Editorially speaking...
Attention, bank robbers!
The strangest things pop up on the internet. Daily, my inbox is filled with, besides regular business and personal correspondence and subscription services, unsolicited historical trivia and gems submitted by friends and associates.
My headline refers to a set of blueprints that recently sold on eBay; they’re of the Eastern Township Bank of Phoenix; dating from around 1900, they recently sold for $200 U.S.
According to the plans, the bank was two stories high with 15-foot ceilings and a vault in the back corner. They won’t do robbers much good, of course, as the Eastern Township Bank went out of business long ago—as did the entire city of Phoenix in 1919.
Phoenix, B.C. —Wikipedia
British Columbia has had 100s of ghost towns over the years but Phoenix was unique. 11 km east of Greenwood in the Boundary Country, it proclaimed itself the “highest city in Canada” because of its mountaintop elevation. For 30 years it boomed because of a single resource, copper.
According to Wikipedia its 1000 citizens enjoyed the benefits of “an opera house, 20 hotels, a brewery and its own city hall”.
All that came to an abrupt end when the major employer, Granby Consolidated Mining, Smelting & Power Co., pulled the plug in 1919 because of exhausted ore reserves and depressed metal prices, and moved its operation, lock, stock and barrel to Anyox.
(Where it would repeat the entire process: build a substantial township in the wilderness from scratch then abandon it in 1935.)
Photos of Phoenix have a substantial and, ironically, built-to-last look which makes it all the more of a marvel to realize that, with the stroke of a pen and 1000s of miles away, corporate number-crunchers wrote finis to such a substantial community. Hundreds of citizens lost their homes and businesses, forced to start their lives elsewhere as the population dwindled to just a handful.
Then came the lumber salvagers and winter snows did the rest. Only the city’s First World War memorial survives as even the town site was obliterated during 20 years of open-pit mining; it’s now a lake.
Many years ago, on a beautiful sunny June morning, I visited Phoenix. I was alone and had the entire place, the lake and the memorial, to myself. I remember the flowering avalanche lilies at my feet. It was one of those moments when the fragility of human life and human endeavour (the lost soldiers, the vanished city) was literally laid out before me. I’ve never forgotten those few hours on that lonely mountaintop in the Boundary Country.
—By Violetsteel777 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=82072753
* * * * *
In Flanders fields the poppies blow... —The Canadian Encyclopedia
You know the expression, “You get what you pay for...” with its cynical implication that free or cheap isn’t always a bargain.
Well, paying more doesn’t always ensure a better deal.
A perfect case in point is a display ad in today’s Times-Colonist. If you wish to place a tribtute in November for “Military heroes past and present,” it’ll cost you $57.75. Plus tax.
So what’s wrong with that?
Well, I’m still altruistic enough to think there’s something more to Remembrance Day than selling newspaper ads instead of freely offering space to publicly honour our heroes past and present. Our own Cowichan Valley Citizen does it every year with pages of tribute to those Canadians who fell in two world and the Korean wars, and during peace-time peacekeeping missions.
And the Citizen doesn’t charge readers a cent.
Yes, the TC runs staff written editorial copy, too, but nowhere near to the extent that the little old Citizen does every November for free.
Disclaimer: This is the 25th year that the author is writing the Citizen’s Remembrance Day special edition. Does he do it for free? Of course, not. But if you’re not aware that TW eulogizes our Canadian heroes, military and civilian, year-round, on an almost daily basis, you haven’t been paying attention!
* * * * *