Searching for Nakusp

Introduction: A Lack of Nakusp

It isn’t uncommon for street names in British Columbia towns and cities to bear the names of other BC towns and cities. As settlers spread across the province in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and laid out townsites which often required a dozen-or-more street names at once, employing the names of other communities was an easy way to populate street grids rather than the alternate method of plain old numbers. 

And in more modern times, when traditional North American street grids have largely been abandoned by developers in favour of curvilinear subdivisions filled with townhouses and McMansions making numbered streets implausible, using local geographical names remains a way to give character to neighbourhoods; a handy alternative for those planners who don’t feel like using the ultra-generic, locally meaningless names picked out of a marketing hat peddled in many new neighbourhoods across the continent (the modern sprawl of Calgary being perhaps the most notorious example).

In the Kootenays, where most modern townsites emerged in the 1880s, 1890s, and 1900s during the mining boom, it’s very common for towns and cities with named-rather-than-numbered streets to have entire sections of streets named for other Kootenay or British Columbia locations (Windermere, pre-numbers Nakusp, Kimberley’s Townsite neighbourhood, Fort Steele, Yahk, pre-dam Burton, Lardeau, New Denver), other prominent mining locations from western North America (Rossland, Anaconda), or both (Kimberley’s Townsite neighbourhood, Greenwood, West Trail, Mineral City, Kaslo’s Upper Bench). 

Plenty of communities have at least a Nelson Avenue, or even a Spokane Street (Trail, Rossland, Kimberley). When the Mica Creek townsite was developed in the 1960s, all of the streets were named after Columbia Basin locations, and much of the new town of Elkford received similar names at the beginning of the 1970s. Among other locations, Elkford’s street names preserve Kootenay ghost towns such as Camborne, Cody, Corbin, Michel, Natal, Nashton, Needles, and Newgate.

It’s also not uncommon for Kootenay towns to wind up elsewhere in the province, given the timing of the mining boom. Even Prince George has Kaslo and Moyie streets. East Vancouver would be the most prominent example of this; with all sorts of British Columbia landmarks populating the street names of northeastern Vancouver. Kootenay examples include Slocan, Kaslo, and Windermere avenues, which in turn has led to one of the city’s largest recreation grounds at the corner of Slocan and East 29th Avenue being called Slocan Park; a bane of Slocan Valley residents attempting to make hometown web engine searches for the past 30 years. (And just forget about trying to search for Trout Lake.)

Some prominent Kootenay place names, however, haven’t travelled as well, and one of those is that of my hometown, Nakusp. During the mining boom, Nakusp was a shipbuilding, railway, and logging centre. Not a mining centre in and of itself and not particularly renowned for its glamour, it evidently failed to receive any notice when it came time to name streets. Even Nakusp itself only possesses Nakusp East Road, the major east-west street through Glenbank. Other toponyms such as Nakusp Hot Springs and the Nakusp Range of the Selkirk Mountains are within immediate proximity to the village and can hardly be considered out-of-town.

Outside of Nakusp itself, just one street bears its name: Nakusp Drive, in Abbotsford’s North Clearbrook area, which was developed during the 1990s (other Kootenay locations which received street names in this BC-themed neighbourhood include Balfour, Elkford, Golden, Slocan, and Sparwood).

You won’t find this intersection in New Denver, Kaslo, or Slocan City, but you will find it in Abbotsford. (Google Street View)

From the Arrow Lakes to Outer Space with Willie Waterfield

Nakusp, however, possesses an honour few Kootenay locations can: its own Martian crater. Located at 24.72°N 35.52°W on the Martian surface, the name was officially registered on Sept. 14, 2006. The name Nakusp was chosen by the International Astronomical Union out of a world atlas (the 1971 Times Atlas of the World, specifically) alongside dozens of other craters named that day for various towns around the Earth. Other BC-appellated craters on Mars include Hope, Penticton, and Quick (named for a railway siding between Telkwa and Houston in the Bulkley Valley).

