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
Originally Published on April 14, 2023
Lynne Jordan has contributed to historical booklets available at the Cortes Island Museum and is currently researching the history of early logging activity in Whaletown.
In the course of an extensive 3-part interview, Lynne draws on original documents, archives, and oral histories to paint a picture of early settler loggers on Cortes — their equipment, their floating camps, the economy in which some prospered and some failed.
Continue reading Early Logging on Cortes Island and Vicinity: Local History with Lynne JordanThe logging community was always a really mixed bag… Much of the logging was done by hand. Some of it using horses.
Logging was not a good way to get rich.
Originally published Sept 20, 2022
Whaletown may get its name from an old whaling station, but Europeans really did not settle in the area for another 15 years or so. In today’s program Lynne Jordan, former President of the Cortes Island Museum, traces the modern community back to a logger named Moses Ireland.
First Nations people were using Whaletown Bay before that and a fish trap is believed to have once stretched across the entrance of the lagoon.
The whalers came for 18 months, in 1869 and 70.
“It wasn’t very many years after the whaling station left, in the mid 1880s, that Moses Ireland moved into the area as a logger and set up camp where the whaling station had been,” explained Jordan.
Continue reading Birth of Whaletown as a community abt. 1885-1914Editor’s note: According to the BC Treaty Commission’s Interactive Map, the waters of Von Donop Inlet and Carrington Bay, on Cortes Island, are within the traditional territory We Wai Kai and Wei Wai Kum Nations. They also claim Quadra, Read and Raza Islands, as well as Toba Inlet. These are all areas that are within the traditional territories of the Klahoose First Nation. whose principle village is on Cortes Island. The K’omoks and Klahoose First Nations have overlapping claims on Read, Quadra and Mitlenatch Islands.
By Madeline Dunnett, The Discourse, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
A new notification system and app that alerts coastal B.C. First Nations about oil or hazardous chemical spills on their lands and waters was recently launched.
The initiative was developed collaboratively between 12 First Nations and the province’s Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy. The process was coordinated by Coastal First Nations-Great Bear Initiative.
The system uses technology from Alertable, an emergency alert system that is used by various local governments to notify residents about critical alerts in their communities such as those related to floods or fires.
Continue reading New system alerts coastal First Nations about hazardous spills on land and water
A new exhibition in the Cortes Island Museum looks at the island’s housing from pre-colonial times up until the present. ‘From the Ground Up: Cortes Island Dwellings And Their Histories’ combines photographs and artifacts from the museum’s collections, stories and images from the community and a display from the Cortes Housing Society. Melanie Boyle, Managing Director of the Museum, took Cortes Currents on a tour of the exhibit.
Continue reading From The Ground Up: The Story Of Cortes Island Dwellings
