12 Mile Remembered Our Lives Before They Burned Our Homesteads

About the Book

When 15 families were forced from their homes in the 1960s, a void was left in their lives and in the picturesque Columbia River Valley 12 miles south of Revelstoke, B.C.

BC Hydro, a British Columbia government entity, forced residents to sell their homes in the 1960s. It constructed a 150-mile-long water reservoir forming a water reservoir to supply Grand Coulee Dam in Washington State, USA. It destroyed homes and farms with bulldozers, fire and water. It paid meager rates for property, most of which was cleared by the homesteaders’ backbreaking methods. BC Hydro then resold unflooded portions of property in Twelve Mile for 20 to 30 times the price it paid the homesteaders. The book reveals how helpless people become when a government agency wishes to force people from their homes and expropriate their lands. After surviving trying conditions in Europe and finding safe homes in a free country, the settlers felt helpless when their lands were expropriated and they were again uprooted and made to move on—but where would they go this time?

Chronicled here are the lives of pioneers who carved out homes from a wilderness replete with wild animals, mosquitoes and heavy snowfall, between 1895 and 1969. Over 200 photos help describe conditions of the highway and cable ferry, farms, logging, utilities, housekeeping, play, health and medical, and final days. The farmers and loggers were fiercely protective of their one-room country school in the absence of any other unifying entity such as a store, church or post office.

About the Author