Qualla: Cassidy, British Columbia

Cassidy, British Columbia: Introduction

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.

Cassidy, British Columbia: Thomas Cassidy's Milk Run

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 owners...

Cassidy, British Columbia: The Douglas Seam

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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. Th...

Cassidy, British Columbia: A Model Town, Briefly

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 m...

Cassidy, British Columbia: The Pub That Played Alaska

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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. Cust...

Cassidy, British Columbia: What Grew Back

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 — whe...