THE KÜTNE READER

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. While the former Nelson Daily News office is a well-known landmark at 266 Baker Street — it was the paper’s home from 1908 to 2010 — it’s not at all well known that two former Nelson Tribune locations are also still standing. The Tribune was the city’s second newspaper, founded in 1892 by John Houston a few months after he sold The Miner .

Naomi Chester recently gave me a collection of slides and prints of West Kootenay taken by her stepfather, Al Peterson, mostly in the 1970s and ‘80s. There were also two negatives I had scanned and present here, showing a rarely photographed building at the southwest corner of Baker and Stanley streets in Nelson. Completed around May 1892, this wooden building was modest, but not unattractive, and I’m at a loss to explain why so few photos of it exist. The pictures here show

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

When Kinji Nagatani died at Willowhaven Hospital on Kootenay Lake’s North Shore in 1970, with him went the amazing story of a roving gambler who stowed away aboard a trans-Pacific freighter, lost his life savings in a game of chance, and briefly avoided the Japanese-Canadian internment by hiding in Vancouver’s Chinatown. Fortunately he told much of it to Nelson’s Jim Sawada, who shared it with me. Kinji Nagatani lived at 606 Front Street in Nelson, seen here in a photo recrea

The rare postcard below, which sold recently on eBay, shows the Burns Block at 560 Baker Street (formerly 514 Baker) in Nelson — although if the photo had been cropped any tighter on the right, it might have been impossible to recognize. The postcard is unmailed, but probably from about 1910. Fortunately, the distinctive ornamentation of the steer’s head and 1899 date stone above the front door is partly visible. This building was the Kootenay headquarters of Alberta beef bar

I was thrilled to find a postcard for sale on eBay recently of Nelson/Rossland pioneer Wesley Ziegler. It was taken by Campbell Art Gallery of Nelson sometime in the 1910s but never mailed. The Nelson Museum has a slightly different view from the same photo session. I have written about Ziegler before, in a story for Route 3 magazine about West Kootenay’s mostly little-known black pioneers. Ziegler (or Zeigler), otherwise known as Old Zieg, was born into slavery in Montgome

A few outstanding postcards and photos sold recently on eBay showing Nelson sports teams, one of which was an action shot of a lacrosse game against Spokane in 1911. Although it is badly creased, it is unusual to find such a crisp action shot on a postcard from that era. Here is a closer look at some of the players. You could have fooled me into thinking this match was played at the civic field in Nelson (now the parking lot of the Nelson and District Community Complex), for

A terrific postcard popped up on eBay recently, showing the A. MacDonald & Co. warehouse at 623-25 Front Street in Nelson, ca. 1910 — better known in recent years as the Corner Brick building, and home to many different businesses. Here is the building as seen from approximately the same location today: Here is a closer look at the unidentified gentlemen in the first image: BC Assessment puts the building’s construction at 1903, but Nelson: A Proposal for Urban Heritage Conse

The most unusual military grave in the Nelson cemetery is the one seen below, which belongs to Usaku Shibuta, who died at the Balfour sanitarium in 1919. He was one of 54 Japanese Canadians whose death resulted from serving in the First World War. Of those, 27 have known graves in France. Shibuta’s is the only one in Canada. Shibuta enlisted on June 19, 1916 at Medicine Hat, where he lived. He was born on Feb. 20, either 1888, 1889, or 1890 to Shiyotado (or Nobujiro) and Ku

A copy of a short-lived and long-lost Nelson newspaper has surfaced: it’s the Sept. 20, 1913 edition of The Independent , whose existence I only previously knew about because of a few mentions in its contemporaries: Slocan Record , Aug. 28, 1913: The Independent is a new publication issued in Nelson last week. It is a weekly and the first issue is small, but the paper will probably be enlarged as larger patronage comes to it. Whether a paper can be independent or not has yet

Nelson’s first fire chief following the city’s incorporation in 1897 was also the youngest chief ever — and the shortest serving. But for a long time, I didn’t know what happened to him. Nelson firefighters in front of the fire hall at the corner of Victoria and Josephine streets, sometime prior to 1913. Samuel Calkin worked out of this building. (Nelson Museum and Archives 59-09-017) Samuel Frank Calkin (or Calkins — the S appears as often as not) was born in February 1871 o

