On the beach beside Nanaimo harbour in August 1852, Snuneymuxw workers dug coal and carried it to the Hudson's Bay Company vessel Cadboro, and the company paid them in blankets, at twenty barrels of coal per blanket. Coal is where most Nanaimo history begins. The history of the Nanaimo coal mines follows it from that harbour seam through Robert Dunsmuir's Wellington pits, found in 1869, to the explosion in the No. 1 Esplanade Mine on May 3, 1887, then on to the Great Strike of 1912 to 1914, the concrete headframe at Morden and a Raven coal mine proposal that never got past the paperwork.

The mines decided who lived here and where. Nanaimo's three Chinatowns stood at three different corners between the 1860s and 1960, the first displaced to the edge of the city limits in 1884, the last destroyed by fire on September 30, 1960 and never rebuilt. The Wong family came from Chinatown to run the Diners' Rendezvous on Wallace Street from 1956 to 2000. Far older is the weaving behind Coast Salish blankets, which marked the standing of the people who wore and gave them.

Some stories run well past the harbour. The Pacific Scandal of 1873 began with a railway promised to British Columbia and ended with a line between Esquimalt and Nanaimo and a land grant of some two million acres. The Halibut Treaty of 1923 was the first treaty Canada negotiated and signed on its own. Federal nutrition experiments on First Nations children reached six residential schools, Alberni among them, and the record came to light in 2013. At Beaumont-Hamel on July 1, 1916, about 800 men of the Newfoundland Regiment attacked, and 68 answered roll call.

Work left its own words. Vancouver Island logging history runs from the last working steam skidder in the province, retired in 1967, through camp words such as skookum and saltchuck, to the pulp mills, Harmac in south Nanaimo among them.

Then there are the small things that travelled. The earliest known printed recipe for the Nanaimo bar, in a 1952 hospital-auxiliary cookbook, calls it a "chocolate square". The green-and-yellow Garbage Gobbler bins were designed by Len Shaw in Langford; about 250 stood along BC highways, and fewer than 20 survive. As for the Caveman Camper, sold from 1958 to about 1980, one account puts its maker on Vancouver Island, while the trademark records point to Grants Pass, Oregon.

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Questions

When did coal mining start at Nanaimo?

Snuneymuxw people were already digging the harbour seam and trading its coal when Joseph McKay took possession of the Nanaimo coalfields for the Hudson's Bay Company in August 1852. Between 1851 and 1853 the company moved its mining equipment south from its failing mine at Fort Rupert to the newly found Nanaimo field.

Who found the Wellington coal seam near Nanaimo?

Robert Dunsmuir found it in 1869, about five miles northwest of the harbour. His biographer in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography calls it the thickest and most extensive seam yet found in the Nanaimo basin. Naval officers at Esquimalt put up £32,000, the firm became Dunsmuir, Diggle Limited in 1873, and a railway carried the coal three miles to wharves on Departure Bay.

Where were Nanaimo's three Chinatowns?

The City of Nanaimo marks the three sites with the neon installations of Jackie Wong's Lost Intersections: Esplanade and Victoria Crescent, View Street and Bing Kee Street, and Pine Street and Hecate Street. The City dates them to the 1860s to 1884, 1884 to 1908 and 1908 to 1960.

Where did the Nanaimo bar come from?

The earliest known printed recipe is in a 1952 cookbook published by the Women's Auxiliary to the Nanaimo Hospital, where it appears as a chocolate square. Food researcher Lenore Newman and archival researcher Shea Wind searched 48 cookbooks and found nothing similar older than 1952. The city's official recipe, by Joyce Hardcastle, came out of a contest in the mid-1980s.

Can you visit the Morden Mine headframe near Nanaimo?

Yes, from outside the fence. Morden Colliery Historic Park is a small day-use park about 7 km south of Nanaimo, reached from Highway 1 by Morden Road, and BC Parks prohibits entry inside the fence around the headframe and tipple. The Regional District of Nanaimo's Morden Colliery Regional Trail follows the old rail grade from the parking lot to the Nanaimo River.

What were Coast Salish blankets made from?

According to a study published in Science in December 2023, weavers blended the wool of a long-haired dog with mountain-goat wool, waterfowl down and plant fibres such as fireweed and cattail fluff. The women who owned the dogs kept them on islands or in pens so they would not mix with hunting or village dogs.

Sources

  1. Historical Development of Nanaimo, City of Nanaimo
  2. Remembering lives lost in BC's worst mining disaster, City of Nanaimo, 2023-05-02
  3. Dunsmuir, Robert, Dictionary of Canadian Biography