Camp Life
A lakeside community
For a time, an isolated but vibrant logging community thrived on Comox Lake. Nestled deep within the forests of Vancouver Island, the Comox Logging Company’s lake camp was more than just a workplace; it was a home to those who dared to carve out a living in the rugged wilderness. With the towering trees and the glistening waters as their backdrop, loggers and their families built a tight-knit community, defined by hard work, camaraderie, and a shared sense of purpose. Though the camp's days are long gone, its spirit lives on in the memories of those who called it home and in the stories passed down through generations.
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"It was regular breakfast food for hungry people. They served porridge, which I didn't bother with, but they also had bacon and eggs and sausages and pancakes, and lots of it! And probably hash browns. That was a bonus."
Pat Williams in Mountain Timber p 172
The cookhouse was the largest building at Lake Camp and could seat the entire staff. It would be chock-a-block packed in the mornings, with the skilled cooks feeding the men a hearty breakfast before they took to the mountainside to harvest the timber. During the Depression in the 1930s, when food was scarce for many, the guarantee of a full stomach.
A Simple Setup
Reserved for the bachelors, who made up fifty per cent of the workforce, the bunkhouses weren’t exactly ‘homey’. Built with rough and unfinished lumber, they were bare with an air of austere drafting through them.
Its plank floor, well-scared by boot caulks, was carpet-less, its windows bare of curtains. Down each side were two rows of six metal cots. Two more across the far end brought the total of beds to fourteen.
Each worker was designated their own cot, a small cupboard for their personal belongings, a skew nail to hang their work clothes on at the end of the day, and an old tobacco tin as an ashtray. At the centre was a converted oil drum heater mounted in a crib of sand. On cold evenings, the men would gather around the drum while it belched out heat—smoking, drinking, and sharing tales of their close brushes with danger from the working day.


He made the best tongs!
Sam Telosky
An Essential Service
The isolated nature of Logging camps meant it was necessary to be self-sufficient. Having a Blacksmith forge was essential. Blacksmiths did everything, from repairing chains and heavy pulleys to making horseshoes to crafting and maintaining an array of tools and equipment the workers relied on.
Lake Camp’s Blacksmith was Hughie McKenzie. He learnt his craft from his father, John, and honed it at various Comox Logging Railway Company camps before moving to Lake Camp with his wife, Birdie, and their two daughters, Joy, ‘Babe’, and Doris, ‘Toots’, in 1933.
He was renowned for forging the best tongs a worker could ask for. They were so sought after that Hughie set up a side hustle of selling them privately. Once the company caught him earning an extra buck on the side, he was fired and moved to Courtenay, where he created his own Blacksmith shop in 1948.

Logging Tongs 2010.002.001

Food Safety & Security
Feeding a camp full of hungry workers wasn’t easy, and stocking up on the most important staple of their diet, meat, was crucial. At a time long before walk-in refrigerators and ample electricity, large-scale food preservation required some abstract thinking.
A water tower was built atop the meat house, steadily and constantly allowing a small amount of water to drain down on the four sides to keep the meat from spoiling.

On Saturday evening, the boom tug Eva went down with a small scow with benches, taking any of the residents and bunkhouse workers who wanted to go to Courtenay. It left right after supper and came back Sunday evening. […] The trip took about an hour, I think, and that's where I learned to play crib.
Pat Williams, Mountain Timber
All aboard!
The ‘Eva New Westminster BC’., known as Eva by those at Lake Camp, was the Comox Logging and Railway Company’s tugboat. Eva was regularly used for hauling booms and loaded flatcars up and down the lake. Eva occasionally transported the A-Frame along the shoreline and up to the mouth of the Cruickshank River.
Not only did Eva tow timber and buildings, but it also transported workers to shore so they could head into Cumberland or Courtenay for the weekend. It was the lifeline of the isolated community on the lake to the bustle of towns nestled in the Comox Valley.
In 1936, Eva was fatefully destroyed. Beached for repairs, some reckless boys set it ablaze. All that was left was smoking memories of years and years of hard toil.
Fortunately, recognising the need for another form of transport for the workers of the lake, Austin Blackburn, a former logger himself, had launched ‘The Joan’ a few years before Eva’s premature destruction in 1933. Coined by the camp's residents as the ‘milk boat’ for delivering milk and goods from Courtenay groceries, Austin Blackburn would ferry workers up and down the lake for a price of 25 cents a ride.
The Joan remained floating on the lake until 1945, when it was decommissioned.


