THE KÜTNE READER

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 visible from Front Street, the lower end of Baker Street, and entering the city from the west. Nelson Hydro sets them to different patterns depending on the time of year. Usually it’s a yellow crown in keeping with the city’s nickname of the Queen City of the Kootenays. There is also a blue star for Christmas and a red heart for Valentine’s Day. T

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...

I was intrigued to read in John Mackie’s This Week in History column in The Vancouver Sun : The first films in BC were shown in Victoria...

Here are some more in a series of negatives I bought on eBay last year showing Trail in 1953. These two views show the west side of the...

The Paterson and Nelway border crossings both have peace monuments erected by Kiwanis clubs on both sides of the border amid much...

Below is an ad from the Nelson Daily News of Jan. 31, 1953 for Avenue Grill and Groceteria, which operated at 714 Ivy St. in Castlegar,...

Before the Nelson Daily News moved to 266 Baker St., it was in the building now home to Jackson’s Hole.

On the heels of discovering that the last office of the Nelson Tribune (and probably the Nelson Ledge and Lowery’s Claim) is still...

Prospector Henry Cody (1861?-1921) is said to have stumbled across the cave system near Ainsworth that bears his name in the late 1880s....

One day I’d like to write a book or booklet about the lost bullion of Slocan Lake, one of our region’s most enduring treasure stories. On...

It’s sort of well known that before earning stardom as Frankenstein’s monster, Boris Karloff performed on the stage in Nelson. But it has...

A recent post looked at the last home of the Nelson Tribune , which, much to my surprise, is still standing on Baker Street. Tracking the various locations of The Tribune and its rival paper, The Miner , is not easy. The Miner was founded by John Houston and partners Charles Ink and Gesner Allen in 1890. Through 1892, The Miner was at 14 East Baker Street, although we don’t know exactly where that was. Houston, Ink, and Allen also had their real estate office in this buil

The starting point for studies of Nelson heritage buildings is often Nelson: A Proposal for Urban Heritage Conservation , an excellent...

A couple of years ago, I wrote about Doug Jones’ quest to find an original copy of what he describes as the holy grail of Nelson maps: a bird’s-eye-view map of Nelson in 1897 or early 1898, created by Augustus Koch, one of the most prolific pictorial map makers of the 19th century. The BC Archives has a foggy glass plate negative of it, but the original would have been in colour. Alas, no original copy is known to exist. Since then, I’ve learned that Koch also produced a pan

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....

Naomi Chester recently gave me a collection of slides and prints of West Kootenay taken by her stepfather, Al Peterson, mostly in the...