In March 1936, the town of Cassidy was sold in pieces. What the auctioneer offered that month was the wreckage of something that had been genuinely impressive: a purpose-built company town with paved streets, tree-lined boulevards, a department store, a theatre, and a concrete dormitory where single miners had steam heat and hot running water in 1919 — amenities that plenty of Canadian cities could not promise. The mine had closed four years earlier. The families had already walked away from their houses. Buyers hauled off what could be hauled, and by 1951 a caretaker and a few skeletal concrete foundations were all that stood on the hundred acres. Today the site is a stretch of highway south of Nanaimo where most drivers do not slow down.
The name arrived long before the coal. Thomas Cassidy was farming in the Oyster district by the 1870s, on ground people simply called Tom Cassidy's, and in 1884 his original sixty-acre preemption was converted into a Crown grant — the legal step that turned occupation into ownership. That same decade, crews were pushing rail line through the bush near the Nanaimo River, and Cassidy sold them milk and vegetables. It is a modest detail that says a great deal about how this coast was actually built: not only by the engineers and the capital, but by the farmer who could reliably get food to a camp of hungry men. His son, Thomas William Cassidy, sold 522 acres to the Department of National Defence in 1942 for a Royal Canadian Air Force glider pilot training facility. That land is now Nanaimo Airport.
In 1918 the Granby Consolidated Mining, Smelting and Power Company began working the Douglas coal seam beneath Cassidy, and almost immediately discovered the problem that would define the operation: a loose sandy overburden that made the workings unstable and the digging slow. They mined it anyway. At the peak, in 1921 and 1922, four hundred and fifty men went underground on each shift. By 1928 the mine employed five hundred people, with two hundred working each eight-hour shift to bring up a thousand tons a day. Then it stopped. The Granby mine ceased operation in 1932 for four reasons at once — the seam was played out, oil was taking the market, the workings had become dangerous, and the Depression had arrived. Seven different mines worked this ground between 1917 and 1953, drawing out more than 2.5 million tonnes of coal before the district gave up on it entirely.
Granby built Cassidy in 1919 as a showpiece. Nineteen houses in a range of sizes went up first, all connected to power, water, and sewer, with plans drawn for fifty more. The streets were paved and lined with trees, with grass verges between the sidewalk and the road. Unmarried miners lived in a concrete dormitory of seventy-six rooms, each with electric light, hot and cold water, and steam heat; the mess house was equally modern. There was a recreation ground for sport, and a theatre. None of this was charity — a company that wanted experienced miners in an isolated place had to offer something better than a bunk and a stove. But it worked, and for thirteen years families raised children in a small, well-made town. When the mine closed in 1932, they had nowhere to take the houses and no reason to stay in them.
One building outlived the town. Put up in 1914 as a bunkhouse for Dunsmuir's coal surveyors and engineers, it became the community's recreation centre and, in 1925, got a liquor licence. The paving of the Island Highway in 1953 sent traffic past its door and business boomed. Custom eventually thinned, and in 1983 the place was reborn as a neighbourhood pub. Its strangest hour came in 2011, when a film crew dressed it as an Alaskan bar for the Superman picture Man of Steel — a hundred-year-old Vancouver Island bunkhouse standing in for the far north. The pub closed around 2014. It won a reprieve from demolition, and then in 2016 fire gutted the empty building at the south corner of Beck Road.
Logging brought people back through the 1940s and 1950s, and the Cassidy Drive-In ran from 1954 until 1992. The railway held on longer than the coal: a station opened at Cassidy in 1919, and it was still a flag stop — a place where the train halted only if someone signalled — when Via Rail's Vancouver Island service ended in 2011. In its last years, not even a signpost marked the spot. What has grown instead is the airport. The Nanaimo-Collishaw Air Terminal, named in 1999 for the First World War flying ace Raymond Collishaw, who was born in Nanaimo, now anchors the community, and Cassidy has settled into life as a bedroom district for the city fourteen kilometres north. Businesses line the highway. Campgrounds and a golf course sit along Haslam Creek. It is a quiet place built on top of a loud one.
Cassidy lies at 49.0575 degrees north, 123.8780 degrees west, on the east coast of southern Vancouver Island, 14 km south of Nanaimo. The community sits directly alongside Nanaimo Airport (CYCD), field elevation 92 feet, with a single 6,602-foot asphalt runway — the airport is the navigational landmark here, unmistakable from the air as a bright strip set in second-growth timber. Best viewing altitude is 2,000 to 3,000 feet AGL on a north-south track following the Island Highway (BC 19) and the parallel Island Rail Corridor. Haslam Creek threads west of the highway; the Strait of Georgia and the Gulf Islands open to the east. Nearby airports: Nanaimo Airport (CYCD) on site, Victoria International (CYYJ) about 90 km south, Comox Valley/CFB Comox (CYQQ) to the north, and Vancouver International (CYVR) across the strait. Morning fog is common in the Nanaimo River valley in autumn; afternoon inflow winds off the Strait of Georgia are typical in summer.