Women used the bathhouse in the daytime. Two or three women would go and put a sign on the door saying, "Keep out. Women inside!" so that they could take a shower. […] We'd pile firewood on the inside of the door in case someone was absent-minded. [...] When the men started coming back from work, no women hung around that part of camp!
Pat Williams, Mountain Timber
A Luxury
Lake Camp had a luxury not all logging camps enjoyed: hot showers. The shower block and cookhouse were built next to the woodyard. Using the Steam Donkey boiler, hot water was provided to both buildings. Suddenly, washing wasn’t seen as so terrible after all!
"Each house had a cold water tap-period! So for the women, cooking on a wood stove, heating water for scrubbing and washing clothes, often with a tub and scrubbing board. We didn't have electricity in the houses."
Pat Williams
Families Welcome
Made from converted Bunkhouses, a total of fifty houses were built on the shore for married men and their families. These three-room homes were sparsely equipped but did enjoy fresh spring water, something of a novelty in other parts of the Valley.
Even with family-minded accommodations, the community was very isolated.
What set Lake Camp truly apart from camps across BC was the close-knit nature of the community. The availability of family-style housing created a sense of neighbourly respect and responsibility. They celebrated the paydays and good times, yet when times were tough, there was a sense of community solidarity and support for one another.

Two logger kids had got into the habit of swearing all the time, and their mother asked the husband how to stop them and was told to give them a good cuff on the ear every time she heard them swearing.
Wallace Baikie, Mountain Timber
The School House
In October 1933, a school was built using Comox Logging and Railway Company resources. Children would no longer be running around camp causing mischief but putting pencil to paper in the classroom. The school only had two teachers: Agnes Henning (1933 to 1935) and Patricia Williams (1935 to 1937). Agnes and Patrica faced a tough task with the children of Lake Camp. Influenced heavily by being surrounded by working men for all their lives, the kids had adopted many of their crude manners and language. The school closed in 1937 when a large portion of the workforce moved to the Cruickshank Camp, which comprised mainly single men and not family accommodations.
"Every night after work, people worked on that hall. A lot of the little finishing touches were the result of individual ideas, things the men saw in the bush and brought back, like the strangely shaped limbs used for handrails and the table made of a large burl cut through the middle horizontally with a section of trunk left at each end to act as legs."
Pat Williams, Mountain Timber
After months of hard work during off hours, the Lake Camp community had a new social hall. Opening on May 1934, a dance hall carefully crafted with fine detailed finishings, the building was their pride and joy. Proceeds of the opening dance went to St. Joseph's Hospital in Comox, known locally as the loggers' hospital. Dances and events often coincided with paydays. But the dance hall wasn’t just adults prancing across the wooden floors. Joy McKenzie gave dancing lessons to the kids, and each year, the school put on a Christmas concert.

He can hardly hear at all, but when Wattie Whyte holds up a certain number of fingers, Brownie will bark out the number[….]Brownie learned to count when he was a pup. He used to go out into the woods and listen to the signals the men were passing back to the donkey. He'd bark one for every 'yo.'
(Newspaper Article reference needed)
Man's Best Friend
It was seldom that you’d see Walter Whyte around Lake Camp without his trusted companion, Brownie. Although not the spryest of old dogs, Brownie had a special talent that set him apart from the rest: she could count. Word of her unique ability drew reporters from across the Valley to see for themselves.

"No logging camp is complete without its mascot, and Josie, the little [racoon], is the pet of the Comox Lake camp of the Comox Logging Company…She is the most affectionate little thing you ever saw and clean as a cat."
Comox Argus, 1993
Pest or Pet
Scurrying down plankways and hopping between buildings, Lake Camp was crawling with racoons. Some caused mischief wherever they went, answering only to the wild. But for others, they became domesticated and, in two instances, even beloved pets!
The star attraction of camp was Josie the raccoon, though. Making headlines in the paper! But not everyone in the camp was enamored with Josie and Rosie, the two pet racoons. No one knows for sure what happened to Josie,... some say she was killed by the cook, others say she returned to the wilds. One thing remains certain, though, her memory of being a menace around camp remains.

