Foreman, British Columbia

Railway

Foreman, like Prince George to its southwest, and Shelley to its northeast, was an original train station (1914) on the GTP^[5][6] (the Canadian National Railway after nationalization). Situated at Mile 140.7, Fraser Subdivision^[7] (about Mile 230 during the line’s construction), it encompassed camps for Lund-Rogers^[8] and Magoffin & Berg.^[9] George Hardie, a Foley, Welch and Stewart superintendent, had a clearing contract that included Foreman at its eastern extremity.^[10] The siding was at Mile 231.^[11]

In 1912, Tony Denicola, who worked on the GTP construction, bought a small holding about three quarters of a mile from the station location.^[12] In 1922, Baron Byng, the governor general, decorated him with a military medal for his World War I service.^[13] Tony was a part-time small farmer and CNR section hand (track maintenance). In 1932, while climbing a tree to escape a pursuing bear, his legs were clawed. A passerby alerted the section foreman, who dispatched the bear with rifle fire.^[14] Years later, he experienced two further close encounters with bears.^[15]

In 1957, a slow-moving train brushed three men walking along the tracks near Foreman, resulting in hospital stays.^[16] One year later, a Canadian National Telegraphs employee suffered a crushed leg and hip injuries when a railway speeder struck him.^[17]

A flag stop from the late 1950s,^[18] this status remained^[19][20] until closure around the mid-1970s.^[21][7]

Built in 1914, the standard-design Plan 100‐152 (Bohi’s Type E)^[22][23] station building primarily accommodated the section crew. Reconfigured in 1948 to Plan 100‐318, it functioned as a freight and passenger shelter, before relocation to Shelley in 1963.^[24]

Forestry

The narrow strip of accessible spruce forest bordering the railway that stretched some 100 miles east of Prince George was known as the East Line.^[25] The Lumber Workers Industrial Union targeted the railway tie camps during 1919-20. The J.W. Blain camp at Foreman, a major producer in the area, was one of the first to be unionized. The company agreed to most of the union demands, but by season end, it had failed to address the abysmal living conditions.^[26] J.W. Blain, which held the timber rights for the government reserve at Foreman, expected to take out 150,000 ties.^[27]

In 1922, headed by Martin Caine of the Caine and Brawn partnership, the Foreman Lumber Co. built a 15,000-foot daily capacity sawmill.^[28] One of the worst fires in the district occurred south of Shelley, where the company was logging.^[29] The creek water at Foreman being too low for fire prevention, the mill temporarily shut down.^[30] In 1924, milling commenced with two million feet of logs on hand.^[31] Children lighting a piece of fuse caused a forest fire at Foreman, one of the many raging in the district that summer.^[32] Having exhausted the available harvest in the vicinity and dismantled the mill,^[33] the company purchased Larsen Timber Co.’s six timber limits, near Miworth, in 1928.^[34] The next year, two miles from the Foreman mill, high winds caught a settler’s fire, which spread into an area burned four years earlier.^[35] That year, Caine constructed a new mill on the Nechako River, at the western end of the Prince George rail yard.^[36]

The company’s CNR tie production contracts were: 100,000 (plus overrun) for 1923;^[37] unspecified for 1924;^[31] 35,000 for 1926 (subcontracted to settlers in the vicinity of the mill);^[38] 40,000 for 1930 (CNR having reduced tie acquisition volumes by 50% from the previous year),^[39] and 10,000 for 1939.^[40] The mill sawed the longer ties for switches, but the standard-length ones were hand hewn. Stacked high, they could occupy the full length of the Foreman siding.^[4] Caine admitted that in those early decades, the tight margins meant very few mills avoided bankruptcy. In his own case, the winter tie business subsidized the summer sawmilling.^[41]

Caine’s lumber activities were dormant during the Great Depression,^[42] but thereafter, he operated a planing mill at the Nechako River site as Caine Lumber Co.^[43] Martin Caine came to the area in 1919. At different times, he served Prince George as chair of the school board (1933), a mayoral candidate (1939), president of the Board of Trade (1943/44), president of the Northern Interior Lumbermen’s Association (1944/45), president of the Rotary Club (1950/51), and citizen of the year (1972). He lived to 98.^[44]

Farming

John Porter built the original cabin in the vicinity in 1909, one of the six earliest settlers to take up preemptions in the entire Fort George area.^[45][12] His mixed farming included potatoes,^[46] and he died a senior in 1934.^[47]

