murder, how Thomas Hammill (or Hamill, or Hammil) died near present-day Riondel on Kootenay Lake,...
2,427 views0 comments
Greg Nesteroff
- Jun 13, 2018
- 7 min
William Randolph Hearst in West Kootenay
Did William Randolph Hearst (pictured below in a photo from Wikipedia), the larger-than-life American newspaper publisher who invented...
440 views0 comments
Greg Nesteroff
- Mar 18, 2018
- 1 min
The crane in Garland Bay
Last September, a group including scuba diver Brian Nadwidny went looking for a Caterpillar tractor supposedly lost in Kootenay Lake at...
3,199 views0 comments
Greg Nesteroff
- Feb 28, 2018
- 5 min
The Mirror Lake post office
Was the Mirror Lake post office once listed by Guinness as the world’s smallest? I first encountered this claim on p. 199 of Kaslo: The...
717 views2 comments
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