THE KÜTNE READER

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 Ave. was formerly home to 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. While the lobby stood

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

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 near Slocan City and was mailed from Slocan to a Miss Nellie Moore of Truro, Nova Scotia on Jan. 26, 1909. The message reads, verbatim: “what do you think of a lumber jacks home in BC in a ceader swamp.” While I can’t say for certain, the fellow in the light-coloured shirt in the first row could be hockey legend Lester Patrick, whose father Jo

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 fig

Around 1995, Nelson’s Heritage Inn renamed its basement lounge Taffy Jack’s. This was an interesting choice, for while Taffy Jack was a real figure from Nelson’s past, he was an obscure one. In the bar’s logo, he appeared as a barrel-chested rugby player, alongside his dog: In truth, Taffy Jack — also and perhaps better known as Candy Jack — was a candy maker and street peddler with a slightly unsavory and unhygienic reputation. As a sportsman, he was mainly interested in fis

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, w

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 on an otherwise residential street, as it obviously once had a commercial use, but what? I’m pleased to report that I finally know the answer — and it happens to involve a Jewish pioneer. Nelson: A Proposal for Urban Heritage Conservation says it was built in 1910 in Queen Anne style and was formerly a commercial building, but didn’t state

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 on Sept. 28, 1895 on an Edison Kinetoscope. But the Kinetoscope only allowed one person to look at the films through a viewer, like a peep show. The first projected films came along 16 months later. “The earliest (projected films) I have found in BC (were shown by) a company called the Edison Bioscope Novelty Company that pops up from Spokan

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 1200 block of Pine Avenue. The building on the corner and the one to the right of it are Carberry’s Flowers and Carberry Funeral Home at 1298 Pine. BC Assessment gives a construction date of 1948 for the funeral home, but I am presuming that is only the portion on the right. The home was either torn down or renovated beyond recognition into