Nakusp, Mars, as captured by the HiRISE Context Camera instrument aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and rendered in 2023. (Wikimedia Commons)

Amazingly, Nakusp crater isn’t the only extraterrestrial location with a Nakusp-related name. Back in July 1933, the German astronomer Karl Wilhelm Reinmuth, who is credited with the discovery of 395 minor planets between 1914 and 1957 (ranking him 57th on the all-time discovery list), discovered the asteroid Waterfield, which he named in honour of two cousins, Reginald Lawson Waterfield (1900-1986), a haematologist at Guy’s Hospital in London and one of England’s best known amateur astronomers, and Reginald’s cousin William Francis Herschel Waterfield (1886-1933), great-grandson of Sir William Herschel and grandson of the famed polymath Sir John Herschel, perhaps the most foremost astronomers of the 19th century. 

An astronomer in his own right, William Waterfield was a staff member of the Harvard Observatory. Most importantly for this article, William (or just Willie) Waterfield was a long-time resident of Crescent Bay, just south of Nakusp.

How the aristocratic scion of one of Britain’s most renowned academic families ended up in the mountainous frontier of British Columbia is actually not as uncommon as one may think. Land developers spread across the Kootenays in the late 19th century and early 20th century, pouncing on massive chunks of mountain land (usually regardless of the Indigenous inhabitants) to market to would-be colonizers looking to establish their own mini-estates.

One marketing strategy was to appeal to the upper-class gentry of the old country. Second-, third-, fourth-, and so-on children of well-to-do families who wouldn’t have the opportunities to inherit their family estates back home in England thanks to the prevalence of male primogeniture were eager to establish their own land holdings; a sentiment on which land developers attempted to capitalize. 

In contrast to Eastern Canada or the Prairie provinces, developers often played to the upper crust’s genteel nature, promoting the properties as orchard land. The most infamous example of this in British Columbia might be the village of Walhachin, a failed late 1900s-early 1910s attempt at creating an elite English enclave in the middle of the arid Thompson River valley.

From Lake Windermere to Kootenay Lake to the Arrow Lakes, dozens of would-be developments popped up across the Kootenays. The Arrow Lakes alone saw a number of examples; Edgewood and Renata being the most successful. For every Edgewood or Renata, however, there was a Fosthall, Pingston or a West Demars which quickly flamed out.

Located to the south of Nakusp and Glenbank on the other side of Nakusp creek, Crescent Bay Orchards were surveyed in 1910 by A.L. McCulloch and marketed by the Canadian Dominion Development Co. Ltd. as a fruit growing settlement. Many buyers bought lots sight unseen expecting rich soil and easy access to the lake, when in fact the waterfront lots were few and shallow. Most of Crescent Bay actually sat on a rocky bench covered in forest, and much of the land was rocky and poorly suited for agriculture beyond grazing.

Subdivision map of Crescent Bay Orchards, 1910. (Arrow Lakes Historical Society)

William Waterfield and another Waterfield cousin, Horace (1876-1918, son of English diplomat Sir Henry Waterfield), both emigrated to Crescent Bay with their wives and young families. A graduate of the Royal Agricultural College, Horace had just left New Zealand, where he had lived for a time serving as the secretary to the Governor-General. Horace’s time in Crescent Bay was short-lived; as expected for a man in his position, his connection to Britain was strong and he enlisted in the British Columbia Regiment during World War I, where he was killed at Étaples.

His wife Elspeth and their young children, however, remained on the family farm. Following the end of the war, Willie was finally able to have his telescope sent from Oxford sent to him in Nakusp, and there he continued to making observations of stars for the British Astronomical Association. In addition to Waterfield asteroid, Herschel Creek and Waterfield Road in Crescent Bay are also named for the Waterfields.

Nakusp residents picnicking at Demars, 1923. Willie Waterfield in is the white shirt and tie at the left end of the second row from top; his wife Aimee Marguerite is fourth from bottom left. (Curry Morton/Arrow Lakes Historical Society 2014.003.4716)

After the death of his wife in a boating accident in 1926, Willie left Crescent Bay for Harvard College to work at the observatory for two years before transferring to its research station in Bloemfontein, South Africa, where he was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1933. The descendants of his cousin Horace, however, remained in Crescent Bay and continued to remain prominent members of the Nakusp community.

