<Begin Segment 43>

TI: So within New Denver, you talk of it as a community. So did it start growing as a community in the sense that people started farming or building their own gardens?

HS: Oh, yeah. Everybody put a garden in the back of their house, and by the first winter, no, because we were just getting there and started right away. By the second winter, by the second season, that's 1943, anybody that had a house -- most, by '43, the spring of '43, most people were into houses. Now, there were still a few people that were still arriving, that were going into tents because the houses were, they hadn't been all built immediately, but they were building, they built, the two hundred houses were, by the first, by the end of the first winter, they had most of the two hundred houses built, and there would be... The problem with the shiplap, he got the shiplap, seven million board feet of shiplap, however, that shiplap unfortunately wasn't kiln dry. It was still wet, it was still raw lumber they got quickly, and he got it there. And of course, when that first winter came, it would shrink because of, because of the humidity. And it shrunk, and it, cracks between, cracks appeared between the boards of shiplap, which has -- you know, shiplap has a little kind of a molding that locks to each other. That's what shiplap is, it locks itself. And normally you would have, it locks and it wouldn't be a, there wouldn't be a direct access to the outside. However, when they shrunk, you suddenly had a crack developing all along the whole of the house, and you'd have cold air coming through there. And that first winter happened to be a very cold winter, and it had a lot of snow, a lot of ice. This is the first time I really saw snow of any degree, because Prince Rupert hardly ever snowed. And the first winter it did that, so it, everybody had trouble. Because all the houses did that, the insides, you'd get condensation, so you had ice forming on the inside of the house, so you had to take the ice out, chip it up and then take, throw it out. That first winter was quite bad that way.

TI: How were the homes heated, the houses heated?

HS: You had a central, central big potbelly stove that they gave us. It was a, one of those sheet metal stoves that they built. See, they were building these little stoves as well as... the tinsmith, that was one of his jobs, building the pipes and building stove, and...

TI: And these were woodburning?

HS: Woodburning stoves. And then this other thing that they, they found near New Denver was a place called Hunter's Landing. Hunter's Landing at that point had been, Hunter, I assume, had been a lumberman, and he had built a sawmill there. And that had been abandoned. Well, it was restarted again when we came in there, because all the situation was set up for, for doing lumber and making lumber, and so they, immediately they started adding, getting shiplap themselves, making it there.

TI: And who would run the lumber mill?

HS: Oh, all Japanese, younger Japanese.

TI: And so there were people that knew how to --

HS: Knew the lumber business. There was a lot of, because lumbering was natural to a lot of the people that were already lumbermen in, timbermen in the West Coast. So they would be the first ones that would get the jobs to carry out the timber work. The thing is, that the first thing we needed was firewood, so they got immediately going on that. And once the firewood -- 'cause there was no coal, it was all, it was all woodburning. And so they did get this daily, weekly, the truck would go around throwing off big hunks, pieces of trees that we could split into smaller wood pieces that you could use for, for carrying out your heating. And that was original -- and originally there was no plumbing inside, so we had to have outhouses right away, and they were built for, so many outhouses for so many buildings. And gradually everything was, there was no electricity to begin with, either, because, of course, to begin with, they hadn't, they had just got the, got the shiplap houses up, and the first thing was to give a shelter, secondly to give us, to give us light at that point was kerosene lamps and Coleman lamps, you know, those mantle lamps. And we were able to use those for the first year, and candles. We used a lot of candles. The interesting thing was very few fires occurred despite the candles. I know there was only one house that burned down, and it was a big event when that house caught fire.

TI: So did you have like a volunteer or a fire...

HS: Oh, yeah, they had all these... if you look at some of the paintings where I have Main Street, you'll see sitting up there were two red buckets that were filled with sand. It was, and that, those were supposed to be used for, in case of fire. And then we had a bucket parade. Of course, it was useless, a bucket parade to the, to the lake, and you'd carry the water to douse the flames. Well, it turned out it was almost useless. They could prevent other houses from getting burned, but that house that was burning just went up. In fact, it didn't even start from a candle. The guy had dug a hole underneath and made a, had made an illegal still to make rice wine, to make sake. And in the business of making the rice wine, some, something went wrong and the thing blew up or something, and it caught the place on fire. And of course, the whole thing went down in flames, and his main worry was that the RCMP would not find the illegal still was underneath the house. He had gone to a big trouble making this illegal still. But that was the only fire that we really knew of, that I remember that occurred.

TI: That's a good story.

<End Segment 43> - Copyright © 2006 Densho. All Rights Reserved.