Railroad Logging on the BC Coast
St John’s Church Hall, 486 Jubilee Street, Duncan, BC at 7:00 pm
(hall parking lot accessed off First Street)
Artist Doug Harrison is the featured guest speaker for the Cowichan Historical Society on Thursday, October 19th , 2023, beginning at 7 pm.
Doug grew up in a railroad logging camp, ‘Alberni Pacific Lumber Camp 1’. This was one of the largest operations on the coast in the 1930-1940s. Doug’s love of the logging business, boating and railroads all stems from his childhood. His father worked directly on the locomotives and speeder operations, so Doug had the opportunity to meet many of the personalities in railroading at that time.
He was trained as a forest engineer at the University of British Columbia and spent his entire working career managing logging operations for MacMillan Bloedel. These operations included Sproat Lake, Haida Gwaii, North West Bay, Nanaimo River, Copper Canyon and Shawnigan Divisions. He was always interested in the ‘hands-on’ logging and so worked with many loggers up and down the coast.
His brother, Phil, took up art at any early age and inspired Doug in many ways with his own natural talent. His paintings tell stories of events that he witnessed in a lifetime of living and working in the logging camps and workboats on the BC coast. The images portrayed in his paintings come from his experiences and his imagination, not from existing photographs.
Admission to the event by non-members of the Cowichan Historical Society is by donation, with all proceeds raised going to the Society.