Willie’s nephew Donald, who took over the family farm, rose to national prominence during the 1960s and early 1970s as he was one of the more outspoken Arrow Lakes residents in opposition to the Columbia River Treaty (or at least in how it was implemented), culminating in the publication of his 1970 book Continental Waterboy: The Columbia River Controversy and its follow-up, Land Grab: Oliver Buerge vs. The Authority.

Donald’s sister Jean would also become a renowned farmer and activist in the region, but there’s more on her later in this article. For now, we must move on to another pair of farmers who settled in Nakusp during the 1910s, this time from the Channel Islands.

A Window in Jersey

Greg Nesteroff and I often trade anecdotes about random Kootenaiana when we come across them. I live in Ireland now, close to the namesake of Castlegar to boot — now that I’ve been to both Nelson, New Zealand and Castlegar, Co. Galway, Greg jokes that I should travel to Rossland, Norway and complete the West Kootenay trifecta — any mention of home carries a bit more weight when I hear it. You can thus imagine how my interest was piqued I got when a message from Greg in 2024 showing a house on the island of Jersey for rent with the curious address of Nakusp, Queen’s Road, St Helier. How did a random house in the capital of one of the world’s smallest countries get named for my hometown? A comparative skip-and-jump away from my home in Galway, I decided to find out.

Of the five different townlands in County Galway, Ireland named Castlegar, the largest in population by far is in Galway City. The Castlegar in British Columbia is not named for this Castlegar but rather for an estate in the eastern part of the county near Ahascragh. (Kyle Kusch photo)

Outside of the very newest housing developments in Jersey, it’s generally the custom that houses in the Channel Islands bailiwick of just over 100,000 people have legal names rather than numbers. Often, the names are in French — not a surprise given the island’s proximity to France and that French was a common language on the island into the early 20th century; almost all street names outside of the capital, St Helier, are French. Other houses will have names similar to those you’d expect in the English countryside; not surprising given that the island is a Crown dependency of Britain. So how did Nakusp, of all places, wind up in Jersey? Putting on my Arrow Lakes history hat, I thought of the only two Jerseymen I knew of who lived in my hometown for any amount of time: the brothers Clem and Phil Buesnel.

It’s barely noticeable in the top of this living room window of a hillside house in the Jersey capital of St Helier, but there it is – the only place (on Earth, anyway) outside of British Columbia named for Nakusp. (Kyle Kusch photo, May 2026)

Prior to its post-World War II reinvention as a financial centre, Jersey was most renowned for its dairy industry. It should come as no surprise, then, that the Buesnels came to Nakusp to pursue dairy farming. The Buesnels came to the Nakusp area a few years earlier than the Waterfields in 1906. They initially settled not in the woods of Crescent Bay but at the south end of Shakespeare Avenue in Glenbank.

An Ernest Bill postcard, c. 1914, depicting the Empire and Sunflower Ranches, owned by Phil and Clem Buesnel. The original Glenbank School at the corner of Shakespeare and Nakusp East roads is at top left. (Estate of E.C. Johnson/Greg Nesteroff/Arrow Lakes Historical Society 2014.026.494)

Clem (1880-1962, left) and Phil (1881-1948, right) Buesnel posing in front of their house on the Empire Ranch (Estate of E.C. Johnson/Arrow Lakes Historical Society 2014.003.3997)

After a decade-and-a-half in Glenbank, the Buesnels moved into the village of Nakusp directly in 1922, purchasing the farm of the late Chinese Canadian entrepreneur Sam Henry. At just under 10 acres, Sam Henry’s farm, located in the pocket formed by the intersection of Nelson Avenue and Broadway Street in the southeast corner of town, was considered the most productive plot of land on the Arrow Lakes thanks to the rich soil created by the combination of an underground spring and the Upper Arrow Lake waterfront. Here, the Buesnels opened their Bay View Dairy, which they operated until 1948.

Phil Buesnel and Clem Buesnel posing in front of their produce display in the agricultural fair building attached to the Opera House, Nakusp Fall Fair, 1914 or 1915. (Kate Johnson/Arrow Lakes Historical Society 2000.035.26)

Attempting to confirm my suspicion that the existence of Nakusp in Jersey would have been tied to the Buesnel brothers, a quick search led me to Jerripedia, the Jersey online heritage portal. Sure enough, I learned that the Jersey Archive held the 1951 will of John Le Breton Buesnel (1875-1955), older brother of Clement and Philip Renouf Buesnel, and that John’s residence was indeed Nakusp, Queen’s Road, St Helier.

