Black Wednesday Spelled Death for the Coal Dust Twins
Way back in the Dark Ages, 1977 to be exact, I completed a three-week-long blitz of dozens of southern mainland B.C. ghost towns while researching a never completed series of books on the subject.
Among the many sites I visited in the Similkameen District was Coalmont, 11 miles (18km) northwest of Princeton, and mountainside Blakeburn, located southwest of the confluence of Granite Creek and the Tulameen River.
Coalmont, which was the railhead connection to the Kettle Valley Railway for the Blakeburn Mine, still has 80 permanent and 20 seasonal residents.
Not so Blakeburn. But for the collapsing remains of some log cabins and wood-framed houses, a tramway tower, concrete ruins and scarred landscape, there’s virtually nothing to show that this was once a thriving community of 500 souls.
Nothing in the way of a memorial to the 45 men of the Blakeburn Mine who, on Black Wednesday, Aug. 1, 1930, were victims of an horrific explosion and who are buried in a collective grave in the Princeton Cemetery.
This seemed so very, very wrong to me, and so I wrote when I first told the story of that black day in Blakeburn in 1930. Several years later, I was researching in the Provincial Archives and was recognized by a man who said he was writing a book on Blakeburn.
He informed me that that he’d read one if my books on ghost towns and was motivated by my comment about the lack of any kind of on-site memorial at Blakeburn. He said that the local historical society had erected a signboard at Blakeburn and he thanked me for giving them the idea.
Well, fast-forward to 2021 and the signboard has again been stolen.
Wrote Bill Kellett in November: “I was saddened today to discover the sign which had been erected at the former Blakeburn site has been stolen for the second time! It is indeed unfortunate that there are idiots among us who feel the need to engage in this sort of thing!”
I must say that Bill is much politer that I am...
The story of the heroic attempts to rescue the trapped Blakeburn coal miners 90 years ago is heartrending and should never be allowed to be forgotten. I’ll do my best to keep that memory alive in next week’s Chronicles.
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