What was barkerville like at its peak
Farming followed the mining activity in the town and cattle were driven up the Okanagan valley to provide meat for the residents of Barkerville. Large cattle ranches were founded in the area surrounding the town.
Barkerville boasted a large Chinese community who were important to the economy of the town. The Kwong Lee Company was a general store selling groceries, clothing and other items. They also built dormitories for transient miners and a nursing home for the elderly.
A great fire ripped through the town on 16 September , destroying many of the wooden buildings. Life went on in Barkerville and ninety buildings were rebuilt in six weeks. The schoolhouse reopened in , however by the turn of the century, the gold rush had ended and people began to leave.
There was a brief revival in the s when the price of gold went up during the Great Depression but that was short lived. Barkerville soon became a ghost town with just a very small population remaining. This is what it looked like in the s.
The government of British Columbia made the decision to buy out the remaining residents in They restored the town to look as it had been in its heyday.
It is now operated as a tourist attraction called the Barkerville Historic Town and Park. The Gold Rush Trail hiking route is also popular among tourists. The cemetery in Barkerville remains as it was.
Some of the residents that left in were moved to New Barkerville, a purpose-built village on the peak of the Reduction Road Hill, in the forest one kilometre from Barkerville. Today, some of those homes accommodate tourists who come to the area to visit the town they abandoned. A wagon in Barkerville in the mid s. April O'Reilly June 3, at am.
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Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. It's still a quarter-mile-long gaggle of weather-worn, wooden buildings and springy boardwalks strung along a couple of unpaved streets. It looks like an Old West movie set - but without the gaudy commercialism that sometimes clutters revived ghost towns.
Gold-panning and stagecoach rides recall the gold-rush days, and interpreters in period dress roam the main street, like actors out for a stroll between shows.
Vintage displays recreate the establishments of Mrs. The Lung Duck Tong restaurant reminds visitors that a third of Barkerville's population in the s was Chinese, mostly migrants from the gold fields of California. Many of the Chinese residents prospered here. Historians report that Chinese prospectors painstakingly reworked Barkerville's discarded mine tailings, often finding more gold than the white miners who had first crack at the claims.
Chinese labor also helped to build the mile Cariboo Wagon Road, hacked through the rocky Fraser River Canyon in Barkerville boasted a population of 10, in its heyday. But like most mining towns, it faded after the best claims were worked. Only memories and a few rickety buildings remained by , when British Columbia celebrated its th birthday.
Because of Barkerville's key place in the province's history, the B. Restoration has been under way ever since. At least 40 buildings in town are originals - if you count from September , when a fast-moving fire wiped out most of Barkerville. Legend has it that the fire was caused by an amorous miner who tried to steal a kiss from a dance-hall girl.
A stove pipe was toppled in the tussle, igniting the wall of her tent, rather than her heart. Saviour's Anglican Church, completed just after the fire, is a Barkerville treasure. Built of local pine that has been burnished to a golden brown by the years, the church stands like a frontier cathedral at the head of Main Street.
Stories of heartbreak were as abundant as nuggets in old Barkerville, and St. Saviour's chronicles tell of one sad chapter. The Rev. James Reynard, from England, built the church almost single-handedly.
But just five years after St. Saviour's was consecrated, Reynard was dead, at age 45 - worn out by ridicule from the miners, cruel Cariboo winters and lack of money. Music-hall entertainment has been a tradition here since the s, when residents formed the Cariboo Amateur Dramatic Association.