Here is the latest newsletter installment of an image and quote from the museum’s award-winning book Watershed Moments – A Pictorial History of Courtenay and District.
Photo credit: Coke ovens at Union Bay, ca. 1905. CDM 979.3.31
Photo caption: “In 1895, James Dunsmuir’s Union Coal Company built two rows of fifty ovens into an embankment on a foundation of limestone quarried on Denman Island. Workers built the ovens, which were eleven feet in diameter, with angled brick imported from Scotland. Japanese labourers and several Scottish bricklayers brought over specially for the project did much of the work with teams of horses.” Page 55.
