The Case of the Least Touristy Gulf Island, Texada

On the northwest corner of Texada Island, in what is currently known as Limekiln Bay, a hush envelops the intertidal zone. Tide pools eroded into craggy limestone collect crabs and rockweed, oysters and barnacles. Here, you’re likely to run into more seals than people.

But that wasn’t always the case. Everywhere you look, if you look carefully, there are traces of industry, of people; layered echoes of the times that came before.

Above the high-tide zone, covered in invasive blackberries, sit two relics made from limestone and brick. They resemble free-standing fireplaces, or, if you’re feeling more imaginative, the ruins of miniature castles.

In the early 1900s, settlers harvested vast quantities of wood to build fires in these kilns. Then they used them to turn their quarried limestone into quicklime, which was used to make a range of products, including cement.

Nearby, there’s more evidence of the work that once took place in these parts. Where the ferry lands in Blubber Bay are remains of a once-thriving community: an overgrown baseball diamond, unoccupied houses and, notably, the now-shuttered operations of Pacific Lime Co. and BC Cement.

And over in Sturt Bay, on the east side of the island near the much livelier contemporary community of Van Anda, sits the island’s most intact, least-swallowed-by-blackberries lime kiln. It presides over what is now a boatyard, on private property.

The limestone that fed these kilns has been excavated on Texada for over a century, leaving scars so large they are visible from space. Three white bites seem to have been taken out of the island’s elongated, crescent shape. Each is a quarry with stepped shelves forming a scalloped pattern, ridges and folds that resemble topography lines on a hand-drawn map.

The northwesternmost quarry, closest to Limekiln Bay, has been silent for years. But farther south, on the island’s western edge, the bite mark keeps expanding. There, work rumbles on at Texada’s largest, most productive quarry, owned by cement giant Lafarge.

Looking to Texada’s early industrial history gives us a peek into why it remains so different today — not a bedroom community or island full of second homes, but a place where mining remains an economic backbone. Luckily, as it turns out, for the province’s more populous areas. Because to this day, what’s quarried here is quite literally a key building block for development in the Lower Mainland. When you see a concrete highrise going up in Vancouver, you likely are looking at some of Texada Island hanging in the sky.

Texada is in the territories of the Tla’amin, K’ómoks, shíshálh and Wei Wai Kum nations. Known to the Tla’amin Nation as Sah yeh yeen, and to the shíshálh Nation as spilḵsen, Texada is the largest of the Gulf Islands. It’s “300 square kilometres of trees and rocks,” as one Texada Island Museum and Archives docent describes it to me. But it has one of the Gulf Islands’ lowest population densities (1,126 people as of the 2021 census), and it feels far more industrial than, say, Salt Spring, which is just over half as large but with 10 times the population, or even Denman, which fits a Texada-sized population onto just 51 square kilometres.

There are several First Nations village sites on Texada, archeologist Colleen Parsley tells me over email, but only two have been sufficiently studied. “Without a trigger to compel archeological work” — no building permits are required by the regional district — “there is no formal mechanism to identify and protect,” she writes.

“All I can really speak to is the work at Shelter Point, which demonstrated the importance of deer hunting in the archeological evidence found there, but also large houses arranged in rows/avenues that suggests there was more happening there than just deer hunting,” Parsley adds.

In 1791, a year before George Vancouver laid claim to much of what is now known as the Pacific Northwest, Spanish explorers sailed these shores and renamed the island — first Islas de San Félix, and then, later that year, Texada. Both for Félix de Tejada, a rear admiral in the Spanish navy.

And then, about a century later in 1871, Harry Trim — born in England, raised in Ontario, “lured” west “by adventure and gold” — showed up and laid his eyes on a large iron ore deposit, which set off both a mini prospecting rush for gold and iron and copper, and a land grab that led to the resignation of the province’s first premier, Amor De Cosmos.

“Copper was the highest-value wealth item in many Northwest Coast cultures,” Parsley says. “Where the copper was obtained is not really known archeologically as there was probably a diverse range of places it was quarried.”

After Trim, there were attempts to mine marble, and some successful copper and iron operations.

But it was limestone — which had been used in the past by Coast Salish peoples to create zoomorphic and anthropomorphic sculptures — that would prove the most enduring settler quarry.

In 1885, Heather Harbord writes in the book Texada Tapestry, George M. Dawson of the Geological Survey of Canada surveyed Texada’s coastline, hoping to find coal.

“He found no coal,” Harbord writes, “but he did delineate the huge limestone deposit that would later become the largest limestone mine in Canada.”

In the early days, after the limestone was mined, it was fed into the top of the kilns and slowly made its way down towards the bottom, getting hotter as it went. Fires were located midway down the kiln, and workers fed them through holes on either side of the structure. The heat calcified the limestone, turning it to quicklime, which was carted off through an opening at the bottom of the kiln.

