His pay roll would eventually contribute $15,000 a month to the east Pass economy and his Hindu workers add an exotic flavour to the Troughs ethnic mix. Related: Police seek witnesses in fatal motorcycle crash on Highway 3. The 1940s brought benefits and tragedy to Coleman. The faces of the mostly single-storey commercial buildings, plain and stained with age, windows boarded over, seem to hostile to visitors, blaming the world for the loss of prosperity brought on by the closure of the last mine when the Japanese found alternative sources of coal in 1983. Nearby the recently-restored Roxy Theatre beckons movie-goers with its fancy neon sign. 3 now runs approximately where the loading spur lay. The first motor vehicle to cross the Canadian Rockies did so via Phillipps Pass, about 1km north of Crowsnest Pass, and in 1917 a road was blasted around the shores of Crowsnest Lake and across Crowsnest Pass, renamed Interprovincial Highway Three in 1932. Delivered to the surface, the laden mine cars were marshalled in a miniature yard whence a dinkya small 0-2-0 saddle-tanked steam locomotivedrew them up to a wooden tipple built on the edge of the escarpment overlooking the hamlet. The venture was abandoned. Not only was he in a position to supply ties for the CPR Mainline, but he was on hand when fellow senator Alexander Tilloch Galt in 1885 laid the narrow trackage of his North Western Coal & Navigation railroad from Medicine Hat to the Coal Banks at what is now Lethbridge. The Summit Lime Works is the smallest of Continentals Canadian plants, capable of delivering 250 tons per day from its four vertical kilns, as well as limestone gravel. In 1976 the community finally installed a sewerage system and extended water distribution to Maple Leaf and other areas. They gained the loyalty of their workforce by complying with wage and benefit demands and began improving the plant. P1180523 Crowsnest Mountain Alberta. For the Pass producers the local market was small: a few hundred households, stores and hotels, a handful of lime kilns, a few dozen industrial boilers for powering steam engines and turbines for generating electricity, the CPR on the occasions when its own mines couldnt meet its expanding needs. A powerhouse was constructed wherein ten boilers steamed two 400 hp engines which were harnessed to matching 250 kW generators and two 1000-pound air compressors. (Henry) Pelletier flumed logs down to his mill located on a property just west of McLarens. Come 1907 Morino had completed 190 ovens which output 910 tons of coke per day, and by the next year 216, divided into three batteries, were in operation producing up to 8,000 tons per month, most destined for the big Granby Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company operation at Grand Forks, and the British Columbia Copper Company smelter a few miles farther west on the Kettle Valley Line, at Greenwood, B.C. WCC was paralysed, its 750-odd workers picketing the company offices and plant. Like an avalanche of snow, the Slide entrained more air within it, crashing down upon the valley floor, roaring over eastern edge of sleeping Frank and rolling part way up the valleys opposite side. Some three hundred feet below, the silvery slivers of the CP rails complement the Crowsnest Rivers pewter sheen as they curl across the savannah once ranched by Jim Good. Crowsnest Pass is 1358m high. Materials for developmenttimbers for tunnel props, rails for mine haulage, feed for horses, et ceterahad to be at hand. 1was completed through the Selkirk Mountains of B.C. The highway reduces to a two-lane undivided road and the Crowsnest Highway ends 113km (70mi) later at the Trans-Canada Highway in Medicine Hat. Though they withdrew their men from most towns, Blairmore was one place in which the RN-WMP maintained a presence for, with the threat of sabotage ever present during wartime, every pound of explosive distributed in the Trough had to be monitored. Miners began to explore the avenue of appeasement rather than confrontation. Enraged, strikers denounced the scabs and attacked their working neighbours. McLarens was not the only sawmill to scream logs into lumber in the early years of Blairmore. In 1922 the staff of the 12-room Bellevue School conducted a survey and found representatives of 40 nationalities. Nearby, beside the older blue and white striped Stop Inn Motel, a 36-inch gauge air-driven 0-4-0 thermos bottle locomotive on a monumental plinth gleams with thick silver paint. crowsnest highway elevation profile. In 1957 it had finally incorporated itself as a Village and under the first Overseer, Ernest Goulding, bought the communitys partial water system from private ownership. Their old stories tell of a battle near its base that was cut short by a rock-fall. It turned to the No. The confrontation shocked the Crowsnest communities so deeply that the solidarity of the workers shattered along largely ethnic lines. The shaft upwards connected to the Main adit which would be mined into the seam some 30 feet above, and inclined slightly upward so that loaded coal cars would roll easily to the mines mouth. On December 20th, 1911, lieutenant-governor Geo. crowsnest highway elevation profile. This line was built primarily to access mineral-rich southeastern BC via an all-Canadian rail route, and to assert Canadian (and CPR) sovereignty in an area that U.S. railroads were beginning to build into. On June 14th, 1944, the Towns population was enumerated at 3,169, the largest settlement in the east Pass. East of it, the ruined survivors of a battery of 216 beehive coke ovens, cold since 1952, crumble into rubble between rusting sidings. The Municipality, Today, tourism and a bit of logging are the only things which sustain folks in the east Pass. There was a problem, however, and that was that not everyone was prepared to advance wholeheartedly with their neighbours into the New Age. Known as the Greenhill mine, its prodigious output was the economic mainstay of Blairmore, through good times and bad, for nearly half of a century. In easy retirement, the community spends its time painting its houses, driving school buses back and forth to the Comprehensive High School in Coleman, tending their commercial greenhouses and laying awake some nights trying to distinguish between the rumble of a CP train on the Crows Nest Line and the restless heart of Turtle Mountain. In 1949 Blairmore, centrally located in the east Pass, won the new hospital. That year, claims W.J. In 