I have tried to access, unsuccessfully, some pages about the Bralorne
Pioneer Mine on the net. I really don't know that much about Bralorne,
but a friend who had been raised there, told me, after a visit to his
home town, that they had made the mine into a museum. The names of the
websites accessed by searching for Bralorne (using excite) do show that
there was a mining museum started. It may well be that the town, like
many others in British Columbia has become a ghost town. One way in
which our mines differ largely from UK mines is their isolation. In
western North America, generally, hard rock towns were different than
placer towns only in that they had a longer life span. Towns grew up
simply to permit miners to tear the treasures from the earth. When the
deposits were worked out, only a few towns, having other resources,
continued to flourish. Most towns, with no other reason for being,
became ghost towns. In the B.C. Archives, a photograph of the WWI
cenotaph at Phoenix, B.C. standing by itself after the town had
disappeared into the open pit mine, has always left me feeling very sad.
For some interesting historic photographs see the B.C.
Archives:
http://www.bcarchives.gov.bc.ca/visual/visual.htm
For any who are interested, I will provide references off the
page to some of these phoptographs. I have never tried to look up
Bralorne.
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