As for records, Mrs. Albert Junkers, who conducted a mixed farm at Foreman, had a White Leghorn hen that laid an egg eight inches in circumference and weighed eight ounces.^[48] A decade later, an affray between two local residents led to broken ribs. Charged with assault, Edward Poty^[49] would go on to operate a sawmill at Mud River.^[12] His brother, Sebastian, after whom Poty Road is named, farmed in the Foreman area.^[50] After his father died at 60,^[51] Armand Denicola returned in 1947 to manage the family farm, where he had been raised. He also was a partner in a small sawmill on Foreman Road.^[52] A chimney fire totally consumed the family house in 1950, which he later rebuilt.^[53] In 2017, approaching 95, Armand laid a wreath at the Prince George cenotaph as a tribute to his father (see #Railway), who was wounded in the Battle of Vimy Ridge. Armand, for his own World War II service, was awarded France's National Order of the Legion of Honour.^[54]

During 1957, Foreman Flats underwent extensive land clearing for agriculture.^[55]

In 1975, Bill Kupper, a Foreman Road farmer, threatened to cut off the area’s water supply and to block the laying of municipal sewer pipes across his land to force the settlement of a six-year-old dispute with the Blackburn Improvement District. The legal suit concerned a well drilled on his property that serviced the airport, the federal experimental farm, two schools and 200 homes.^[56] When he carried out his threat, a BC Supreme Court judge immediately intervened by granting an injunction.^[57]

Community

Children attended school in either Prince George or Shelley.^[58]

In the late 1940s, John Armella developed five-acre lots in the area.^[12] In 1960, his 14-year-old daughter, Diana, the thirteenth victim in the Prince George polio outbreak, was one of the milder cases.^[59]

In 1959, the charred remains of two people were found in the ashes of a log cabin a mile from the station.^[60] Three years later, a similar cabin fire took another life.^[61]

By late 1962, Foreman Flats had yet to be connected to the telephone and electricity networks and the school bus driver could not safely negotiate the railway crossing and its adjacent hill.^[62] Electricity came the following year,^[63] and telephone service a decade later. The near impassable condition of Foreman Road during the winter and springtime continued to frustrate residents.^[64] In 2015, the city initiated a one million dollar upgrade of the road.^[65]

The site for a new school cleared and leveled,^[66] class commenced for the 1962/63 year.^[67] One springtime, a backwater from the Fraser covered the road in two places. Unable to use their cars, the 11 families boated their children to the water-encircled building.^[68] The first two years, student numbers averaged 14.^[69] With only 16 students across six grades, the one-roomed school closed in 1969.^[70] School District 57 initiated the disposal of the surplus school site in 1984.^[71] On at least one occasion, leaking tanker trucks, accessing the Blackburn treatment plant, blanketed Foreman Road with raw sewage.^[72] When completed, the new sewer system provided an opportunity for property owners to subdivide their holdings along its route.^[73] Although this included lots adjacent to Foreman Road, council did not grant the rezoning preferred by developers.^[74] Though later rezoned from the former five-acre lots to one-acre ones, the persistent Louis Raeber needed half acre or three-quarter acre lots for a viable development.^[75] The sewage plant received further upgrades in the early 2000s.^[76]

Emergencies

When a small plane lost power on approaching Prince George in 1976, it finished 30 feet up trees on Foreman Road. Neither the pilot nor passenger were injured.^[77]

Since the Skins Lake Spillway opened in 1957, flooding in the Foreman Flats area has been less severe.^[12] It did occur when the Fraser peaked at 10.44 metres in 1972 and 9.91 metres in 1990.^[2] On the latter occasion, the Yellowhead Road and Bridge 24-hour ferrying service provided the only access to the cut off area, where basements flooded.^[78] Subsequently as a precaution in vulnerable years, residents installed sandbags prior to the river peaking and remained under evacuation alert.^[79]

In 1996, Peter Spiess rescued a neighbour who became trapped under the mobile home he was levelling,^[80] but questioned why the area zoning included mobile homes.^[81] Weeks earlier, arsonists destroyed Otto Bartkowski’s 62-year-old barn on Foreman Road. The responding firefighting crew took no action because it was beyond the city boundary.^[82] A year later, a resident’s out-of-control garbage fire destroyed three sheds.^[83]