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 SteamshipsOriginally Published September 5, 2022
When the Union Steamship company started operations, in 1889, there was a single ship servicing Burrard Inlet. Three years later they expanded their market to include the canneries, logging camps and small communities springing up along the coast. The first reference to a ship stopping in Whaletown is found in an 1899 edition of the VANCOUVER PROVINCE.
Continue reading The Union Steamships arrive in Whaletown
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. 1885-1914
What does it mean to be a neighbour on Cortes Island? This question is at the heart of the new Cortes Island Museum exhibition ‘Won’t You Be My Neighbour?’ curated by Melanie Boyle, Managing Director of the museum and Monica Hoffman. Opening Sunday May 4th the exhibit invites visitors on a visual and narrative journey through both the historical and contemporary communities that shaped life on the island.
“The idea of focusing on neighbourhoods came from the prior exhibition, ‘From the Ground Up,” explained Hoffman.
Boyle added, “We did touch on how people work together to build structures, in terms of collaboration. It was also about repurposing material and sharing of resources and, in a way, this is also what this new exhibition is about. Collective land arrangements are a way for people to live affordably on Cortes, to share the land, but also to share the material, resources and work collaboratively. So there’s a lot of overlap.”
Continue reading At The Museum: ‘Won’t You Be My Neighbour’ Exhibit Explores Community Life In Cortes Island
Friends of Cortes Island (FOCI) is launching a new transportation initiative
“We’re really excited to be launching this new ‘Room for Rider’ initiative. It’s a mirror tag that people can hang in their rear view mirror to let people know that they’re willing to give people a ride across Quadra,” explained Helen Hall, Executive Director of FOCI.
Continue reading The Cortes Island ‘Room for Rider’ Initiative
