Editorially speaking...
Lots happening, some of it good, some of it not so good, on the museum front these days.
COVID has obviously put a damper on public attendance at most museums. To cite but one, the B.C. Forest Discovery Centre has had to cancel its popular Easter Hunt and train rides, both of which drew mass attendance and income from admission fees.
Last week, I told you that the Shawnigan Lake Museum has been blessed with two large grants for its expansion and enhancement program, but this appears to be the exception these days. Most other historical institutions are having to scramble for ways to support themselves or their preservation projects.
COVID has been a Catch-22 for museums: when schools were closed and kids most able to visit museums—they couldn’t.
Here in Duncan, the Cowichan Valley Museum in the E&N Railway station (owned by the Island Corridor Foundation), is struggling to cover the costs of repairs to the ca 1912 building on Canada Ave. A major refit of the entrance and display rooms was completed a few years ago but the aging building has more pragmatic needs, too, like a new roof and the like. All very expensive, and the Cowichan Historical Society, which operates the museum and the archives on the third floor of City Hall, is volunteer-driven. Although the City of Duncan has been a stalwart supporter for years, the same can’t be said for the CVRD; and North Cowichan Council, which gives modest annual operating grants, favours the Chemainus Museum.
The Cowichan Historical Society (www.cowichanvalleymuseum.bc.ca) is registered with CanadaHelps.org via the CVM’s Facebook page or donations can be made by cheque to the Cowichan Historical Society, P.O. Box 1014, Duncan, B.C. V9L 3Y2.
On a truly, truly positive note, the rehabilitation of the 1913 headframe/tipple at Morden Colliery Provincial Park is completed! The chain link fence is gone and for the first time in decades, visitors can walk in, around and beneath the gangling structure in perfect safety. The vertical mine shaft directly beneath this six-storey-high gargoylian mass of concrete, 100s of feet deep, is now permanently sealed.
For 20 years, scores of volunteers gave humongous time, effort and expense to trying to get successive provincial governments to honour Vancouver Island’s coal mining history by saving the structure, one of only two of its kind in North America, from further deterioration and ultimate destruction. Well, the B.C. Heritage Trust finally did it.
Still to come, I’m hoping, is some form of interpretation by way of signboards. As it stands at present (it was only opened to the public a week or so ago) first time visitors don’t know what it is, exactly, that they’re looking at.
(Not to look a gift horse in the mouth, the job isn’t quite complete in my mind. The wooden superstructure that was atop the sorting bins needs to be replaced. This would be relatively inexpensive compared with the $1.4 cost of repairing the concrete and would serve three purposes: complete the structure as it was originally, show it more as it really was, and help protect it from the weather which has been a major contributing factor in the headframe’s deterioration.)
Morden as it looked during rehabilitation—supported by shipping containers.
The ‘new’ Morden as it looks today, complete with inviting cedar snake fence.
Previously, the fan from the Extension No. 3 Mine air shaft which had been stored, exposed to the elements, behind the fence enclosure at Morden, was picked up by the Regional District of Nanaimo. Thanks to Extension regional director Maureen Young and RDN works staff, it has been sandblasted, painted and mounted in Extension’s mini-historical park.
This, folks, is what it’s supposed to be about—saving our history for posterity so that future generations can experience and learn from our past.
Finally, two seemingly unrelated news items recall one of the worst shipwrecks in British Columbia history. The first announced the arrival from their builders of two new Bay-Class Canadian Coast Guard lifeboats. Some lifeboats! These aren’t open, man-powered rowboats but small ships able to right themselves even if capsized.
The other news item announced that the West Coast Trail, closed last year because of COVID, is to reopen to hikers this year.
The link between the lifeboats and the trail is the sinking of the passenger steamship Valencia off Cape Beale in January 1906 with the loss of 136 lives. This was when the west coast of Vancouver Island was known world-wide to mariners as the Graveyard of the Pacific, one stretch of it for “a wreck for every mile”. 100s of ships of all types and sizes and 1000s of lives were lost over the years. But it was the wreck of the Valencia that prompted the federal government to establish an emergency “Lifeline Trail” and to station an emergency lifeboat at Bamfield.
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