Excerpt of the will of John Le Breton Buesnel showing his address as “Nakusp,” April 2, 1951. (Jersey Archive D/Y/B1/33/21)

Diving deeper into the Jersey Archive and looking at other records, it appears that John Buesnel changed the name of his house sometime in the late 1940s, as records previous to his will show the house’s name as “Beausejour.” We know this is the same house thanks to a datestone from 1922 placed by John and his wife Clara in the lintel above the door of the house. Was this name change a tribute to his recently-deceased younger brother Phil? By the time of Phil Buesnel’s death in January 1949, he and Clem would have been separated from their surviving siblings (there were 15 Buesnel siblings born between 1870 and 1892), including John, on the other side of the globe for 45 years.

Besides the requisite baptismal and census records, the only record of Clement and Philip Renouf Buesnel in the Jersey Archive or the Société Jersiase is this notice from the Aug. 5, 1914 edition of the Nouvelle Chronique de Jersey, Jersey’s last French-language newspaper, in which the two brothers, now living in Nakusp, have designated a power-of-attorney ostensibly to conclude their Jersey affairs. (Société Jersiase)

John Le Breton Buesnel’s World War II registration card, issued Jan. 8, 1941, showing his residence as Beausejour, Queen’s Road, St Helier. During the German occupation of the Channel Islands, all residents of the islands were forced by the occupiers to carry these cards with them at all times. (Jersey Archive D/S/A/4/A1917)

Tying It All Together

It is inevitable that the Waterfields and the Buesnels would have been decently acquainted with one another over the decades in a village of a few hundred people. The direct connection between the two families, however, would not come until 1948, when Clem and his ailing brother Phil (who would pass away early the next year) sold their farm to another British emigré whose name would become synonymous with farming in Nakusp, Chris Spicer.

Having operated one of England’s largest market gardens in his 20s, the Wye-educated Spicer (1913-1998) was already an expert agriculturalist when he enlisted in the Royal Air Force, flying 49 separate missions over Europe during World War II. He came to Newfoundland in 1947, making his way across Canada in search of “the perfect farm.” 

A year later, he found that farm in Nakusp, purchasing the Buesnel farm in the dead of winter after digging through the snow to examine the rich topsoil. That same winter while skiing, Chris met none other than Jean Waterfield (1909-1994), the polymathic eldest daughter of Horace and Elspeth Waterfield. Having earned a bachelor’s degree in botany from UBC before her 18th birthday, the future Jean Spicer was an avid florist who marketed her flowers across the continent. Along the way she also worked as an ore assayer, cook, and painter. 

Proceeds from her flowers and paintings were given to children’s causes both in Canada and abroad. The two soon married, embarking on a lifelong journey of farming, recreation, activism, and philanthropy; a spirit they passed onto their twin daughters Crystal and Janet. The farm remains in the hands of Janet to this day, and Spicer produce continues to be the product of choice at supermarkets, co-ops, and farmers’ markets across the region.

The idea that two families who crossed paths in Nakusp are tied to a house on the other side of the world and an asteroid lurking in the expanse between Mars and Jupiter is pretty remarkable. And not many villages can claim their own Martian crater, either. Perhaps Nakusp isn’t that little after all.

Prior to leaving for Ireland in 2023, Kyle Kusch served 11 years as archivist for the Arrow Lakes Historical Society in Nakusp. Now at University of Galway Library Heritage Collections, he currently serves as project digital archivist for Imirce: Irish Emigrant Letters and Life Stories from North America, which makes thousands of Irish emigrant letters and life stories from North America available to researchers and the public alike. The author would also like to point out that Jersey itself is the namesake of the West Kootenay ghost town of Jersey, just east of Salmo.

Articles like these don’t happen without the resources provided by local archives. Many thanks to the Arrow Lakes Historical Society, Jerripedia, and the Jersey Archive.