Editorially speaking...
There’s nothing like a challenge to get the blood flowing.
It’s been 46 years since I wrote Ghost Town Trails of Vancouver Island which has been in continuous print all that time. One chapter deals with my “first” ghost town which qualified as such because I could drive to it. (Not many B.C. ‘ghost towns’ allow you this luxury, believe me.)
As proof that Jennifer and I aren’t only ones who enjoy exploring our back roads and former railway grades in search of our industrial past, this photo of old railway and logging in the Paldi area is by Andrew Waldegrave.
Before the book, when I first wrote about Cassidy, the coal mining community beside Haslam Creek just north and west of today’s Nanaimo airport for an article in the Colonist, Ladysmith historian Ray Knight corrected me: it wasn’t Cassidy, he said, but Granby, named for the mining company that founded it.
Everyone I’ve talked to over the years who lived in Nanaimo or has an interest in Island mining history, seems to have agreed with Ray. In fact, you can google Granby, Vancouver Island and there are several other geographical features around the province that share this name with better-known Granby, Que. All have the same provenance: the Granby Consolidated Mining, Smelting and Power Company Ltd., whose primary purpose was the mining of copper but which came to the Island in 1917 to mine coal exclusively for its Portland Canal Anyox copper mine, then the largest producer in the British Empire.
This company also brought with them an until then unheard-of approach to employer-employee relations: they cared. At a time when robber barons such as the Dunsmuirs (to name just one offender) housed their miners in shacks without central heating or indoor plumbing, the Granby Co. housed their workers in modern company homes with all the amenities. Both company-owned Granby, V.I. and Anyox in northern B.C. were famous for the quality of their industrial and residential construction. (Almost a century after its abandonment, many of Anyox’s buildings—built of concrete—and its dam remain standing.)
Why, Granby miners were so spoiled that, when they came off shift and showered, their clean clothes were waiting for them, toasty-warm, having been steam-heated while they worked underground! Compare that to other major companies of the day, mining and otherwise, whose employees had to walk home, filthy and often wet, to where—if they were lucky enough to be married—their wife had a hot tub (the water then shared by the family) waiting for them.
Speaking of Anyox, I have in my possession most of the papers and photographs of the late Ozzie Hutchings, who lived there as a late teen then as a young, married machinist. In his retirement he set out to chronicle the history of this remarkable community that, even today, is so remote as to be all but untouched since it shut down in the first years of the Great Depression.
So where does the challenge come in? A history major, Class of ‘82, who wrote his history thesis on the ‘Cassidy Colliery’, has stated on Facebook that I, Ray Knight, the Stupich family that lives there today and a host of others, are wrong: it isn’t Granby but Cassidy.
That sent me into my Granby file for the first time in years and officially, choke, he appears to be right.
Whippersnapper.
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My deepest thanks to retired Vancouver Sun environmental reporter Larry Pym who nominated me, and to those who endorsed my nomination, for a B.C. Historical Federation Award of Recognition.
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Finally, this great quote from Andrew Waldegrave whose photo appears above: “There’s something compelling about intricate old structures, whether they be railway trestles or mine tipples. Silent reminders of old industry. And reminders of what can still be.”
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