Sandon - British Columbia
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T0SHEA
N 49° 58.547 W 117° 13.637
11U E 483703 N 5535962
Sandon was one of many flash-in-the-pan mining communities in southern British Columbia.
Waymark Code: WMFXCK
Location: British Columbia, Canada
Date Posted: 12/12/2012
Views: 7
“In the heart of "The Silvery Slocan" district, Slocan got its start when rich galena ore was discovered by Eli Carpenter and Jack Seaton in 1891. It immediately boomed and by 1898 was incorporated as a city. Its population passed 500, but just.
Mines sprang up in the surrounding hills and were worked for many years, slowly petering out, causing the populace to move on, little by little. The town was not yet deserted when, in 1955 Carpenter Creek, which actually ran under the main street, flooded, carrying the street and a good portion of the town away.
Though considered a ghost town, it is still inhabited by a few people, and even hosts a fine museum, run by the Sandon Historical Society, which is chock full of artifacts from the town's heyday.
The Town Hall and a few other lesser buildings, a steam locomotive, and some mining relics remain. Sandon is the glorious heart of British Columbia’s famous Valley of the Ghosts. The former wild silver mining town is arguably the most famous ghost town in western Canada. The West Kootenay wilderness community, nestled along a creek bank in a narrow valley, is today mostly still and hauntingly quiet. It has been that way almost every night for nearly half a century. It’s population never rising above 30, and now holding steady with just a handful of full-time residents.
However, Sandon was once a wild, wild place with saloon and casino brawlers living up to the town's brazen hell-raising image as the heart and soul of the Silvery Slocan.
Sandon was renowned as a rollicking community of wild-eyed silver-seeking prospectors: a town where fortunes were gained in a week and then lost overnight, and where gambling and ladies of the night routinely dominated the night life.
The swashbuckling pioneer spirit ruled the roost, and so too did the "everything goes" lifestyle. There was even a police chief who ran a house for prostitutes and dealt black jack at a casino."