They soon realized that they would not exit the mine the way that they had come in a few hours earlier, and after investigating the air shafts and finding them, too, blocked, resolved to dig themselves upward through the seam to the Mountains surface. Not far beyond the Courthouse and N.I.T.s Mini-Railway Heritage Park, 20th hooks hard left, crosses the River on a flat-decked 1983 span and rejoins the Crowsnest Highway to run on down three kilometres or so to tragic Frank. Hamilton contacted Drewry and on November 1st of that year, 1906, began buying the coal rights to some 12,350 acres. Making a big show of complying with the officers search warrant, Pic was somehow able to warn his son who sped away back toward B.C. By the time that its postal bureau opened on August 1, 1901, the 300 or so residents of the little hamlet of Frank could send their kids to schoollikely at someones cabin,buy necessities in a few tent stores down on Dominion Avenue, frequent a saloon or two, and keep track of all the local doings courtesy the Frank Sentinel. Porter of Pittsburgh and retired from service with International Coal and Coke in 1954, it has a slot lanced into the top of the tank: Ten Ton Toots, the Lions Club sign says, Worlds Biggest Piggybank During the dozen or so millennia since, the River has scoured its bed deep into the gravel, leaving terraces above the stream upon which the prudent have built their houses and highways. Gebo and H.L. Sandwiched between strata of sedimentaries, layers of crumbling coal dip away to the east, staining the ditch water amber. As the crow flies she counts close on 777 kilometres between Hope, British Columbia, and Medicine Hat, Alberta. The three-storey Maple Leaf Hotel was up by the end of that year and was soon joined by Allazettas General Store and Mrs. Rudds store. During the process of mining, it crumbled readily, filling the works with suspended dust which, like any organic dust, needed only to reach a critical concentration point in the right mixture of air to detonate with the slightest of sparks. Operations in the Mohawk ceased on March 14th, 1952. Originally these ovens were slated to built at Frank, but that the Slide buried the chosen site, and when the bricks arrived in 1903, they were hauled up to Lille where E. Morino built the batterys foundations set into a wharf 92 metres long by perhaps 50m wide. It was the first of these routes to reopen. At $1.00 par value MCCs shares immediately attracted enough mainly Minneapolis-area buyers so that by the summer of 1910 the company had been able to raise a tipple over the CNL tracks for sorting, cleaning and loading coal, and was hauling it thereto from the mines mouth two miles away on a miniature electric railway. Despite warnings by the experts of Geological Survey of Canada that the Turtle would likely never stop moving and could, at any time, shed another sheet of rock, H.L. Replacing an entire workforce was a different matter. Brock of the Geological Survey of Canada tabled their report. In 1917, reports Florence E. Kerr in her essay, The Sanatorium in Crowsnest and its people, the resort was purchased by the government of Canada as a convalescence home for soldiers whose lungs were filling with tubercles. Noted is D.A. The Towns merchants, led by the Blairmore Trading Company, Mar Ons Blairmore Cash Trading Company and, post-1912 when it moved down from Lille, F.M. With eighty employees bussed out daily from Bellevue, Adanac was trucking 1,000 tons a day for cleaning and sorting at the Bellevue tipple by 1947. Several Members of Parliament, E.M. Hill,23 and A.J. Cameron, mayor. Apprised of the project, the surviving brothers Leitch27 expressed interest and in 1907 they added Anguss properties to those of Hamilton and together the three entrepreneurs incorporated Leitch Collieries, Limited. In the winter, when the water was low in the Crowsnest, McLarens mill hands hied themselves to the woods to cut the next summers supply of logs and drive them en masse to the mill in an exciting and wildly dangerous adventure in the spring. Crowsnest Pass is 1358m high. A concern affected by the Great War was the San. Just after the turn of the Nineteenth Century, their rather rustic facilities inundated with more clientele than they wanted to spend time serving, the successors to W.S. In hopes of a recovery, the company maintained the Greenhill until 1963 when it allowed the depths to flood. Even the Prez is utilitarian in dcor, one of its window panes vibrating excitedly as a rare freight train drags its weight through the vacant yards a block south. Courteously, truckers would squeeze their rigs over to the right as far as possible to let faster traffic pass. The station was salvaged, according to C.W. The post-war recession, however, weakened demand and the company began paring back its workforce in 1921, the very year that six new rooms were added to the Hillcrest School. As CPs devoted coal suppliers, International and MCC faced a bleak future. One of mayor William Knight and the councils first acts was to declare May Day a civic holiday, and rename Victoria Avenue Tim Buck Boulevard for the secretary of the Communist Party of Canada / Labour Progressive Party. At the moment of the slide, C-AC&Cs Main adit had been punched 5500 feet into its seam of coal. The old mine is the West Canadian Collieries