THE KÜTNE READER

There was a time (primarily in the 1950s) where it was common practice to honour individuals (usually trustees and other politicians) by...

Go for a walk on Beatty Avenue in Nelson, down by the waterfront next to the RCMP station, and you will come across this curious...

John Gibb Devlin (1865-1925), alias the Gunner from Galway, was a well-known early Kootenay character. One funny story about him is how...

This amazing little item is in the midst of being transferred from the Touchstones Nelson archives to the Slocan Valley Historical...

The remarkable postcard seen below shows two friends, Anna Norris of Boundary, Wash., and Velma Shields, of Waneta, who didn’t let a...

A previous post looked at surviving West Kootenay landmarks related to the Patrick family, hockey pioneers who lived in Nelson from...

It was once common for newspapers to fancifully refer to certain people (well, men) as the mayor of a place that wasn’t incorporated....

The story of pioneer Trout Lake hotelier and prospector Alice Jowett is well told in books such as Circle of Silver as well as on the...

Painting signs by hand has largely gone out of style but was once a common vocation. The men (and I imagine a few women) who did it for a...

This business at 323 Vernon Street in Nelson only existed from about 1969-71. Winslow Sommerfeldt (1923-2016) was president and his son...

Last of five parts Who was the first person in the Kootenay Boundary to own an electric car since their re-emergence and where was the...

Fourth of five parts Alexander Zuckerberg of Castlegar’s Zuckerberg Island had an electric car in the mid-1950s. An ingenious man, he no...

Third in a series on local electric cars The most noteworthy early electric vehicle in our area belonged to a Kootenay lumber baron, the...

Second of five parts In 2016, John Mackie of The Vancouver Sun wrote an interesting story about early electric vehicles, and called...

First of five parts Was the first automobile ever seen in this region electric? With the current push to better accommodate electric...

Like anything else, phone books and civic directories are obviously prone to mistakes. Still, I wonder how some of the following...

Is Trail missing a manhole cover? If so, public works might want to call their counterparts in Nelson, because there’s one in Railtown...

At a presentation on the history of Slocan Valley sawmills in November 2016, a forester suggested the poles for the original light stands...

Hand-painted signs on the north and south sides of the Grand Forks Gazette building at 7330 2nd St. advertise both its current and former...

Sundown Slim was the champion liar of the Lardeau. The king of whoppers. A master fibber without peer. He had a fabrication for every...