It was never determined exactly what caused the Hillcrest mine to blow-up on June 19th, 1914. In 1935 the principals in Hillcrest Collieries began talking about amalgamation with the owners of the Mohawk Bituminous Mines across the Crowsnest River at Bellevue. All, of course, were dependent to some extent on the Mine. An aspect of Franks history that is often over-looked amid the rubble of its famous Slide is that it was, reputedly, the first town in the Pass to raise a miners co-operative store. The owners called in the police to maintain order and heads were cracked all round. 2 contained around 7% ash; excellent for steaming and coking purposes. Discouraged, FCC closed the mine for good. To compensate for the lost time, miners felt that the price paid per ton ought to increase. Some of these fractures were radically acute and their failure resulted in the crustal strata on the west side of the fault being thrust up upon their eastern neighbours. Just as production commenced, Turtle Mountain smashed down into the Crowsnests valley, wiping out the lower two miles of the F&GMs trackage and its junction with the CNL, then being re-aligned by the firm of Poupoure and McVeigh. Though there were a thousand things over which bosses and workers could disagree, money, of course, topped the list. The Tent Mountain property came on-stream around 1946 and its output was trucked to the H-MC tipple at Bellevue for cleaning, sorting and shipping. This seemingly sensible idea was rejected on the argument that the lamp didnt cast nearly the same amount of light as an open flame, and therefore made working in the absolute pitch-black darkness of a coal mine even more dangerous. At the same time, the mine had to be developed. Talk, however, is cheap, and no agreement could be reached before Labours big strike of 1911 scuttled the plans. Here and there on the heights surrounding, the charred remains of the trees immolated in the wildfires of 2004 remind the human inhabitants of this valley just how vulnerable is the forest organism. The coal compressed within Hillcrests three seams proved to be ideal for use in locomotives; it was low in ash content and therefore relatively free of clinkers when burned. This is Aalto. H.S. As the tax base grew the Village began to chafe under its corporate restrictions. Splashing more red ink into its ledgers, the company stubbornly stuck to its plan and finished the last of its coking ovens. You either love it or hate it. The year 1906 is not exclusively a story of disaster in Blairmore. Needing to resume production, the mine owners quickly exploited these ethnic divisions and enticed the poorer and more desperate men back into the mines. The proviso was that no liquor could be sold on any property for 15 years from the date of purchaseColeman was to be a family town. Although the Emperor was Not on the train, legend requires raconteurs to relate that the robbers were hoodwinked out of really big prizes by both Pic and a local utility manager who each alertly secreted their money-rolls in seat cushions. Come Labour Day everyone, workers and owners, had had enough. In 1959, citizens rehabilitated the Hillcrest Cemetery which had become a wild forest glade, and today a dignified cairn has replaced the humble wooden head markers that were originally used to record the names of the dead. These drifts were the floors of the galleries which would then be opened up above for 250 feet. Zephyrus, the west wind, prevails in the Trough ninety-nine days out of a hundred and sweeps this end of town clean. Coming in from the west, just as it turns into 20th Avenue, the Highway crosses the gulch of McGillivray Creek on a fill. These were banged into trains in the company yards and chuffed two miles on Hillcrest C&C rails across a long, curving trestle over the Crowsnest River to CP sidings at the Junction on the CNL. Burnett and Nora Mitchell, post master and mistress. According to John Faley in his Shaping Spokane: Jay P. Graves and His Times, in 1901 a Spokane-based businessman, E.J. 18 in The Ordinances of the North-West Territories passed in the first session of the Second Legislative Assembly as printed by R.B. and Jas. 17. Tripp as Overseer. The mine had survived the explosion in a salvageable condition, and, with War gnashing his teeth in Europe and military-industrial complex crying for coal, the company chose to rebuild. 3 bumps over the River. Meanwhile, at McGillivray, people worked. Dust and smoke stained the air and the defile resonated with the discordant music of industry. Montalbetti, possibly financially drained by the proceedings, sold his claim to one Malcolm McKenzie who had the wherewithal to press the fight. Come the end of 1902 the two-storey Frank School had been completed. Downstream, northward, is the bridge carrying a remnant of the old highway on up a kilometre or so to Island Lake Campground. Electricity came from Internationals steam-powered generator and was sold by the companys Coleman Light and Water Company, Limited, subsidiary. An image captured by Blairmore photographer Thomas Gushul in 1918 shows the buildings pretty well still intact. Seven Sisters Panorama. With the end of mining and the flight of its population, Lille, of course, began to disappear. Though production in the Trough as a whole peaked in 1913, the famous market downturn that began around Thanksgiving that year dragged the industry from the heights that it would never scale again. Another 26km (16mi) east, the Crowsnest Highway meets Highway 395 at the southern end of Christina Lake. A suitable site having been located on the now-named Gladstone Creek, near its confluence with the Castle River south of present-day Cowley, all men and materials had to be transported by bull teams over the bald prairie from Benton. Is it still so dimly lighted that one has to squint at the details and frown over the inscriptions, and emerge into dazzling daylight hours later when your vision seems irreparably damaged and you have digested a wonderful feast of locally-flavoured history. Tis a travellers delight, and to that Delight this site is dedicated. The Journal itself was founded in 1921, ten years after the Coleman Miner was suppressed by the authorities for radically labour points of view. Crowsnest Pass, AB Crowsnest Pass: Hwy 3: 1.9km East of - BC Border . The fact is that for ons the Turtle had waited for an excuse to shed some weight. Smart stepped into the Territorial governments bailiwick by ordering the Inspector of Mines, William Pearce, to conscript a squad of Mounties in Calgary, requisition a train to get to Frank and take charge. Never the best maintained abodes, they, and the lack of a wash-house at the mine works, kept