Twenty years ago the Sechelt Community Archives opened its doors to the public, and one of the first queries was regarding the naming of Holy Joe Rock at Selma Park. Thanks to the late Helen Dawe, who collected Sunshine Coast documents, photographs, maps and artifacts, the question was answered. Local donors and organizations have added to the original Dawe records and if they are to be preserved and made available to the public, a larger repository is required.
Apart from arranging and cataloguing these records, many hours have been spent doing research for hundreds of individuals from all over the world. So many fascinating true stories can be found in the archives, such as the interesting tale of Capt. Thomas Patrick O’Kelly.
He had an adventurous life in Canada: emigrating from Ireland in his early teens to a brother-in-law in Banff, farming near Edmonton and joining the Hudson’s Bay Company where he had charge of the Athabasca-Peace transports and inspector of posts and accounts.
He came to Sechelt in 1911 to work for Herbert Whitaker, run the post office and serve as a school trustee, until 1915 when he enlisted in the army. He served with the 102nd North British Columbia Regiment and was invalided home after Passchendaele.
A year after the war ended, he went with the Canadian Expeditionary Force (Siberia) to northern Russia to support the White Russian forces by organizing machine gun patrols with sleighs and 232 sleigh dogs. This venture lasted barely one year and he returned to the Hudson’s Bay Company as assistant fur trade commissioner and transport officer.
Major Douglas Sutherland, the Coast’s first policeman and original owner of the Wakefield Inn, had an equally exciting career.
Other interesting stories to be found in the archives are a love triangle and murder in Halfmoon Bay and the mystery of a bound copy of six months of the New York Herald newspaper for 1897 found in Teredo Square.
The most fascinating research to date involved the Sunshine Coast’s connection to a headless corpse that had been lying in a Berlin hospital mortuary for over 80 years, but that is another true story.
– Submitted by Ann Watson, Archivist