adit, of which the Crowsnest Pass Ecomuseum Trust has reopened some 400 metres. Observed by an unsympathetic eye chilled by a cold-hearted little mountain drizzle, the town looks desperately dismal and on its last legs. and Blairmores first building raised exclusively for religious purposes; Central Baptist Church, now Blairmore United, dedicated on July 25th, 1909, and topped with a spire made by blacksmith J.W. crowsnest highway elevation profile. ), 1900. The CPR sought and received construction funding from the federal government, partially in exchange for a freight subsidy on prairie farm exports and equipment imports which came to be called the "Crow's Nest Pass Agreement". Having finally arrived at the site of Lille, a casual visitor would be hard pressed to imagine the busy village which flourished there for a few years in the newness of the Twentieth Century. Ten were kept in production for awhile to supply specialty foundry orders, but on February 29th of 1952 Harold Nelson pulled the last loads from the final five ovens still in use and sealed them closed. Campbell remained president, with J.A. There were, mentions Dr. B.R. Porter compressed air-powered thermos bottle locomotives running on 28-pound rail gauged to 36 inches. Power tools were acquired, and pumps to keep the Mine dry as workers began digging down below the water table. Finding it blocked, they sent a crew back to collect some tools and attacked the blockage, dreading the after damp that they felt sure would soon reach its gaseous fingers out of the depths of the mine to silently strangle them. Arkoff, Ausby Auloff and Tom Bassoff, boarded the day coach with malice aforethought. Egbert, J.B. Sutherland, and R.S. Close to the Boundary, the Crowsnest Pass region was notorious for clandestine activity. Companies facing mounting loses had no sympathy for their workers plight. The water system, owned by International and still not extended into West Coleman, suffered severe damage to its intake on Nez Perc Creek. Pozzi of Blairmore to raise the structure. Reverend Lang built a church in 1910, the Pisony family opened their butcher shop, a hall was raised and Passburg School District No. In the Coleman museum and in the occasional pamphlet, one sees a reproduction of the blueprint of the Hillcrest Mine. That year local sports formed the Pass Turf Association to organize horse races, the premier event becoming the annual the running of the Pass Plate, and in October the Union Bank of Canada expressed its faith in the Villages future by opening a branch office. The washery replaced the inefficient dry picking table operation that MCC had been using since 1909. No powered tools were needed to extract the coal, and horses were quite able to handle the underground haulage chores. Few identifiable bodies were ever recovered, most of the dead being buried in their beds under tons of erstwhile sea floor shining brightly in the moonlight. 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. Eschewing local labour, Remey and Fleutot began importing squads of first French and then Belgian miners and surface workers. Reflecting the goals enshrined in the companys name, an experimental battery of six beehive coke ovens was built at the foot of the Mountain, the first of 240 that Hank Frank had announced were to diversify C-AC&Cs offerings. By what ever route he enters, the visitor comes quickly into Bellevues central business district; the settlement just isnt that big, and neither is the CBD: little more than a one block stretch of 213th, formerly Front, Street. Camping Most of the land surrounding the Crowsnest pass objectives is leased to ranchers and timber companies. Farmer, but he was unable to turn the enterprise around and it faded into retirement in the late 30s. With a swimming pool, a lunch counter and a dance floor set on stacks of old tyres, the Playgrounds opened that July 5th. At the same time, the mine had to be developed. The price tag for these improvements was a daunting $100,000, but Hill must have been satisfied with his investment when production in 1908 quadrupled 1906s output. Police waggoneers improved the track out from Fort Macleod, making such a road of it that T. Clarke, the diarist in the group of four constables who travelled from the Fort to Crowsnest Lake by democrat buggy just to fish in August of 1896, described the trip as comfortable. By 1910 the track had been well enough beaten that a cyclist could probably have made it from Lethbridge to Creston, and by 1912 was carrying enough traffic to be called a trunk road, at least from Lethbridge to Fernie. To meet demands International had begun preparing an open-pit mine on the southern end of its property on York Creek, while MCC investigated the possibility of applying the technique to the northern end of its measures in Vicary Creeks valley, some 20 miles north of Coleman. A main entry and a counter entry, like French colonial boulevards chopped through the native street pattern of the kasbah, lance into the mountain. Frank is famous for two things. Over the decades, however, mine by mine, concessions were won, the most fundamental being the right of workers to organize and use the threat of withholding their labour as an ace in the hole when bargaining for the improvement of their lot. 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