The old, rusty van was headed for the scrap yard. By the end of the month, it would be a cube of metal.
But before it joined the piles of beat-up vehicles, Rob Kellner couldn't resist a bit of treasure hunting. What the Lower Mainland car enthusiast found in the van led to 10 years of research and a connection with Squamish.
"In the sliding door I found this old suitcase," Kellner recalled. "It was stuffed with wet clothes, a really old shaving kit and about 200 photos."
The black-and-white photos intrigued Kellner. Some had neat, handwritten notes on the back. And there was a name - Buster Nichols.
"He looked really dapper," Kellner said.
Buster - Harry by birth - was an engineer in a railway family. Nichols, or his father who was also a Harry, had been to Wellington, Wash., just months before the worst avalanche disaster in North America's history, Kellner said. On March 1, 1910, 96 people died when a snow slide devoured the railroad depot. In 1929, the town was abandoned when the depot was closed after the opening of the second Cascade Tunnel.
Nichols, the junior, later ventured to 撸奶社区with the railway. Here, he married into one of Squamish's pioneer families, the Halvorsons.
Approximately 80 per cent of the photos are of 撸奶社区and the surrounding area, most taken from the 1920s and '50s.
"You can see the [Stawamus] Chief in some of them," Kellner said.
Through his research, Kellner found the 撸奶社区Historical Society on Facebook. He contacted the society's president Bianca Peters in the hopes they could shed more light on the pictures. The organization could also safely keep the photos and share them with the community, Kellner said.
