Lost buildings: Tadanac staff house and school

Around 1929, Cominco built a three-storey brick staff house at 211 Kootenay Ave. in Tadanac (then a company-owned district municipality that included the smelter and adjacent residential neighbourhood). It was a residence for the company’s young single employees until 1972, when it became surplus office space. Later it was converted into a training centre.

Tadanac staff house, ca. 1930s. (Greg Nesteroff collection)

Jim Bennett, who was steward of the staff house, offered some memories of the place in the September 1943 edition of Cominco Magazine.

“The staff house gang at that time included such memorable characters as Cameron, Graham, Bryden, McBean, Piper, Lee, Chesser, and Campbell,” he said. He recalled R.B. Bennett (no relation) visited in 1930 or ’31 while prime minister, but it’s more likely to have occurred on Aug. 24, 1929, while Bennett was still opposition leader. He stopped in Trail that day as part of a month-long tour of BC.

In addition to sharing a last name, Jim and R.B. had the same birthday, July 3, so Jim felt an extra effort was necessary.

I went to work with the staff and really put on a spread. Mr. Bennett commented on the delicious Lamberts (which were Bings) and [Cominco boss] Mr. [Selwyn] Blaylock had to point out in detail how to distinguish between the two. The two men are excellent judges of good food and catering to them is a challenge for any cook.

The final word came a few days later, when George Murray picked me up in his car coming up Smelter Hill. Mr. Murray told me that “That was the best banquet ever put on around here.”

Here is the staff house on the 1935 and 1943 fire insurance maps (the latter of which referred to it as a hostel), revealing it had 56 rooms.

However, the Nelson Daily News of April 2, 1930 said the building had 40 rooms, and Rex McMeekin, who lived there for a few years after World War II, said it had 28 single rooms, so perhaps some of the original rooms were consolidated. 

In addition, there was a two-room suite for the company president. The dining room was in the basement. There was also a common room with a poker table in one corner, and McMeekin recalled a rush to finish dinner every night so you could get a seat for poker.

“It was a great place,” he recalled in the Trail Times of Oct. 3, 1998. “There was a pretty steady parade from there to the nurses’ residence and stenographers’ residence.” (The nurses residence was in what is now the Trail Memorial Centre parking lot, while the steno residence was originally above the company store on Cedar Avenue. A second residence was created in Tadanac in what later became the Cominco guest house.)

(Greg Nesteroff collection)

The staff house had a Chinese-Canadian chef, Mah Tai, and his assistant, Mah Kee. The booklet Trail’s Golden Jubilee Old-Timers said Mah Tai came to Trail from China when he was just 16 and worked for Cominco bigwig Selwyn Blaylock. As of 1951 he still lived at the staff house, but soon moved to Mount St. Francis in Nelson, where he died in 1953, age 82, leaving no known survivors.

Jim Bennett told a sad tale about Mah Kee, who suffered a serious mental breakdown and chased two kitchen maids with a butcher knife. Kee was subdued before anyone suffered physical injuries.

The Chinese community in Trail raised a collection to send Kee to Nelson, although for what purpose is unclear. He went back and forth between Nelson and Trail a few times, then was admitted to the provincial mental hospital at Essondale, where he died in 1950, age 55.

The staff house in the 1930s or ’40s, once the garden grew in.

(Greg Nesteroff collection)

One of the few references to the building in the book Trail of Memories concerns Bob Dockerill:

Around 1930, Bob lived in the CM&S staff house with other single young men. The men spent their spare time curling in the winter, and fishing and partying at Christina Lake in the summer. They would invite many of the eligible young nurses in Trail to their parties, and it was at one of these parties that Bob met [his future wife] Ethel Mary Darr, a nurse at the Trail Tadanac Hospital.

Former Trail operations general manager Doug Magoon also lived in the staff house when he started working for Cominco in the 1960s.

The 1963 civic directory listed Anna Friz as the staff house’s live-in housekeeper. I have no idea how long she worked there.

Trail Daily Times, July 19, 1975

By 1998, the company didn’t need the ivy-covered staff house any longer, but didn’t know what to do with it. An engineering report said it required $200,000 worth of renovations to bring it up to code, including more exits to meet fire regulations, which would involve moving a washroom, and upgraded plumbing and electrical. The exterior walls had already been reinforced with tie rods.

Cominco’s first thought was to demolish the building, but first managers met with residents, who did not want to see it go. “They regard it as a very important esthetic feature of Tadanac, and important in terms of being a screen for the [residues] storage site,” company spokesman Richard Fish said.

One suggestion was to preserve the exterior and not worry about using the building for anything. The roof was good, so all Cominco would have to do is maintain the window frames and the grounds.

The building did linger for a little while longer. By October 2000, when I took these photos, it was vacant. It was hard to capture the whole building due to trees immediately in front and around it.

Alas, the staff house was torn down in May 2006 — ironically just as the company kicked off its 100th anniversary celebrations.

“Its location, remote from the main operations and extensive need for repairs made it no longer practical,” the Trail Times quoted a company spokeswoman at the time. The newspaper added: “Among its problems were asbestos insulation, the need for sprinklers, and sagging walls … No attempt was made to sell the building.”

Around 1990, Cominco bought four houses on Kootenay Avenue because of their proximity to its residue piles. One of them, at 303 Kootenay, came down around 2001, despite neighbors’ protests. I’m not sure when the others disappeared. The staff house and the Tadanac school were on either end of the homes.

The school opened in 1929, on land donated by Cominco. The Nelson Daily News of Jan. 3 said it was built to hold about 95 students. 

The interior of the frame structure has been finished in rude plaster. The building, two stories in height, is 86 feet long and 26 feet wide and includes two class rooms on the top floor, 24 feet by 31 feet, two playrooms on the ground floor about the same size, and a wide stairway between two two rooms, with a landing at the top.

The school was added onto in 1937 and closed in 1982, then used as a preschool for special needs children known as the Children’s Development Centre until June 1998.

Under the original agreement with the school district, the building and property reverted to the company once it ceased to be used for educational purposes.

When Cominco staff met with local residents that fall to discuss the staff house’s future they also raised the issue of the school, but reportedly neighbours didn’t consider it as important. The building was demolished in November 2004.

Today there are open fields where those buildings once stood. It’s hard to imagine they were ever there.

Updated on July 29, 2020 to add details from Jim Bennett’s memoir; on Aug. 19, 2020 to add Anna Friz’s name; on Feb. 4, 2021 to add the 1975 newspaper clipping; and on Jan. 28, 2024 to add the fire insurance plans; and on July 4, 2024 to add a few more details about Mah Tai. Updated on June 16, 2025 to add more details from the Trail Times of Oct. 3, 1998.