THE KÜTNE READER

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

Names scratched on bricks outside the Sandon museum are some of the few reminders of the town's days as a Japanese-Canadian internment camp.

Seven rare postcards of Fruitvale have been sold on eBay over the last few months by four different dealers, for a collective price of $673

A previously unpublished interview with the late author and TV host.

In 1910, a remarkable curved bridge was built at Salmo across a slough formed by the Salmo River.

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 west side of Abbott Peak at an elevation of 2,075 meters. It belonged to the Lillooet, Fraser River, and Cariboo Gold Fields Co., who drove a 100-meter long crosscut into a limestone bluff in hopes of tapping a half-meter wide streak of galena. The retiring workers headed back to camp, about a mile and a quarter below the mine, but two collea

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. Her father, Charles, was born in Bolton, England, and trained as a druggist. He was headed for Vancouver for the promise of a job, but was so astonished by the mountains around Kootenay Lake that he got off the boat at Balfour. “He never went any further,” Allison says. “He just stayed.” Charles was first mentioned in the Nelson Daily News o

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 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, 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

Kütne Reader reader Bob Guesford recently pointed out something to me that I never noticed: two giant walls from the old Strand Theatre in downtown Trail still stand. The site of the Strand, 1330 Cedar Avenue, was formerly home to the Trail Opera House, built in 1917, and later renamed the Liberty Theatre. After remodelling and a major expansion, it reopened in 1938 as the three-storey, 900-seat Strand, a movie house managed by Will Harper for Famous Players. The Strand lobby

1930s stage and film actress Victoria Hopper (1909-2007) spent part of her childhood in Trail. Although the city has done an excellent job of celebrating the successes of its native sons and daughters, her Kootenay connection has mostly flown beneath the radar. Victoria Hopper depicted on a 1934 tobacco card promoting the film Lorna Doone . Hopper was born in Vancouver to Matthew Garfield (Gar) Hopper and Elizabeth Jane Rutherford, who were both from Dunston-on-Tyne England.

A rare postal cancellation from the Kootenay post office, dated August 1884, sold at auction last month for $375 Cdn. The envelope was mailed to “Mrs. O’Reilly, Point Ellice, Victoria.” The Kootenay post office opened in 1866 on Wildhorse Creek, 12 miles northeast of present-day Cranbrook. It was renamed Wildhorse in 1895 and closed in 1900. The letter was probably mailed by Peter O’Reilly, a government official who served in many different roles, to his wife Carry at their V