Cumberland’s Chinatown gone but not forgotten
The locals laughed when American collectors began hauling away bottles by the truckload… Here’s irony for you. Fifty years after collectors razed Chinatown to the ground in search of bottles, pottery and curios, the Village of Cumberland is out to recreate some of its Asian heritage with Coal Creek Historic Park. According to Drew Penner in the Comox Valley Echo, “The 40-hectare property containing Chinatown and No. 1 Japanese Town was given to the Village of Cumberland by Weldwood Canada in 2002, with the stipulation that a covenant be put in place to protect its heritage and ecology.” Talk about locking the barn door after the horse has bolted! Let me put it this way, with a column I wrote in the Cowichan Valley Citizen in 2002: Although it’s now a matter of history, Cumberland’s Chinatown lives on in...
Read MoreCapital Iron & Metals was a marine Mecca
Ah, the good old days when I had my first–my only–real job in the editorial room of what was then The Daily Colonist. God, how I hated it. But that’s another story for another time… Several years ago, I attended the film, The Shipsinkers, a just-released documentary that followed a team of Canadians who contract to sanitize and sink ships as artificial reefs. (We have evidence of their work in Nanaimo waters.) Much of the film dealt with their stripping-down of the decommissioned New Zealand frigate Wellington alongside a shipbreakers’ dock prior to giving it a Viking’s funeral. What memories that brought back to me of Capital Iron & Metals on Store Street beside Victoria’s Inner Harbour As coincidence would have it, the very next day I found myself sitting beside Ron Greene, Capital Iron’s former owner, in the...
Read MoreIt’s June and they’re ba-c-c-k! Ox-eye daisy, that is
Legacy. It can be all things to all people, I suppose, and take all shapes and sizes, be they physical fact or less tangible. If measured in terms of human achievement, it’s nice to be (fondly) remembered after our brief visit on this mortal plane. The pioneering brothers John, Phillip, Augustus and Edwin Pimbury certainly left their collective mark. They, and Augustus’ wife Ellen, are still with us in the Cowichan Valley, by the way, taking their deserved rest in St. Peter, Quamican cemetery. Their Cobble Hill property is still with us, too, albeit much reduced in size and transmogrified by more than a century of changes. But that’s not where their achievement lies nor why they’re remembered Oldtime Cobble Hill chronicler Nathan P. Dougan referred to the Pimburys at least four times in his reminiscences first published...
Read MoreMore about the Westholme Giant
The Second Largest Douglas Fir Recalls Westholme Giant post has been drawing informed comment this week and I just found this great photo in my files. It was taken in Stanley Park, in the ’20s, judging by the vehicle. Today, this tree would never get to grow to any appreciable size; it’d be logged when hardly bigger than a fencepost judging by the truckloads that I see here, almost daily, in the Cowichan Valley . Sad. See also…‘Second Largest’ Douglas fir recalls Westholme GiantWestholme tree...
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