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Page last updated December 22, 2002
The view of East Bay, Beaver Cove from the Telegraph Cove Road
The collection of floathouses and cabins on stilts at Beaver Cove on Johnstone Strait is an authentic, rather grungy resource community, certainly compared with nearby Telegraph Cove, which has been restored into a very upscale tourist resort (with pay parking for drop-bys, even!) catering to fishermen and whale-watchers. In this era of corporate logging and prefabricated, manufactured homes, where paved roads extend into almost every nook and cranny of Vancouver Island, most logging and fishing communities have lost their historic look. The buildings here apparently date from the 1920s through the 1970s--built primarily of wood, as opposed to vinyl or aluminum, they have weathered into an aesthetically pleasing ensemble (especially when seen from a distance).
The Beaver Cove Lumber and Pulp Company built the first settlement near here in 1917. An American investor named James White invested about a million dollars in wharves, a pulp mill, shingle mill and sawmill, and put in a railway to bring logs down from the hinterland. The community consisted of a hotel, bunkhouses and cookhouses for single men and detached houses for the foremen, a general store and a small, separate Chinatown. The pulp mill was poorly designed, however, and the company soon went broke and closed in 1920. Five years later, the lumber company Wood and English established a new community nearby at Englewood. During the Twenties and Thirties, Englewood and Beaver Cove operated as typical outports, looking to the long-established community at Alert Bay, and floating "department stores" such as the converted yacht Jolly Jumbo, for provisions. There was regular steamer service and a farm a mile away, owned by Capt. Corney, which supplied cream and milk. During the 1930s about 30 families lived in the area. Beaver Cove apparently hosted a monthly dance, using an Indian orchestra from Alert Bay, that attracted revellers from communities including Sointula and Telegraph Cove. (By the way, the cove is named for the legendary Hudson's Bay Company steam paddlewheeler Beaver.)
Three years after its incorporation in 1938, Canadian Forest Products bought the property and in the early 1950s began construction on the railway that connects the Nimpkish Lake area with the coast. Crown Zellerbach, which had bought Beaver Cove from Canadian Forest Products in 1946, moved the settlement up the hill to Kokish and cleared the waterfront at the end of the rail line to create the flat log-sorting area visible today to anyone coming in by road.(Source: Insight Consultants. North Island Heritage Inventory and Evaluation. 1984). There is a good essay on railway logging at http://www.knowbc.com/iebc/book/R/raillog.ASP , and the Nimpkish line is significant due to Locomotive 113, a 135-ton monster that hauled logs as late as 1971, making it probably the last working logging locomotive in North America.
Telegraph Cove was well-named, as it began its life in 1912 as the island terminus of the telegraph line, but expanded with a box-making plant and a small saltery. Until 1942, there was a Japanese community at Englewood, and one of the surviving Telegraph Cove cabins belonged to a Japanese fisherman named Ogawa. One of the men at Telegraph Cove, Charlie Nakamura, presciently left the coast shortly before the war was declared and reestablished himself near Salmon Arm, where he opened a tie mill; his contacts with the Nagatas and Konishis led them from Mayne Island to the Shuswap during the war (Source: interview with Fiko Konishi, 2002).