the company and its supposedly placid Euro-workers in tooth gnashing disagreement for years. Or a heart-wrenchingly ominous rumbling from deep underground could signal the end of lives and the closure of a mine forever. Unhappily for the community of Mountain Mill, however, the CNL by-passed it by some 10 kilometres, and come the end of the Nineteenth Century, the saws had run through economically available timber. A cruise up four block-long 8th Avenue will take the visitor past every notable edifice in town save the 1913 Carpenters Gothic United Church on 7th, a block west. The suggestion made sense: the companies were working the same seams, were in close proximity to each other, and were both suffering drastically reduced sales. Until dawn on April 29th, 1903, this area was the vibrant central business district of the community of Frank. There was no avenue of appeal: the weight of Law was always on the side of the owners of capital and the means of production, and to squeeze every last penny of profit from a mine, Owners seldom hesitated to use the Law to beat upstart workers into the realization that they could expect few concessions. The Village of Blairmore, Sometime during the summer of 1873, while Michael Phillipps and John Collins were exploring their way eastward through the Crowsnest Pass, William Samuel Lee was prospecting his way westward up the Crowsnest River. P1180457 Peak of Crowsnest Mountain, Alberta. At its feet what people at the time called The Oldman River, middle fork, glistened. The news surprised no-one. Included in Franks duties was the switching of coal gondolas between the CNL and the Frank and Grassy Mountain Railway (F&GM) which twisted and trestled its way some seven miles northward up Gold Creek, climbing 783 feet from Frank to Lille. Some 200 metres away on the travellers right at about 2 oclock, is a siding which was first laid in 1909 to facilitate the loading of clay. McEachern School was opened in September of 1962, when it became the communitys Maple View Hall. At the final tally, Hillcrest Collieries had employed around 107 miners at $5.40 per day guaranteed, and around 100 other workers whose scales ranged from $4.45 for a labourer to $5.10 for a timber packer. When the count that day revealed that 61% of the all male electoratewomen were not to get the vote in the province until April 19th, 1916,were in favour of absolute abstinence, Siftons government declared that on July 1st of the next year, 1916, Alberta would curtail the casual availability of liquor, allowing its use for only sacred, medicinal and scientific reasons. School classes were convened for the few children, Hill himself raised a hotel, and the MacLean Trading Company24 opened its doors. Though it had lost much of its traditional market to petroleum, Coleman Collieries struggled on hand in hand with Local 2633 of the United Mine Workers of America, District 18. That profit must have looked like big money to Hills certified miners who at the time earned a maximum of 55 per 2,240-pound long ton, sixteen of which, sang Tennessee Ernie Ford so many years ago, a good man could load in a day. Informed that his son had been shot, the Emperor picked up Filumena Florence Lassandro, the 22-year old wife of a business partner, Carlo Lassandro, and booted it up to Coleman to confront Lawson. Premier Listings for Crowsnest Highway 3 The Crowsnest Highway (Highway 3) runs from Hope at the east end of the Fraser Valley all the way east to the British Columbia-Alberta border in the Rockies. Police Flats are so called because the Crows Nest Detachment of the North-West Mounted Police built a temporary post here in 1881 to discourage rustling and horse-thieving through the Pass. Egbert, P.A. Three-quarters of a million dollars in hand, Remey and Fleutot returned in the spring of 1902 to rename what had previously been known as French Camp for Lille, the hometown of their chief backers, Le Societ Anonym du Chemin de Fer Noullier du Canada. Until October 1st, 1917, B.C. Though relief trains of basic necessities sent by supporters buoyed the Workers struggle, their situation continued to deteriorate. Some of the backers got cold feet and on June 7th, 1921, Bellevue Collieries liquidated itself, its assets immediately being transferred to Mohawk Bituminous Collieries which had been organized specifically to receive them by some of Bellevue Collieries original principals. For $1400 the School was greatly expanded with four additional rooms in 1919. When WCC shut down its Lille mines in 1912-13, it transferred many of its workers to Bellevue and the community boomed anew. After more months of halting negotiations over wages, hours of work, safety, child labour and housing, on March 15th, 1911, the UMWA called its members out of the Crowsnest Pass mines, first in B.C., then in Alberta. Passing the much-photographed antique fire hydrant, one of the few relics of the Old Town to survive, one bears left on the narrow paved lane of Old Frank Road152nd Streetwhich, generally following the loop of the River, was bent through the boulders in 1917 to replace the stage road which had picked its way around the northern fringe of the Slide since 1903. Due to the penury it suffered during the Depression, the CPR lagged behind its American contemporaries. Carrying their workplace politics into the civic realm, residents of the east pass soon elected radicals to local policy committees and boards, confronting the big-business policies of they saw as a corrupt and entrenched ruling class. That year and the next, 1949, some new machinery was purchased, including a Gardner six cylinder, 100 horse-power Huwood-Hudswell 0-6-0 locomotive to replace Ten Ton Toots hauling trains of mine cars through the two mile-long rock tunnel between the York Creek coal dump to the tipple. Come the late 30s, with the majority of its shareholders and markets sequestered behind Hitlers Atlantic Wall, WCC had to sell into the over-supplied North American market. delegation proposed that Western workers ally themselves with the One Big Union and, with the revolution in Russia seeming to prove that Workers could effect change in their own lives, many embraced the suggestion. This, too, awaited only the feeblest of excuses to explode. In 1902 the dam and much of Mountain Mill was washed away in the spring floods,11 but by then McLarens mill-saws were howling out building planks and mine props by the thousands of board feet in Blairmore. This time, however, despite the heroic efforts of mine rescue teams sped to the scene by the CPR from as far away as Fernie, B.C., 30 died, either killed out-right or suffocating in after-damp. 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