
King Coal
Coal Created Cumberland
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Industrial Revolution dominated the global landscape. At the heart of the Industrial Revolution was one key natural resource: coal. The demand for this little black rock drove settlement on Vancouver Island in the mid-nineteenth century. Coal mining communities such as Nanaimo, Ladysmith and Cumberland sprung up.

The Beginnings of Coal
As early as the 1830s, members of Kwakiutl First Nations mined coal at Suquash on northern Vancouver Island to trade with the Hudson’s Bay Company. Recognizing the importance of the First Nation-owned resource, Hudson’s Bay Company built Fort Rupert near the coal seam, attempting the first large-scale coal operation in British Columbia.
The Hudson’s Bay Company recruited Scottish, Welsh, French-Canadian, Métis and Hawaiian workers to work the Suquash seam and build Fort Rupert.

First Nations were also employed, but at a limited capacity. A poor-quality seam, strained relationships with First Nations, and the discovery of more promising coal in Nanaimo, moved the company south in 1852.


The discovery of Nanaimo coal was the industry's breakthrough on Vancouver Island. It paved the way for its dominance in the forthcoming decades and became the chief industry on the Island.
The most infamous, and arguably most contentious figure at the center of the Vancouver Island coal industry was Robert Dunsmuir. He began as a miner for the Hudson’s Bay Company working the Fort Rupert seam and Nanaimo. In 1855 Dunsmuir was awarded a free miners’ license for his loyalty to the company during a miners’ strike. When the HBC sold its coal rights to the Vancouver Coal Mining and Land Company in 1862, Dunsmuir’s newfound freedom allowed him to contract his expertise to supervise the company’s new endeavors.

The Vancouver Coal Mining and Land Company enjoyed the complete monopoly of the Nanaimo coal field until Robert Dunsmuir opened mines in Wellington, a few kilometers north of the city, in 1873.
Dunsmuir’s discovery of the Wellington coal seam was the bedrock of his success. Financed through a partnership with a group of naval officers, the Wellington mines thrived under the Dunsmuir, Diggle Limited Co. By 1881, the Wellington mines were producing 164,243 tonnes of coal annually, and Dunsmuir bought out his business partners, establishing the company as R. Dunsmuir & Sons.
The Wellington mines thrived and laid the foundations of the R. Dunsmuir & Sons coal empire, which dominated the industry on the Island for the rest of the century.

Cumberland Emerges
As coal fever gripped Canada in the mid-nineteenth century, new villages emerged from the old-growth forests that spread across Vancouver Island. Among them was Cumberland. Following the discovery of the area's rich coal deposits in the 1850s, the Union Coal Mining Company attempted to mine the seams in the 1860s. Ultimately, their endeavor failed due to diminishing returns, yet their efforts paved the way for the Dunsmuirs to prosper.
The 1884 Settlement Act granted the E&N Railway Company nearly two million acres of unceded First Nations territories, $750,000.00, and a virtual monopoly over resource extraction on the island in exchange for the construction of 113 kilometers of rail. The railway would ‘connect the BC seaboard with Canada's railway system.’
Dunsmuir, a key stakeholder in the E&N Railway Company, seized the opportunity to attain control over land and resources.

The land grant set the wheels in motion for Robert Dunsmuir to expand his coal empire into the Comox Valley. Initially content to let the Comox mines lay idle until his Wellington seams had been exhausted, Dunsmuir was pressured by his sons to take on the Union Coal Mining Company operations. After passing on the business in 1888 to his son James Dunsmuir and son-in-law, John Bryden, the pair wasted no time capitalizing on the rich Comox coal deposits.
Building upon the work of the Union Coal Mining Company, James Dunsmuir and John Bryden rapidly expanded colliery operations. They immediately sunk shafts, dug tunnels, and built substantial workings to harvest coal from the upper coal seams.


The coal was exported through Union Bay mainly to California; built in 1889, coal was processed and transported at the wharf.
As the mines flourished in the 1890s, the workforce swelled to support the increased capacity of the company. Immigrants from China, Japan, and Europe made the arduous journey across the globe to work in the Cumberland mines.
The company-owned townsite of Union was formed. Now known locally as Camp Road, the first houses hosted early European immigrant residences of village miners and townsites, originally known as Union.

Cumberland Chinatown emerged, built on a swampy piece of land dedicated by the company. It was a bustling community and was one of the largest Chinatowns in western Canada.

The Japanese immigrants developed a number of small communities spread throughout Cumberland. The largest was at No. 1 Mine, a kilometer west from Chinatown.

With this dramatic influx of immigrants, the population of Union grew to the point it was incorporated as a city in 1898 with the new name of Cumberland. By the early twentieth century, a diverse Cumberland community was flourishing: schools, stores, theaters, churches and temples, as well as a hospital, had sprung up in the village. At the core of this blossoming community were the thriving coal mines that lay at the village’s foundations.


Though hampered by periods of unrest such as the ‘Big Strike’ and the Great War, the mines from their renewal in 1888 through to 1930 witnessed sustained growth. Once the Dunsmuirs took control of the Cumberland mines in 1888, coal production increased. By 1910, half a million tonnes of coal was carved from under Cumberland every year, with other collieries across BC setting record production numbers. It truly was the age of coal.

The Coal Decline
The 1930s spelled the beginning of the end for the once-booming Vancouver Island coal industry. Cumberland’s economy began to suffer due to the substitution of oil for coal in industrial and domestic markets, increased labor costs, exhausted coal deposits, and the global economic downturn of the Great Depression. The once bustling mines slowly fell quiet through the following decades as the mines successively shut.

The economic depression in the 1930s led to mass unemployment for Asian miners. When the economy crashed, they were the first to be laid off. Many returned to their homeland or sought work elsewhere, leaving Cumberland altogether. After the mass diaspora of the Chinese community, the abandoned houses were eventually burned down in a controlled fire.

As the coal industry continued to slump, coal owners across Canada sold up and moved on. The Canadian Collieries (Dunsmuir) Ltd. were no different. In 1959 they sold the Tsable River mine, the last operational pit in the Comox Valley, to three local miners. After years of struggle, the miners finally got what they always desired: A mine of their own.
However, time had finally run out for the miners. The seam was exhausted, and the industry was collapsing around them. In 1966 they were forced to close. No more swinging of the pick, no more billowing smoke from the pithead, no more rumbles from underground.
Coal mining in the Valley was finished.
Coal gold was over.
But Cumberland was not.
