Today’s posting will be quite short as the history of the area is already quite well known. We’re visiting Craigellachie, British Columbia and — more specifically — the location where the Last Spike of the Canadian Pacific Railway was driven on November 7, 1885, exactly 132 years ago.
In all honesty, we visited the location back on October 3 of this year and I wrote this posting on October 25 but I thought it would be fun to set this to automatically post on the anniversary date. As an added bonus, I set the posting time to be 10:22 Mountain Time, which is 09:22 Pacific Time which is when the Last Spike was driven.
That spike was driven by Donald Smith and the moment was captured by Winnipeg photographer Alexander Ross. The image captured that day is likely one of the most famous photographs in all of Canadian history.
Today the site is a rest area located alongside a busy stretch of the TransCanada Highway. The parking lot is large enough to accommodate RVs which makes it a convenient stop for us, regardless of the historical significance. In addition, you will find a couple of displays, a gift shop, the requisite washrooms, and a cairn marking the Last Spike. The CPR still runs by this spot and trains are not uncommon to see. There is also a caboose on site, which is Canadian Pacific 437336. According to some very perfunctory internet research, this caboose was built in 1949 but I didn’t find much else about its history.
With a few photos taken and a magnet purchased from the gift shop, we were back on the road to continue on to the next stop along our Scratch the Surface Tour. Hopefully I will have had a chance to post a few more of those places before this post appears in November.
“Here was driven the last spike completing Canadian Pacific Railway from ocean to ocean”
An overview of the site including the washrooms, monument, and caboose
I’m sure someone must know more about the history of this caboose. Please share in the comments.
The modern day CPR still passes by this location
By Ross, Alexander, Best & Co., Winnipeg – This image is available from Library and Archives Canada under the reproduction reference number C-003693 and under the MIKAN ID number 3194527 This tag does not indicate the copyright status of the attached work. A normal copyright tag is still required. See Commons:Licensing for more information. Library and Archives Canada does not allow free use of its copyrighted works. See Category:Images from Library and Archives Canada. , Public Domain, Link
While Vancouver Island was our goal for this trip, we actually had very little time on “The Island” itself. We arrived in Nanaimo in the evening and spent the night with our friend Lila and her husband. The next day we traveled to Tofino and Ucluelet and then the day after that we made it to Victoria where we joined our friends Chris and Helen for dinner. The next morning we were back on the ferry and starting the trip home.
While it may have been a bit of a whirlwind visit, we managed to fit in a lot of different sites and today I’ll be highlighting three of them.
The first of three highlights is the Amphitrite Point Lighthouse in Ucluelet. The current lighthouse was opened in 1915 after the previous light was destroyed by a tsunami in 1914. The lighthouse itself is a rather drab looking bunker of a building and certainly doesn’t fit the stereotypical vision of what a lighthouse should look like. However, the location where it sits is phenomenal, complete with waves crashing against rocks. We were fortunate to be there right at sunset and had beautiful light for capturing photos and footage. While there is no access into the lighthouse itself, it remains a location well worth a visit. If you have time, walk around the Wild Pacific Trail and check out the area. There are ocean vistas around every corner.
The second location I’m highlighting is the oldest of the three. It is the Stone Butter Church which was built in 1870 and located near Duncan, BC.
The night we were visiting Lila, we were gathered around the kitchen table and looking over some old books about ghost towns and abandoned places. While I was engrossed in a book about ghost towning in Alberta in the early 1970s, Emily and Lila were discussing this church. I apparently missed the entire conversation so I had no idea what to expect when Emily and I decided to detour by this church on our way from Ucluelet to Victoria. All she promised me was “You are going to be blown away by this place!”
The GPS tried to route us up the road to the front of the church but it was signed as a private road, so we had to approach the church from the back. This involved using a pullout on the side of the road and then climbing a long stone staircase up a hillside. It certainly makes for the most dramatic approach as the stone hulk slowly comes into view as you reach the top.
It is known as the Stone Butter Church because the missionary Father Peter Rondealt paid the people who helped build it with funds he earned through the sale of butter from the dairy herd on his mission’s farm.
Apparently, in 1931, Ripley’s Believe It or Not” featured the church in a 1931 report in which they described it as “The church of no services…in which no congregation ever gathered.” This was actually incorrect, as the church was used for a period of ten years before the bishop determined it would be better to have a church on church-owned land, rather than relying on the verbal agreement the church had in place with the local natives.
