THE KÜTNE READER

The full story of the former Doukhobor headquarters in Nelson.

Did former Montreal Wanderers goalie Art Boyce (aka Boyes) play for Nelson in 1917? Spoiler: no. It’s a case of mistaken identity.

A love story involving an Italian-Canadian miner from Nelson, his Cornish bride, and the postcard that brought them together.

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 gra

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, killing nearly 1,200 people. But there was another one I didn’t know about — and his role was nothing short of extraordinary. Nelson Daily News , May 8, 1915 George (Geordie) Smith was a shipwright, born in Buckie, Scotland in 1881, the eldest of John and Margaret Smith’s eight children. He reportedly came to Canada about 1901 and to Nelso

In 1937, prominent suffragette Nellie McClung visited Nelson. (Pictured in an undated photo from Library and Archives Canada, PA-032012.) She wrote about it in her book More Leaves from Lantern Lane , a collection of her newspaper columns, published later that year (one of 18 books she wrote). Then a Victoria resident, she recorded observations about snow conditions, the lack of a bridge across Kootenay Lake, the newly-built Civic Centre and its theatre, opposition to fundin

Having studied one brewery in Nelson’s Fairview neighbourhood that was planned but never built, here’s the story of another that was built but almost no one has ever heard of. Its obscurity is not surprising since it was small, short-lived, and there are no pictures of it. It never advertised in local newspapers and I’m not aware of any surviving artifacts. The Castle Brewery was first mentioned in the Nelson Miner of Nov. 20, 1897: Wm. Gosnel [sic] and August Stadler have

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 fig

Around 1995, Nelson’s Heritage Inn renamed its basement lounge Taffy Jack’s. This was an interesting choice, for while Taffy Jack was a real figure from Nelson’s past, he was an obscure one. In the bar’s logo, he appeared as a barrel-chested rugby player, alongside his dog: In truth, Taffy Jack — also and perhaps better known as Candy Jack — was a candy maker and street peddler with a slightly unsavory and unhygienic reputation. As a sportsman, he was mainly interested in fis

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 on an otherwise residential street, as it obviously once had a commercial use, but what? I’m pleased to report that I finally know the answer — and it happens to involve a Jewish pioneer. Nelson: A Proposal for Urban Heritage Conservation says it was built in 1910 in Queen Anne style and was formerly a commercial building, but didn’t state

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 on Sept. 28, 1895 on an Edison Kinetoscope. But the Kinetoscope only allowed one person to look at the films through a viewer, like a peep show. The first projected films came along 16 months later. “The earliest (projected films) I have found in BC (were shown by) a company called the Edison Bioscope Novelty Company that pops up from Spokan

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 standing, I’ve made two more discoveries about Nelson newspaper offices. (You can read about the other one here .) Much to my surprise, the building home to the weekly Nelson Economist , probably for its entire existence from 1897 to 1906, is also still standing. David M. Carley established and operated this newspaper, which had a much differe

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 not been previously revealed that another future horror movie star appeared there as well. Karloff joined the Jeanne Russell Co. at Kamloops in September 1911, despite having no stage experience. He was actually an Englishman named William Henry Pratt. Part of his stage name probably came from a character in the play The Man on the Box . De

A previous 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 bu

The starting point for studies of Nelson heritage buildings is often Nelson: A Proposal for Urban Heritage Conservation , an excellent and exhaustive document produced by the Heritage Conservation Branch in 1981, based on work completed in 1978. But while it enumerates hundreds of noteworthy buildings, it also has some blind spots. For example, it says “The 100 and 700 blocks [of Baker Street] contain no buildings rated of heritage significance.” This was an astonishing state

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