So now I met you on these streets.
Who did you think you’d meet?
Where lives have been lost the ghosts stay around.
In your time is it still the same?
Do people die as the rich man gains?
It’s always been that way. When will it ever change?
When will it change?

Cumberland Coal
Words and Music by John McLachlan


The Cumberland Museum and Archives sits on the west end of Dunsmuir Ave. directly across from Cumberland’s fire hall. Because this avenue is Cumberland’s main street, it is natural for a newcomer like myself to wonder who Dunsmuir was. As it turns out, the museum was a great place to find out.

With the kind suggestion of Museum curator, Barb Lemke, I borrowed the book The Dunsmuir Saga by Terry Reksten. Barb alerted me to the fact that once I started reading it, I would not want to put it down and she was absolutely right. There is something captivating about reading a book that leads directly from a colorful past to the very ground of your present existence!

The Dunsmuir Saga artfully depicts the intense struggle and will-to-power of one of Canadian history’s most ambitious Empire capitalists, a man who rose from the rank of immigrant, indentured coal miner to that of the province’s wealthiest man.

The saga begins in 1825 when Robert Dunsmuir was born in a wee coal mining town in Scotland. Still in the early stages of colonization, British Columbia was an outpost on the far reaches of the British Empire. There was no Cumberland. There were no Cumberland mines. There was no Cumberland cemetery to hold the bodies of the hundreds of miners who inevitably lost their lives underground working for the Machine. The owner of that Machine was Robert Dunsmuir and Sons.

What The Dunsmuir Saga reveals, through evocative and well-researched anecdotes drawn from the lives of real people, is just how dubious were the ultimate personal and collective rewards of such a completely capitalist enterprise.

The saga reveals it all: the good, the bad, the ugly and I came away from reading it with a provocative question: Are we, in continuing to name our main street after James Dunsmuir, unconsciously exalting and perpetuating the values of greed and avarice so deeply entrenched in his family's image? Can't we come up with a name more appropriate than this to honor the values Cumberlanders really stand for ?



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Related:

Robert Dunsmuir
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

James Dunsmuir
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Alexander Dunsmuir
A Man, A Town
A Promise, A Fountain

The Esquimalt and Nanaimo Railway

Cumberland

Song: Cumberland Coal

Free downloadable song : Cumberland Coal