Kelly Black, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, The Discourse
Efforts to protect and celebrate trees in the Comox Valley often make the news.
From recent rallies to protect old growth forests, to events that identify individual trees with special meaning, many people place value on the continued presence of big trees in their communities and the contribution they make to social and environmental well-being.
But people have not always seen giant trees as worthy of protection. Early colonials saw them as a barrier to the expansion of agricultural settlement and by the twentieth century, forests were targeted for their economic value as timber.
When First World War veterans created the community of Merville in 1919, trees and their massive stumps left behind from logging were a significant obstacle to successful farming. The logging and settlement history of the Comox Valley and Vancouver Island helps us understand why the coastal Douglas fir ecosystem is now endangered.
From soldier to farmer
During and after the First World War, returned soldiers flocked to cities, unable to find work and suffering from the effects of war. This created demand for new social programs to be delivered by the government. Some military officials and politicians saw the problem of returned soldiers as an opportunity to implement emerging ideas that proposed a greater role for the state in land use and community planning matters.
In 1917, B.C. Premier John Oliver’s government passed legislation to create soldier settlements across the province. Oliver prided himself on his credentials as a former farmer and supported policy ideas that linked increased agricultural production with returned men living in a cooperative and rural setting.
Government commissioners tasked with setting up these settlements looked for suitable land in locations across the province. On Vancouver Island, vast tracts of logged land near the established agricultural communities of the Comox Valley seemed to have the right conditions. These coastal Douglas fir forests were part of the E&N Railway Land Grants – also known as the Great Land Grab – and in the 1890s various sections were sold off to sawmill companies.
The largest timber between Courtenay and Campbell River was carved up into an area that was called Block 29. Beginning in 1910, the Comox Logging and Railway Company, a subsidiary of B.C.’s largest lumber company (Canadian Western Lumber Company), targeted it for logging. Many trees were cut down in Kómok’s territory in the decades that followed.
In early 1919, the provincial Land Settlement Board purchased 14,000 acres of already logged land in Block 29 from Comox Logging. This would be the land for a soldier’s settlement. With support from the federal government, veterans were given loans and plots of land. The first men and their families began arriving in the spring.
Stump ranching in Merville
Veterans arrived at Camp Nelems near Courtenay where they were assisted by the provincial Land Settlement Board. The camp was named for Land Settlement Board Chairman M.H. Nelems. In the summer of 1919, as the community formed, the name Merville was chosen in a vote — a reference to the French village of Merville Au-Bois where some of the soldiers fought.
Working together, the men cleared some of the land. The loggers who had been there before cut the trees six or more feet off the ground which meant that fields of stumps towered over those who intended to farm the land.
“The land had supported some of the finest Douglas fir forests ever logged,” writes Richard Mackie in the book Island Timber. “The Merville Settlers’ Association bought a donkey engine which went from farm to farm pulling stumps and yarding the debris into huge piles, which were then burned.”
Unfortunately, these fires also burned up all the nutrients in the soil and left the land below unusable for agriculture. Stumps were also cut, pulled and even blown up, sometimes with little to show for the effort. But the goal to establish farmland in the area remained.
The settlers at Merville became known as stump ranchers. Despite the challenges, many were hopeful for the community’s success when the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VIII, visited with the soldiers and toured the land clearing work in September 1919. This optimism was dashed in July 1922 when a fire from nearby logging operations swept through the settlement and destroyed many farms.
“It seems fate had singled out the Merville settlers for the harshest treatment one could imagine,” recalled settler Barney Beaumont, in a book on Merville and its settlers published by the Merville Community Association. “One has only to look at the list of ‘defections’ of the single men to get an idea of how unattractive the scheme was.”
After the fire
After the fire, many settlers in Merville abandoned the scheme to start anew elsewhere. The trees and stumps, however, remained. In the 1998 novel Broken Ground, author Jack Hodgins’ describes a scene many farmers in the Comox Valley faced:
“Taylor examined a sixth stump, bigger than the rest, back against the edge of the woods. This one was taller than the others and twisted, with jagged spikes thrust up from the top — a tree that had probably fallen when cut only halfway through. Some poor logger may have been killed by the kick. Its giant roots were half-exposed, curled around boulders as though refusing to budge, like a wisdom tooth wrapped around your jawbone.”
The government’s efforts to remake the logged over landscape into a thriving community of farmer-veterans had failed. The remnants of once great forests seemed to haunt the Merville project — even the Merville school grounds were described as “poor” and “stumpy” in a 1923 report.
Whether soldiers at Merville stayed on their farm or left the settlement scheme, many found full-time and seasonal work with Comox Logging; where once they had battled stumps, now they created them.
In the decades that followed, Merville did become a thriving agricultural community.
Today, there are thousands of people — and fewer stumps. The forests never returned, but remnants of coastal Douglas fir forests can still be seen, with great efforts being made in the present day to protect what remains.
