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British Columbia Tourism Region : Cariboo Chilcotin Coast
Description From Owner:
- Gold Bridge named after the Ben d'0r Mines Co. claims. Ben d'or, a Scots-French hybrid, means 'mountain of gold.'
- Cadwallader Creek named after a Welshman, Evan Cadwallader, who built a sawmill at Lillooet in 1862 and in 1863 guided a company of Italian miners into the valley through which the creek runs, the site later of the Pioneer and Bralorne mines.
- Carpenter Lake named after E. Carpenter, who came to British Columbia from the United States in 1909. He did much of the engineering design in connection with the Bridge River power project between 1927 and 1931.
- Downton Lake - Standing atop Mission Mountain in December 1912, Geoffrey M. Downton, BCLS, a ship's officer turned surveyor, suddenly realized that the Bridge River valley to the north was 1,200 feet higher than Seton Lake to the south.
- Let a two-mile tunnel be driven through the mountain on which Downton stood and a fantastic source of hydro electric power would come into being.
- Only after the two world wars, in the first of which Downton won the Military Cross, was the Bridge River power finally developed and brought south to Vancouver.
- Downton, one of the original syndicate that obtained the rights, realized only $2,000 from the sale of his shares, but in 1948 the BC Electric Company chose him to push the button that set the current surging south.
- Ultimately British Columbia would get from here more power than Ontario gets from Niagara Falls.
- A journalist who visited Downton and his artist wife, both natives of Norfolk, found him 'an urbane scholarly man like a retired professor or an Anglican parson.'
- Gold Bridge - The road from Lillooet to the gold country around Bralorne and Pioneer here crosses the Bridge River.
- Gun Lake - Apparently a gun was lost when a packhorse drowned in nearby Gun Creek.
- Hurley River - After Daniel Hurley, miner and rancher, at one time a hotelkeeper in Lillooet, where he died in 1942.
- Liza Creek - Immortalizes an Indian woman who reputedly was so fond of a certain horse that whenever it was sold the new owner acquired Liza too.
- She is said to have been a very kindly person who, during the great flu epidemic of 1919, wore herself out visiting the sick before she herself caught the disease and died.
- With permission from G.P.V and Helen B. Akrigg 1997 British Columbia Place Names. UBC Press.
Address of this page: http://bc.ruralroutes.com/GoldBridge
