castles and coal towns

on the weekend, nathan and i met up in princeton and stayed at a place called the “princeton castle” (tag-line: “escape to history in log luxury”). you can see from the photograph above the ruins which do look decidedly medieval-castle-like but interestingly, this is a crumbling cement factory circa early 1900s. what is odd about the place is the lack of history that has survived other than building itself which is falling rock by mortar into the ground. what follows is the only information the resort provides:

In 1910 there began a gigantic industrial dream to build a “Great Cement City” called East Princeton, with an enormous cement plant and a complete powerhouse. The dream was to cost over a million dollars. It also cost a number of workers their lives. Four years and hundreds of thousands of man-hours by skilled craftsmen, stone masons, carpenters and engineers, resulted in a colossal architectural achievement known as The Portland Cement Plant. But, nine short months later, the dream fell into silence: the plant was closed down. Some say they ran out of limestone from the on-site mountains; some say the coal they needed for the operation failed to appear because of conflicts with the needs of the First World War, and some say it was never meant to succeed. Now, some 80 years later, people are again returning to experience the magic of what has become known as PRINCETON CASTLE.

i haven’t been able to find any other references to this place in the bc archives or online – and find the information provided strangely sparse in real details such as – who was the industrialist who built this place? how many workers were involved and died in its construction? why would it have never been meant to succeed? the ruins themselves are interesting to look at, but without the salient details the story makes pretty much no sense unless viewed in the context of bc as an eccentric outpost where people have often embarked on grand failures (like the guy in bralorne who built the ark which has rotted back into the forest as the years went by and the flood he expected never came).

there also appear to be no existing photographs on record of the original building – again an oddity given that there are photographs of pretty much everything in the archives and photo technology wasn’t exactly new in 1910.

in any case, we spent a lot of time speculating to no definitive end.

because it rained hard during our weekend away, we opted for a driving tour rather than hiking in the area. the almost-defunct coal towns of coalmont and tulameen and the sprawling ranchlands that surround them. i am hoping to return to do some cross-country skiing in thie area over the winter – and if i ever get into bike touring the kettle valley railway is high on my list (it passes through this area and looks like an incredible route).