According to some basic internet research, there were three attempts at restoration, going back as far as the 1920s and as late as 1980. From what I gather, the biggest restoration effort took place in 1958 which is when the roof was repaired. Sadly, the efforts made to preserve the church are no longer in evidence anywhere as it sits open to the elements and, as you can see in the above photo, vandals.
According to the legends, the local native population consider the church to be haunted. We didn’t experience any paranormal activity but there was certainly a sense of unease, most likely because we weren’t sure about the legalities of us visiting the site with it being located on a native reserve. Clearly we are not the only ones who visit it and photograph it, based on the number of hits one can find on the internet regarding this church.
And, finally, our last highlighted stop is the Kinsol Trestle. Completed in 1920 by the Canadian National Railway, it was in operation until 1979 and abandoned in 1980. It would sit for more than 30 years before being restored and incorporated into the TransCanada Trail in 2011.
It stands 44m high and spans 188m across the Koksilah River, making it one of the largest wooden trestles in the world. It is an impressive structure and walking across it certainly has to make one impressed with the engineering feats we were able to accomplish almost 100 years ago.
We used the GPS to navigate to the trestle and it took us on quite the tour through rural Vancouver Island. We were just beginning to get a little skeptical about whether or not we were going the right way when we suddenly saw the parking area which provided easy access to the trail. It was just a short 300m walk to the north end of the trestle.
The structure is so large it is difficult to capture in photographs. Since it wasn’t very busy I put the drone up in the air and captured some footage. The video below shows some highlights of the Vancouver Island portion of the trip: Long Beach, the aforementioned Amphitrite Point Lighthouse (starting around 0:57) and the trestle (starting around 2:00). Check it out and please let me know what you think in the comments.
Sometimes the best discoveries happen by accident. We were heading down the Coquilhalla Highway on our way to the west coast and Emily and I kept noticing small signs along the side of the road in the shape of steam engines. Naturally, some furious search engine action ensued and we soon learned that the names we had been seeing such as Portia, Shylock, and Juliet were all named for the Shakespearean characters and were originally railway stations located the canyon. Then Emily hit upon the most amazing discovery — the upcoming Othello Tunnels. Naturally, a detour was in order and we were venturing off the highway and on our way to Coquihalla Canyon Provincial Park.
We stopped at the north end and walked along the old Kettle Valley Railway right-of-way to the first tunnel. We were immediately awestruck with the surrounding area. There are a series of five tunnels with trestles connecting them over the river. The geography of the area makes it incredible to believe that they had the ability to survey and construct a railway through such terrain back in 1914 when the tunnels were built.
We would soon learn that the Coquihalla Highway is mainly built upon the old railbed first constructed by the Kettle Valley Railway. The KVR’s main engineer was Andrew McCulloch and he was the driving force behind the creation of these tunnels, and is also most often credited with the naming the stops along the way after Shakespearean characters.
The KVR used the line until 1959 when a series of major washouts rendered it inoperable. It was officially abandoned in 1961 and became part of the Provincial Park’s trail system in 1986. I’m sure this area must have been quite the playground for the area’s more adventurous youth before it was opened to the public.
We took the time to explore the first three tunnels before we needed to get back on the road. Like many of the places on the Scratch the Surface Tour, we were here just long enough to realize we need to come back with more time to explore further. I was very tempted to throw the drone up in the air but the steep canyon walls prevented me from getting a solid GPS signal lock and I wasn’t willing to risk losing the drone in the rushing water below should something go wrong. Still photos will have to do, I guess.
Emily outside one of the tunnels
Looking through one tunnel towards another
View from atop one of the old trestles which are now hiking trails
I’m going to take a little detour from the vacation posts and instead talk about Sears. I’m not interested in discussing what went wrong for the once-mighty retailer in terms of a retail case study, but rather looking at the history of the chain and one store in particular.
The history of Sears in Canada goes back to 1953. A year before, Canadian retailer Simpson’s created a joint partnership with Sears, Roebuck and Company from the US. The result was Simpsons-Sears, which was a fixture on the Canadian retail landscape well into the 1980s.
Any child of a certain age remembers when the Sears Christmas Wish Book would arrive in the mail and then sitting down with a pen and circling all of the toys he/she wanted for Christmas. Today’s youth will never understand just how magical those days were as building an Amazon wishlist just doesn’t have the same charm.
While those warm memories of childhood remain, I am guilty of not doing my part to keep Sears as a viable company. Prior to the visit which inspired this post, I think the last time I had been inside a Sears store was in 2012.
