Twenty-five years after the town itself was bulldozed out of existence, former residents of Cassiar, B.C. keep their community alive online.
Cassiar’s asbestos mine opened in 1953, and the town grew around it. Located just off the Stuart Cassiar Highway in northern B.C., it was always a company town. Cassiar Mining Corp. provided electricity, sewage and infrastructure.
Asbestos mining maintained a bustling community for 40 years, but when the company went bankrupt in 1992, just over a thousand people had to abandon the little town tucked among the mountains.
Cassiarites dispersed around the world, some never to be heard from again, but others stayed in contact through letter writing, reunions, and now, social media.
The Facebook group, “Cassiar…do you remember?”, has just over 1100 members and almost daily former residents post memories, pictures, or videos.
There are class pictures from a schoolhouse no longer there, tributes to the deceased, and more recent pictures of the defunct mine. A string of comments follows each post as friends quibble over fading memories.
Herb Daum began the group in September 2007, and remains an administrator.
Daum, a born and raised Cassiarite, also runs a website completely dedicated to commemorating the community. He took over the site from its creator in 2000, and has since spent thousands of hours curating its historical information, photographs, and most importantly, connecting old friends.
Daum maintains an “address book” on the website, which can only be accessed by providing one’s own name and address. Daum says that there are hundreds and hundreds of names in the address book, though Facebook is a somewhat more convenient for communicating these days.
Former Cassiarites have also thrown several reunions.
Most notably, in 2001 there was a reunion near Vernon B.C. More than 800 people attended and residents from all periods of the town’s 40 year history gathered for a weekend.
“It was amazing…it was such an emotional high I didn’t sleep for three days,” said Daum of the reunion.
Above is a news clipping from the reunion held in 2001. I found it through a news database search and it helped confirm the number of people at the reunion that I had heard from a few sources.
Christel Travnik is Daum’s sister and lived in the town for 33 years. She also remembers the reunion with fondness, “It was non-stop, giving someone a hug and seeing the next person you were going to hug,” she said.
Despite the beauty of Cassiar and the fondness its former residents hold for the town, asbestos, the product they were mining, is a known carcinogen.
Margery Loverin lived off and on in Cassiar between 1962 and 1988. Her husband had asbestosis, a chronic lung disease caused by inhaling the fibrous mineral, before he passed away in 2011. Loverin suffers from a lung disease herself, which doctors say could be caused from exposure.
Daum tries to remain positive, “I have this sword hanging over my head by a horsehair, I think we all do,” he says, “but hey, I choose to focus on the blessings.” He laughs, “I’m healthy now.”
On Facebook, sometimes former residents share advice and resources for asbestos exposure, but many try and look with hope to the future.
Drone footage from 2014 shows that Cassiar is flattened. There’s little left but a bunkhouse and piles of rubble. The houses were sold off and bulldozed. The rec centre collapsed almost a decade ago under the weight of snow, the church did the same within the past couple of years.
Above is drone footage from Gordon Loverin, a former resident of Cassiar. It shows the townsite in 2014 and helps give an idea of what the area looks like today. I found it on Daum’s website.
Travnik made the trip to Cassiar in 2008. “It was almost like a funeral,” she said. The trees and houses she’d grown up knowing were all gone.
Loverin however, is looking forward to a 25th anniversary reunion of the mine’s close in July, to be held at the townsite. Amidst the festivities there will be a wedding, as two Cassiarites start their new future in the town where they met, and connected.