In 1923, Frances West (also known as Florence), the six-year-old daughter of Edbert West, manager of the Ogilvie elevator in Taber, Alberta, spent the summer in Nelson with her mother Addie. Frances took her first swimming lesson from J.B.B. Smith at Lakeside Park. She showed promise, to say the least. Within weeks, she swam without help across Kootenay Lake, about three quarters of a mile. The Vancouver Sun of Aug. 27 called her an “aquatic prodigy.” There was some skeptic

One oft-asked historical question is exactly when Nelson’s Big Orange Bridge was painted orange. It was originally silver when built in 1957 although the date of its hue conversion was unclear. We knew, however, who decided on the colour: Jack Kelsall (1924-2009), a Silverton native who worked as a traffic engineer in Prince George, New Denver, Grand Forks, and Revelstoke, then as provincial bridge inspection engineer in Victoria before settling in Nelson in 1969. His obitua

Six West Kootenay/Boundary residents and one former resident were among the 1,200 passengers and crew who perished when a German U-boat sank the RMS Lusitania on May 7, 1915 off the south coast of Ireland. There was also one survivor from our area and three others who narrowly avoided sailing on that fateful trip. The RMS Lusitania is seen in a 1907 painting by Norman Wilkinson. (Wikipedia) The Chantry family Harold Chantry (or Chantrey), 23, and his wife Mina, 22, arrived i

What does Fred Flintstone’s mother-in-law have to do with West Kootenay? The woman who provided the original voice for Pearl Slaghoople on the Hanna-Barbera cartoon series was Verna Felton (1890-1966), who also did voiceover work for Disney, appearing in Cinderella, Dumbo, The Jungle Book, Alice in Wonderland, Lady and the Tramp , and Sleeping Beauty — as fairies, villains, and elephants. That’s her singing Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo in Cinderella . She worked extensively in radio

The photo below comes from a glass plate negative found in Alexander T. Garland’s store in Kaslo and is believed to show the International Hotel at Nelson. If so, the woman pictured may be Alice (Mother) Foster, alias the Midnight Nurse. It’s hard to say for certain: there are no other pictures of her or the building to compare it to. The hotel opened at the corner of Vernon and Stanley streets in 1890 but burned down in January 1894. (Kootenay Lake Archives 990.012.0058) Koo

The Nelson Daily News of Nov. 2, 1912 announced a new brewery would be built in Nelson’s Fairview neighbourhood between Nelson Avenue and 2nd Street, north of Kokanee Avenue (then called Kootenay Avenue) and reproduced the concept drawing seen below. The plant was to be built by the Fritz-Steiner Brewing & Malting Co. at an estimated cost of $40,000 to $50,000 ($891,000 to $1.1 million today). Local merchant A.S. Horswill was president of the company, which was capitalized

Recently Doug Jones bought a batch of early Nelson photos from someone in England. There were lots of terrific shots, but what left Doug (and me) slack-jawed was a never-before-seen Neelands Bros. photo of three tipis near the CPR wharf with the SS Nelson in the background. “When I saw the tipi image, I had to get it,” Doug says. “It’s such an amazing undiscovered picture, it just had to come home. The seller was a dealer in England, who kindly included about 20 more local p

I had a call recently from Mitzi Hufty, who was reminiscing about the old Lakeside Motel in Nelson — presently being demolished to make way for Lakeside Place , a 47-unit housing project for seniors and people with disabilities. She remembered the motel as a kid in the 1940s, having moved to Nelson from Slocan City. It was then called Lakeside Bungalow Court. “I remember the motel perfectly,” she told me. “We used to cut through it all the time to go swimming at Lakeside Par

Photos of what is now called Nelson’s Railtown neighborhood prior to the construction of the Highway 3A-6 interchange in the early 1970s are inexplicably scarce. The project resulted in the relocation of some homes and demolition of many others, as well as the loss of a rock wall, a set of stairs on Silica Street, and the portion of Falls Street that used to descend into the area where the Cottonwood Market is now. It drives me crazy that the Department of Highways does not s