Speaking of visiting Sears, that is exactly what Emily and I did last Thursday evening. Our target was the Sears in located in North Hill Mall. We had slightly different goals, with Emily’s being to see if there were any great deals as part of the liquidation proceedings and mine was to document the store.
The history of this Sears store goes back to 1958. North Hill Shopping Centre has the distinction of being the first shopping mall in Calgary. It was originally constructed as an open-air mall with a canopy covering the area between the stores. The Simpsons-Sears was a free-standing building located on the east end. This store remained relatively unchanged, even when the mall underwent a massive renovation in 1973 which converted it into an enclosed shopping centre. At the time of its construction in 1958, this would have been a very suburban location, whereas today it is practically inner city. The location has been a target for redevelopment for quite some time, with plans announced back in 2014 that the location was going to be converted into highrise condominiums.
On the evening of our visit, the store was a bit of a disaster inside. Customers have been rooting through the merchandise like vultures picking over the carcass of a freshly killed deer. It was very symbolic of how the once-proud pillar of Canadian retail has become a mere shadow of its former self.
While we may make another visit to see what is left when the discounts get deeper, we both realize this may have very well been the last time we ever set foot in a Sears. The name and the legacy will join other retail legends like Woolworth’s, Kresge, and Eaton’s which have disappeared.
Let me issue a disclaimer right up front. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t disclose the location of this church with this much detail. I would have normally said “near Sorrento” and left it at that, but I wanted to be able to link to the blog of the group working on restoring this church and their group is called “Save Notch Hill Church” so that name is already out there.
This place was another unplanned stop. As we were approaching Sorrento, Emily says “Hey, isn’t that neat church with the photo of the train light taken around here somewhere?” With that, she pulled out her phone and began searching.
Sure enough, she was correct. So, armed with nothing more than the knowledge that the church was near Sorrento and near some railway tracks, we began our hunt. I stopped and checked the map and pulled out a likely location and began heading that way. After about fifteen minutes of hunting, Emily resorted to the phone-a-friend option and we confirmed we were close but we had made a right instead of a left. Off we go!
It wasn’t long before the church came into view. The building itself was clearly marked No Trespassing and it was obvious there would be no way to approach the building without either trespassing on farmers’ fields or walking along the railway tracks, which would also mean trespassing. In addition, there were a number of homes in close proximity which gave us an uneasy feeling of being watched, so I didn’t feel comfortable throwing up the drone either. As a result, we settled for shooting some shots from the public roadway.
After getting back home and doing some digging, I came across the website of the aforementioned “Friends of the 1922 Notch Hill Church Society“. Their site provided some insights into the history of this great building, as well as documenting the efforts to save it. If you compare the photo I took to the one that inspired us to stop here, you can see the church is in much better condition now. The building and steeple have been straightened, there is fresh paint, and the windows have been covered to keep the pests out. Their website doesn’t show any updates after late 2013/early 2014, so I don’t know if they ran out of money and/or volunteers, if they lost momentum, or if this is as far as they ever planned on taking the work. There was some scaffolding visible on the far side of the church, so maybe they just stopped updating the website?
Anyway, using the information from their site, I learned Notch Hill was really established as a community in the mid-1880s because the CPR needed to locate pusher locomotives there to assist in getting trains up the steep grade. Several of the CPR employees worked as volunteers on the building of Holy Cross Church, which first opened in October of 1922.
As the 1960s rolled around, the church’s fate was sealed by a combination of factors, the largest being the overall decline in church attendance which was being seen all across society.
Another factor was the addition of a second and third set of tracks being added by the CPR. Those tracks forced attendees into the same dilemma we faced: to access the church you either had to walk across farmers’ fields or trespass along the railway right-of-way. With access limited, the usage declined and the final recorded event taking place in the church was the 50th anniversary celebration of Anne and Carl Frederickson. Carl was one of the volunteers who originally built Holy Cross and so it was fitting he was there for the end.
The church was left to rot until 2012 when the Friends of Notch Hill Church Society began restoration work. As they word it, “the bell tower had a significant lean, much of the roof on the eastern side was torn away, and the whole building was tilting 16 inches toward the east.”
You can see a lot of “in progress” photos on their site, including a photo on the “History” page which shows the church being used in the 1960s. What I found noteworthy about that photo is that the bell does not appear to be in place, nor is it in place in the Kevin McElheran photo — they must have put one back in place at some point during the restoration, but I don’t see it specifically referenced on their site. I wonder if it is the original bell.
I think I’ll reach out to their society and see if anyone is still monitoring the email address. If I hear back from them, I’ll be sure to post a follow-up.
