THE KÜTNE READER

For all of Nelson’s many surviving heritage buildings as well as lost heritage buildings that at least we have lots of photos of, many others existed for which few if any photos survive.

A rare photo shows a piece of Nelson industrial heritage under construction in 1900.

Recently Doug Jones bought a batch of early Nelson photos from someone in England. There were lots of terrific shots, but what left Doug...

Photos of Nelson’s Railtown neighborhood prior to the construction of the Highway 3A-6 interchange in the early 1970s are inexplicably...

Recently I’ve been posting photos by the late Ellis Anderson on the Lost Kootenays Facebook site . Anderson was a Creston photographer who took brilliant colour shots of the Kootenays in the 1960s and ‘70s and produced postcards, some of which you can still buy in stores and museums. After Ellis died in 1990, Don Lyon acquired his photo collection — thousands upon thousands of yellow and pink packages of negatives, positives, and small prints. When Don died in 2013 , his wife

The photo below is probably the second most-reproduced image ever taken in West Kootenay (next to R.H. Trueman’s vertigo-inducing shot of a train stopped at Payne Bluff on the Kaslo and Slocan Railway). This early selfie shows photographer Mattie Gunterman being punished for some transgression at the Nettie L cookhouse near Ferguson by sisters Annie and Rose Williams, ca. 1903. It has appeared in numerous books and magazines since it was first published in Bruce Ramsey’s Gho

Some of the most amazing West Kootenay postcards ever produced show the Rossland mines underground in the 1900s. I don’t know how the photographer managed to get such excellent images in extremely difficult light conditions. There are at least 13 cards in the series, taken in the LeRoi and Centre Star mines. While the photographer is unknown, it was probably someone from out of town given that some of them are labelled “Rosland, BC.” I have a couple, including the one seen be

Below is an ad that appeared in Trade and Commerce magazine in March 1962. It’s a fascinating aerial photo of Nelson from an unusual angle. Judging from the lack of snow, I presume it was taken sometime in 1961. Of particular note is the bottom section (which I really wish they they hadn’t obscured with a black bar). It shows the seldom-photographed intersection of Front and Hall streets, including several buildings that no longer exist. The large building on the far left (la

Many pioneer photographers signed their work — a smart marketing move. Many others did not, leaving us guessing who might have been behind the lens. One such anonymous shutterbug worked throughout southern BC, northern Washington, and a few places in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Idaho, and Montana, primarily from 1908-13, producing amazing images of small towns, including some that were rarely depicted otherwise. The postcards he or she created are among my favourites, but it only