Originally Published on September 6, 2022
The Union Steamship Company served communities along the West Coast up until they were supplanted by airplanes and small motor boats in 1956. Few would have guessed that as little as a generation earlier, when they were still the main way of transporting people and supplies. In the conclusion of her segment about the Union Steamship company, Lynne Jordan talks about the company’s twilight years.
Continue reading Twilight of the Union Steamships
A great many fisherfolk once worked out of Whaletown. The Cortes Island Museum’s list goes back to the 1930s, at which point there were 7 men and a woman. Three of them used rowboats.
“There used to be a huge fleet rafted out, both six and seven abreast all along both sides of the dock, in Whaletown. In the last 10 years or so, there’s only been three or four boats in there, fishing. The main one that I know of in the last little while is the ‘C-Fin,’ but he goes outside of the Vancouver Island area and fishes tuna. When he comes back he doesn’t sell it to a fisheries, he sells it from the dock, and the same with his prawns. So he’s not using a middle man to sell his products, which I suppose is one of the few ways you could make a little bit of money now,“ said Lynne Jordan, former President of the Cortes Island Museum, in the latest instalment of her history of Whaletown.
Continue reading When fishing was an industry in WhaletownCome on board for the first season of Vintage Vignettes, a joint project of Cortes Community Radio and Cortes Island Museum and Archives, brings you “radio snapshots” of local life in simpler times. These brief episodes feature dramatized voices from the past with archive recordings of music from the “Old Timers”, a dance band that played locally for several decades. In Vintage Vignettes 1 -7 we focus on colourful characters and memorable events, from the first drive across Cortes Island to the 1946 earthquake.
Continue reading Vintage Vignettes 1-7