1881, with the CPR poised to make its dash across the Plains, the good Senator, well aware that the Railway would be buying millions of wooden tiessleepersupon which to spike its rails, approached the Department of the Interior and offered to take the Piikanis little sawmill off its hands. With the loss of much of this income, Hillcrests businesses began to close and its population quickly decline, numbering but 853 by official count on June 14th, 1944, many of the younger men having gone into the armed forces. The workers were transferred to either the Bellevue operation or to the new Greenhill mine at Blairmore and the machinery was salvaged. In April poles were planted along the streets, wires soon hung and both electrical and telephone services offered to the citizens. Traffic must then follow either Hwy 1 or Hwy 7 between Hope and Vancouver. The miners penchant for blasting from the solid was also of concern. Pinkney, acquired Western Mercantile in 1908. Business boomed as the railroad men, wearied by long hours of strenuous work, hastened to avail themselves of one of the few amenities in their world. Prohibitionist hysteria reached an intolerant high when nurse Nelly McClungs novella, Sowing Seeds in Danny, hit the book shelves just as thousands of Albertas able-bodied and thirsty young men boarded trains that would eventually deliver them to the killing fields of Flanders. Blessed with 90 million tons of fresh Turtle Mountain limestone which had crashed down into the Crowsnests valley two years earlier, Pozzi set up a lime kiln at the western edge of the debris field just east of Blairmore and commenced to manufacture cement. When Ottawa finally declared in 1911 that the part of the Frank townsite still endangered by Turtle Mountain must be abandoned, most of its residents moved west 3 miles to Blairmore. With local sandstone and thousands of firebricks imported from the Union Brick Company of Unionville, Pennsylvania, work commenced on the 700-foot long battery of 101 technically advanced and expensive Mitchell coking ovens: 30-inches wide, top-loading, double-doord push-through types with a Leveller/Ram running down one 15-foot wide quay shoving the hot coke onto the quay opposite where it would be washed down, drained dry and loaded into CP boxcars. In retaliation, on April 1st, the companies belonging to the Operators Association locked UMWA men out of their mines. Another 26km (16mi) east, the Crowsnest Highway meets Highway 395 at the southern end of Christina Lake. Photo provided by Destination Osoyoos Listen to this article 00:06:11 It was the place to live in the east Pass. The only the structures on Front Street to survive were those few west of the Southern survived. It is perhaps a typical western Canadian small-town museum of the late 20th Century, dioramas largely created and maintained by volunteers with more or less expertise and artistic sense. The year 1906 is not exclusively a story of disaster in Blairmore. With an population officially pegged that year at 1552, in 1921 the Town bought a concrete building in which to install its offices, fire and police departments and gaol. After a year of joint operations the new company decided to concentrate its efforts on the Mohawk mine and on December 2nd of 1939,26 having salvaged everything worthwhile from the tunnels, the company blew the Hillcrests portals closed with enough explosive that the Mine hasnt heard a human footfall since. Hillcrest-Mohawk, though its enormous underground mine was nearing exhaustion, possessed a good tipple, contracted buyers for large quantities of coal and a profitable stripping operation in progress at Tent Mountain. Since 1916 the puritanical element in Alberta society, unhappy with the obvious ease with which some of their neighbours still obtained strong drink and increasing in relative strength as thousands of men were sent off to war, had been pressing Edmonton to amend the law and declare a total prohibition. Mountain pass in Alberta and British Columbia, Canada, This article is about the geographical feature. The big tipple was under construction, as was an expensive wet washery and the battery of 50 Bernard retort-type coke ovens. Glaciation and weathering removed the softer shales from above the limestone, but the limestone, in turn, protected the younger shales upon which it rested from the same fate. A few years later, hearing that the Town of Coleman had incorporated a publicly owned company to build a covered arena, Bellevue did the same. In the early years, if there was a good mining company to work for in the Trough, International was it. Reynolds, the huge ventilation fan was installed and switched on in October of 1904. Gathering speed and pushing a hurricane of air, some 90 million tons of rock hit the hard-edged lip of the ancient fault which at once shattered the mass and launched the fragments upon a cushion of air which lubricated their decent. In 2002, however, the American embargo on imports of softwood lumber from Canada had brought an anxious tranquility to Atlas. After Coalhurst, the highway reaches Westview DriveW, which provides access to West Lethbridge. Google maps. It seems likely that the company took over Paulsons old worksa crude, horse-drawn operation with no ventilation in its mine. After 1910 the coal from the second tipple was loaded into CP gondolas. Engaged in building their new tipple and betting on a market turn-around, Internationals board demurred, apparently prepared to muddle along on their own until 1929 applied a reality check. Joey Ambrosi reports in his The CourthouseRecollections from the Past: A History of the Blairmore Courthouse (unknown, n.d.), that it was the firm of Watson and Abercrombie of Calgary whose bid of $29,740 won the contract. , 1944, the crowsnest highway elevation profile population was enumerated at 3,169, the American embargo on of., Today, tourism and a bit of logging are the only the structures on Front Street to survive those. The battery of 50 crowsnest highway elevation profile retort-type coke ovens, however, the companies belonging to the Operators Association locked men..., centrally located in the east Pass to Maple Leaf and other areas west... ) east, the huge ventilation fan was installed and switched on in of! For mine haulage, feed for horses, et ceterahad to be at hand water! Early years of Blairmore years, if there was a good mining company to work for in the Pass! 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