When land is developed almost anywhere in the north, it is customary and often a legal prerequisite to check it out first to find any signs of historical significance.
Often that is for cultural purposes, in case ancient indications of people are present. Sometimes the study is for safety reasons, like finding weaknesses in the geology that might cause peril if built upon. Other times it is for environmental values, like protecting key habitat or rare plant-life.
A number of professions are involved in such studies, and one of those is the archaeology done by Dana Evaschuk. She has particular education in finding signs of aboriginal inhabitation.
It is for this that she has been tasked by the provincial government to investigate a parcel of land owned by the provincial Crown in the general vicinity of University Way, west of the soccer fields and south of Glen Shee Road.
As someone who is accustomed to finding needles in haystacks, though, she has some concerns about this part of the city. In the 1940s, a giant contingent of the Canadian military used this area: the long face of Cranbrook Hill, from Moore's Meadow (a natural bowl perfect for confining live-fire ammunition, most often close-assault guns) all the way across the Pinewood and Lakewood neighbourhoods.
In fact one of the rifle ranges of that day sat on what today is Pinewood elementary school.
Where the Prince George Golf & Curling Club now sits was an airport and a mortar range, launching shells into the face of the hill behind the modern day CN Centre. What is now the College of New Caledonia was once a cluster of bunkers to store fuel, munitions and other high-security materials.
The Prince George Gymnastics Club and BC Northern Exhibition offices are now housed inside one of the few remaining original buildings built by the army during that era.
Next to no one lived in any of these areas, at the time.
The Prince George townsite was considerably far away, basically confined to what is today the downtown and South Fort George, so this long, tall, continuous hillside was a safe target to shoot at if you were a Second World War army in training.
"I can find very little information about this area, but I had heard it was a place where a lot of bombs and shells were test-fired," Evaschuk said. "If I'm jamming a shovel into the dirt, am I going to hit something that's going to go boom under my feet?"
It's not paranoia. It happened.
Anecdotally, it was revealed in these inquiries that the construction crew building University Way found an unexploded munition during their work.
The most extreme example of the dangers posed by the flotsam and jetsam of live-fire war training was stamped into the historic record by The Citizen in 1949.
This was the story that appeared on the front page of the November 17 edition that year:
"Charles East, city engineer, was called upon this week to put war-time ordnance experience to the test in detonating an unexploded bomb found by a group of youngsters on the old airport adjacent to the golf course. This is not the first case of live bombs being found by children, the most tragic being that which resulted in the death of Ernest Boleski earlier this year."
That was followed up on the front page of the July 20 edition in 1953.
"Public Warned To Keep Off Grounds," was the headline. The story said, "Stern warning that the general public is prohibited from trespassing at the local Department of National Defence training ground and rifle range was issued today by a spokesman for 'A' Coy. Rocky Mountain Rangers. This area is used regularly by the local army unit in live ammunition training. Last Wednesday, the RMR's had to warn off berry pickers in the area before they could proceed with their exercises. The fact that unexploded mortar shells may still be on the grounds has been tragically demonstrated here with the death of a young boy two years ago, the spokesman pointed out."
While all this knowledge has faded into dim memories and anecdotes at the public level, it was not considered irrelevant history by the Department of National Defense. In 2013 the Canadian Armed Forces called upon local military contact Sheldon Clare, a CNC instructor, former president of the Prince George Legion, and current president of Canada's National Firearms Association.
With Clare acting as a local consultant, the military came in and did an assessment of the Cranbrook Hill area (plus other sites) that the army used to pound with copious explosives.
"There were lots of those things (unexploded shells) at one time," Clare said. "The City of Prince George used to employ someone to look after that. Art Garrett looked after the city's cemetery gardens and in World War II he was with the Royal Canadian Artillery. He knew about blowing up unexploded munitions, and he did that for the city all through the 1950s and '60s."
When asked about the history of these activities in the CN Centre / University Way vicinity, the City of Prince George provided no information.
Although relics of the Second World War - some dangerous, most benign - have been found throughout that area over the decades, the recent trip to the area by the Department of National Defense determined it had been well cleaned up during the army's slow fade from Prince George once the war ended.
"It is a real concern. In Canada and particularly in Europe there are many instances of cities growing over these old training areas or old battlefields and then people come across ordnances. Sometimes there are even explosions," Clare confirmed.
"Prince George was a bit of an extreme case in Canada. That whole area was military training ground, but it also went all the way around into what we now call Pineview out past where the airport is now, and all the way to the Buckhorn area and Tabor Mountain. It was a big, big operation. They had between 13,000 and 14,000 troops stationed here in 1942, and Prince George was a small town back then."
According to Prince George At War, an academic article authored by Tom Makowsky and held by the College of New Caledonia's library, the town's population was about 2,800 at the time.
"But," Clare continued, "it seems to be a pretty clean operation. Not perfect, obviously, but when the assessment team came here a couple of years ago, they knew what they were doing, they checked everything on their list, I was not privy to that information but I know they left happy."
When the military picked Prince George as one of its many training bases, the geography helped dictate the choice. There were physical features that were conducive to all the shooting and blowing up of things and bombing from the air (there were ads in the local papers during the mid-1940s warning the public about training activities they might see like low-flying war planes and loud blasts), but also the defensive position it represented should the enemy invade from the Pacific.
Prince George stood in between Prince Rupert, Vancouver and Edmonton which were not merely towns, back then in the throes of war, they were fully tooled garrisons. Vernon was also in the mix, a key military training facility like Prince George would become.
The place was called Prince George Camp overall (there were sub-names for different neighbourhoods of the base) and it was headquartered on what is now Hammond Avenue.
Some of the leftover effects of the army's presence are apart from the weaponry that may or may not remain. The military hospital established by the army grew on its original site into what is now University Hospital of Northern BC. The reason 15th Avenue is so wide from one end to the other, compared to Fifth Avenue and 10th Avenue, was because a large army building had to be moved from the training base to the downtown core by heavy equipment pulling it caterpillar-style over a bed of logs. It was too broad for a regular avenue's dimensions and since there was next to zero development there at the time and all the roads were dirt anyway they simply bulldozed a wider thoroughfare that never shrank.
The position of the CNC dormitories was partially dictated by cement bunkers that were too robust for demolition. They were just covered over with dirt, said Clare, and the residence buildings had to go where they are today because the bunkers were in the way.
Range Road by Costco and Peden Hill elementary school bears its name because it was the access to one of the main shooting galleries.
The current airport was situated by the American army, which sent a team of engineers and a staff of 200 to build and maintain it in, according to Makowsky's research, in the spirit of allied cooperation (namely the protection of Alaska from attacks similar to Pearl Harbour and a backup staging area in the event of an offensive launched from the Aleutian Islands). Prince George was far enough from the coast to be ready for any Maritime forces landing on Canada's shores, but close enough to dispatch planes to meet such an enemy.
"In short, Prince George was the heart of the entire northern coastal defense system," Makowsky said in his article.
Evaschuk is leaving as little to chance as possible. "I'm hoping there are people out there who can help me learn more about the history of this area. If anyone knows more, I'd love to hear about it," she said. "I have work to do and I'm going to do it, but I want to be as safe about it as I can be, and information will help."
Evaschuk can be contacted through Archer CRM Partnership at 250-562-0444.