Lime produced on Texada was stored in barrels to keep it dry. It was then shipped to the Tacoma Steel smelter, to the nearby paper mill to be used to bleach pulp, and to various other places to be used as a key ingredient in cement. Massive quantities of timber were necessary to keep the fires going; coopers also used it to build the barrels to store the lime.

The problem for some of the would-be lime kiln barons is that limestone must be relatively pure in order to be useful as quicklime.

The Sturt Bay lime kiln, which began burning lime in August 1898, “contained silica kernels that left holes in finished plaster surfaces, so production soon ceased,” Harbord writes in Texada Tapestry.

The limestone around Limekiln Bay was “of better quality,” Harbord writes, but some of it still contained impurities — this time, magnesium.

As quarries and kilns popped up, began production and ceased, workers would move from one site to another.

In the early 1900s, when the kilns at Limekiln Bay were owned and operated by the Tacoma Steel Co., the daily production was about 400 barrels a day, according to a winter 1998-99 newsletter put out by Heritage BC and shared by Texada Island Museum and Archives.

Lime production began in Blubber Bay in 1907 with better limestone, and ceased in Limekiln Bay in 1912.

According to the Heritage BC newsletter, “Many of the European and Chinese employees of the Limekiln Bay operation simply walked over the hill to a new job at Blubber Bay.”

Today, according to Statistics Canada, the number of people residing on Texada with Chinese heritage is zero. But at the turn of the last century, many of the workers in the quarries had recently immigrated from China.

“The Yip Sang Agency of Vancouver hired men in China, arranged transportation and forwarded their remittances home,” according to the Texada Heritage Society.

A payroll ledger from the Marble Bay mine, exhibited at the Texada Island Museum and Archives, shows “White Labour” on the left and “Chinese Labour” on the right — with clear pay disparities.

Canada’s immigration laws at the time were virulently racist, specifically targeting Chinese immigrants.

The majority of Chinese men in Canada were married, with wives and children they could not sponsor to come to Canada from China.

Chinese workers often lived together in company bunkhouses, gardening vegetables and sharing tasks like cooking.

In Blubber Bay, Chinese workers quarried limestone in a huge, 100-metre-deep, hand-dug pit referred to as “the Glory Hole.” Every morning, they descended to the pit using a series of wooden ladders, broke up the limestone using pickaxes and shovels and loaded it into wheelbarrows.

In 1938, Blubber Bay quarry workers of European and Chinese descent banded together for what journalist Rod Mickleburgh describes as “the first critical strike by a newly formed organization that for decades would be the province’s largest and most important union.”

The quarry and kilns at Blubber Bay changed hands a few times over the course of the first half of the 20th century. While quarrying continued, the kilns’ days were numbered.

“When natural gas came to Tacoma, Washington, in 1957,” Harbord writes in Texada Tapestry, the company that owned the site at the time “began shutting down the Blubber Bay kilns and shipping the limestone to Tacoma for processing in the kilns there.”

Over a century later, though limestone is no longer processed on Texada, mining it remains economically critical.

“Limestone quarrying is a mainstay for our island economy,” qathet Regional District director for Texada Island Sandy McCormick told me over email. “There are two active quarries, one semi-active quarry and another quarry site which is not yet developed.”

Lafarge Canada, which owns Texada’s largest active quarry, operates 24-7 and is the island’s largest employer, McCormick said.

In 2013, Lafarge’s director of environment and public affairs told Business in Vancouver that their quarry on Texada held a “200-plus year deposit.”

All of the limestone mined at the quarry, Business in Vancouver reported — about four million tonnes per year — was barged down to Lafarge’s cement plant in Richmond.

Limestone’s utility as cement is “a source of pride for Lafarge” as it’s what’s used to create infrastructure such as sidewalks, curbs and bridges.

Lafarge did not respond to emailed questions from The Tyee — we wanted to know, among other things, if Texada is the province’s largest supplier of limestone, whether Texada’s limestone still supplied the Richmond cement plant, and what notable buildings in Vancouver have been built using Texada-sourced cement.

But the company did share an Aug. 27 post to Instagram about Texada.

“Every year, we produce millions of tonnes of high-quality limestone from this quarry, which is used to create cement, aggregates, and other essential building materials,” it wrote.

In response to a query posted to the local online message board, several people confirmed that limestone from Texada is still barged down to Richmond.

And in 2022, business-to-business publication Global Cement reported that a fire at the Richmond plant was “exacerbating a cement and concrete shortage in Vancouver, where some building firms have been forced to halt projects.”

Based on this, it’s safe to share a little non-judgmental thought experiment.

Returning to the aerial waves and ridges of the quarry — the face of the island, changing as it has been mined — we can picture, as the rock is removed, its addition to the landscape of the Lower Mainland. A sidewalk popping up here, the undergirding of a highrise cropping up there.

An intimate relationship between the two places emerges over time. A long time on the scale of settler history, and a much shorter one for Indigenous Peoples in the area.

It’s something that helps establish a bit more of a hold on this island, which, as Parsley says, is “very enigmatic in many ways.”