THE KÜTNE READER

Did you ever see a movie — or perform — at the Premiere Theatre in Fruitvale? If so, you’re part of an elite group.

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

An amazing envelope from Cascade City has sold on eBay.

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

It was the end of the work day at the Abbott mine on Jan. 8, 1896. The property was at the head of Healy Creek, near Trout Lake, on the...

The following memoir by Allison Holt of Victoria looks back on the store that her family ran at Balfour from about 1913-15 and 1919-45....

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...

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 1959, Joe and Freda Zimmerman opened the Swiss Inn and Motel at Kettle Valley, a little east of Rock Creek. It was quite a building,...

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...

Kütne Reader reader Bob Guesford recently pointed out something to me that I never noticed: two giant walls from the old Strand Theatre...

1930s stage and film actress Victoria Hopper (1909-2007) spent part of her childhood in Trail. Although the city has done an excellent...

A rare postal cancellation from the Kootenay post office, dated August 1884, sold at auction last month for $375 Cdn. The envelope was...

The remarkable postcard seen below sold in 2020 on eBay for $168 Cdn. It’s a previously unknown image of the Patrick Lumber Camp No. 1...

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...

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...