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PLACE NAMES: Warfield neighbourhoods

Beaver Bend took its name from a CBC Radio series
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Looking down Murray Drive in Warfield, a neighbourhood known since the mid-1930s as Beaver Bend. Photo: Greg Nesteroff

Two hundred ninety-eighth in a series on West Kootenay/Boundary place names

Warfield has at least six distinct neighbourhoods, plus a couple of others whose names have fallen out of fashion.

• We’ve previously covered Annable, which was once a community of its own, but is now a Warfield neighbourhood – or two of them, Upper and Lower Annable. (In 1952, residents decided to call the newly-incorporated village Warfield rather than Annable-Warfield.)

Annable includes Annable Road, Wellington Avenue, Haig, Currie, Colley, Turner, Silver, French, and Simonds streets, plus portions of Coleman Street and Reservoir Road.

• In the early 1900s, Joe and Mary Shutek bought land stretching from where J.L. Webster school now sits up to the community hall. In 1934, they sold an acre to Eva and Jim Calder, who installed a water line. This led to the construction of the Calder-Southworth subdivision, presumably along Calder Drive. However, it’s not clear who Southworth was. The name is no longer in use.

• According to Trail of Memories, Warfield’s first school was “in what is known as the Paesano subdivision on Montcalm Road.” The name is no longer in common use.

Beaver Bend is the area around Murray Drive, southwest of J.L. Webster school. It was part of the Shutek ranch, which Cominco bought and subdivided for employee housing.

The Trail Daily Times of Dec. 9, 1935 explained: “As a community Trail’s new subdivision of Beaver Bend at Warfield may not yet be out of its swaddling clothes. It has no post office of its own and is not likely to have one but in its brief existence it has attained sufficient fame, or notoriety, or what have you that a letter posted outside the city and directed to Beaver Bend reached its destination without trouble or delay.”

As to the name, Ian Nicholson wrote in the Vancouver Daily Province of April 25, 1936: “Warfield now has its community of homes, known to all as Beaver Bend. The name is lifted direct from that popular radio play titled The Young Bloods of Beaver Bend.”

Young Bloods debuted on the CBC in 1934, described as “a drama of urban and rural life in western Canada.”

The name was perpetuated by the Beaver Bend Sports Club. Today the name is also applied to a linear park and bike pump track in a gully, although there is no permanent signage.

• We’ve looked previously at Mickey Mouse Town, the nickname given to Upper Warfield on account of its steep-pitched houses, built beginning in 1938. But we’ve got a new earliest reference, from The Vancouver Sun of Aug. 12, 1939: “The Warfield site is known as Mickey Mouse Town …”

A second batch of homes built after World War II was dubbed Minnie Mouse Town, because they were of similar design but smaller.

The earliest mention of that name was in the Spokane Spokesman Review of July 11, 1949: “Now, higher and to the left, a newer addition to the same community, with the attractive colors already starting to show, has been dubbed ‘Minnie Mouse Town.’”

• The area around the former St. Joseph’s Church on Lytton Street was once the Sleeman Dairy, operated by William (1871-1926?) and Cassie (1877-1912) Sleeman. The name was perpetuated by the Sleeman subdivision, built in the same area in the 1980s.

• The Emerald Ridge subdivision along Whitman Way was developed in the 1990s.

ROSSLAND NEIGHBOURHOODS, REVISITED

Local musician/historian Wayne Krewski filled in some details on a couple of Rossland neighbourhoods previously covered in this series.

We speculated that Section Pond, down a steep hill just beyond the junction of Highway 22 and the old Cascade highway, took its name from a railway section house in the area.

However, Krewski says: “I was down there once with Alfie Albo and commented that there was really no place to have a section house. He told me there never was a section house, it was just the pond where the section crew filled the steam engine with water.”

Albo (1909-2006) was born in Rossland and lived there for all but two of his 97 years.

Regarding Coronation Heights, established in 1937 and named for the coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, Krewski says “the name was still used by locals born at least into the 1960s. When we bought our house in Coronation Heights in 1990 most people from local families knew the location, although it wasn’t commonly used.”

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Beaver Bend Park is a path through a gully and a bike pump track. Photo: Greg Nesteroff