The Village of Nakusp

The Village of Nakusp

I started working in Nakusp within a few years of becoming a BC Land Surveyor. I was hired to

do a survey for a big pulp mill being built by Celgar. Initially, it was only a sawmill company,

but it purchased several small licenses and bought out some small logging companies. Nakusp

appeared to be booming.

I immediately decided to do a controlled survey. For some odd reason, I was able to finance

spending an extraordinary amount of time resurveying the townsite, which I did in 1962. I got

my surveying ticket in 1958, so this was happening four years into my career. I then resurveyed

the entire townsite. Later, in a debate about a similar resurvey in Nelson, some legal folks argued

that I should not be defining somebody's property unless I had been hired to tackle this

assignment. They said that I had no right to go in and resurvey the whole townsite, saying to the

landowners that this is where your property lines are. But here I was, in 1962, resurveying all the

properties in the organized village, which was quite an extensive area, say ten blocks by six

blocks of lots.

And I can remember many owners being very pleased because of their measurements. That was

part of the reason for resurveying because you would find that the original survey was

inaccurate. But my surveys were precise and reliable. My work was at least four times more

accurate than previous surveys.

I can still remember ignoring the original survey. The original surveyors had thought that,

because it was flat land, there was no reason to be precise. It was not like Nelson or some of the

other communities with steep hills and cliffs. They were assuming that nobody would go out and

check the measurements. Initially, people would just accept the survey posts as they were. If they

were out, they never knew that they were incorrect. It resulted in situations where a lot was

supposed to be fifty feet wide but was surveyed at forty-nine and a half feet wide.

They did not know that the lots were only forty-nine and a half feet wide because nobody had a

tape measure. Surveyors were not being hired to repost lots like they are now. If people did not

know where their properties were, they would hire a surveyor to stake out their property. But if

the surveyor did not have an overall map of the area or a reliable definition of the overall area, he

would not know where to start. You could not just drop in and do a single lot. You would have to

know that it would fit into the overall picture.

So anyway, I did the Nakusp resurvey work. Within a year or two, this big Celgar logging

company, now also operating a pulp mill, had me do a forty-two-lot subdivision at the west edge

of the Nakusp. That was really a big project for that era. Normally, a few lots would be involved

—maybe two or three, sometimes five or six—but not something of this scale.

This goes back in law, too. There was what they call a one-quarter reversion. If a developer did a

subdivision, the company would not also have to build the roads. But it had to turn over every

fourth lot to the government, which would sell these lots to pay for building the roads.

If you planned to develop more than four lots, you had to file a prospectus, a very elaborate legal

document. You had to state where the subdivision was, if water, telephone, and sewage were

available, the financing of the developer, and everything else. The document had to be certified

by a lawyer. The goal was to stop fraudulent development. The prospectus had to indicate if the

road was going to be paved. Initially, very few subdivisions had paved roads, but many provided

sidewalks and street lighting. So, we always did only four lots at a time, even if we knew that

we'd be doing four lots next year and so on, but you never went over that, because of the

requirement for filing a prospectus.

I tackled other assignments for this timber company, Celgar. I laid out a cemetery for a

settlement called Needles. In Nakusp itself, I laid out a wharf for the federal government and,

right in Nakusp, a school site for the school board. I also got hired to draw a map of the Nakusp

waterworks system. They actually had quite an extensive water system in Nakusp, but they did

not have a map of the whole thing.