THE KÜTNE READER

The first professional hockey player born in BC was from Nelson.

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 railway trestle. The movie and novel of the same name that it was based on are set in fictional Fingerbone, Idaho, which is based on Sandpoint, Idaho, where author Marilynne Robinson was born. (And which coincidentally became a sister city to Nelson in 2013.) In the first few pages of the novel, Robinson’s protagonist, Ruth, describes her gr

Some of the earliest picture postcards of Nelson (seen below) look west down the Kootenay River with the corner of a pond in the foreground. The latter was the Park Street reservoir, which sat between Observatory and Gore streets on the north and south and between Park and Cherry streets on the west and east. It was just below the present Nelson-Salmo Great Northern Trail, formerly the Nelson and Fort Sheppard Railway. It has long since been decommissioned, but it might surpr

I’ve written before about people from the Kootenay who were aboard the SS Lusitania the night it was sunk by a German U-boat in May 1915,...

In 1937, prominent suffragette Nellie McClung visited Nelson. (Pictured in an undated photo from Library and Archives Canada,...

Having studied one brewery in Nelson’s Fairview neighbourhood that was planned but never built, here’s the story of another that was...

I’ve previously written about sites in West Kootenay associated with the Patrick family , famous for their exploits in early lumbering and hockey. But I didn’t realize until recently that yet another notable site directly connected to them still stands. What’s more, the rambling house at 414 Falls St. in Nelson (formerly 412 Falls) has a fascinating history: it was built by a mining magnate who died in bizarre circumstances, and later became home to other well-known mining fi

Around 1995, Nelson’s Heritage Inn renamed its basement lounge Taffy Jack’s. This was an interesting choice, for while Taffy Jack was a...

Between Kootenay Lake Hospital and Gyro Park in Nelson are decorative lights that are often seen but seldom remarked upon. They’re visible from Front Street, the lower end of Baker Street, and entering the city from the west. Nelson Hydro sets them to different patterns depending on the time of year. Usually it’s a yellow crown in keeping with the city’s nickname of the Queen City of the Kootenays. There is also a blue star for Christmas and a red heart for Valentine’s Day, w

I’ve long been curious about a yellow brick building at 103-05 Chatham St. in Nelson’s Fairview neighbourhood, seen below. It’s an oddity...

I was intrigued to read in John Mackie’s This Week in History column in The Vancouver Sun : The first films in BC were shown in Victoria...

Before the Nelson Daily News moved to 266 Baker St., it was in the building now home to Jackson’s Hole.

On the heels of discovering that the last office of the Nelson Tribune (and probably the Nelson Ledge and Lowery’s Claim) is still...

It’s sort of well known that before earning stardom as Frankenstein’s monster, Boris Karloff performed on the stage in Nelson. But it has...

A recent post looked at the last home of the Nelson Tribune , which, much to my surprise, is still standing on Baker Street. Tracking the various locations of The Tribune and its rival paper, The Miner , is not easy. The Miner was founded by John Houston and partners Charles Ink and Gesner Allen in 1890. Through 1892, The Miner was at 14 East Baker Street, although we don’t know exactly where that was. Houston, Ink, and Allen also had their real estate office in this buil

The starting point for studies of Nelson heritage buildings is often Nelson: A Proposal for Urban Heritage Conservation , an excellent...

A couple of years ago, I wrote about Doug Jones’ quest to find an original copy of what he describes as the holy grail of Nelson maps: a bird’s-eye-view map of Nelson in 1897 or early 1898, created by Augustus Koch, one of the most prolific pictorial map makers of the 19th century. The BC Archives has a foggy glass plate negative of it, but the original would have been in colour. Alas, no original copy is known to exist. Since then, I’ve learned that Koch also produced a pan

Here’s a story left out of Kootenay News — my exhibit at Touchstones Nelson on the history of Nelson’s newspapers — for lack of space....

Naomi Chester recently gave me a collection of slides and prints of West Kootenay taken by her stepfather, Al Peterson, mostly in the...

In a guest post, Ted Burns looks at some of the corner stores that operated in Nelson during the 1950s.