Rare Nelson gas works photo sells for $305

An amazing photograph of the Nelson Coke and Gas Works under construction in 1900 sold on eBay this week for $219.29 US ($305 Cdn). For some reason, photos of unfinished buildings from that era, even of major landmarks, are extremely hard to come by, so this is a real gem.

The gas works in the 600 block of Railway Street was comprised of three main structures: the retort house, now home to Selkirk Veterinary Hospital; a meter and governor house that is now city-owned; and the gasometer tank, which is long gone.

The photo shows the south section of the stone retort building near completion and scaffolding surrounding the north section that is still under construction. The massive tank appears nearly finished. A CPR boxcar sits on a temporary spur line and stone and lumber are piled all over the place.

The facility took coal from the Crow’s Nest Pass and cooked it in ovens to release gas that was sold mainly for cooking and heating although a few hotels reportedly used gas lighting and the gas works itself was lit with gas lamps.

The cornerstone was laid on Dec. 13, 1899 although it bears a date of Jan. 1, 1900 and, rather unusually, identifies the builder: the Economical Gas Apparatus Construction Co. Ltd. of Toronto and England. The gas works was designed and engineered by L.L. Merrifield and David Morris and built under the supervision of George McFarland using stone from a quarry on Hall Mines Road. The south side of the retort house was home to brick ovens and a steam boiler. The north side had a scrubbing and condensing room and purifying house.

By 1907, the business was diversified to sell byproducts including roofing pitch, creosote, and tarpaper. However, the company ran into trouble with mortgage payments. The buildings defaulted in 1913 to the Economical Gas Apparatus Construction Co., which then sold them to the City of Nelson, which in turn ran the gas service until 1956, when Inland Natural Gas took over and bought or leased the meter house.

Nelson Tribune, March 8, 1900

(Fun fact: Frank Stringer was superintendent of the Nelson Gas Works from 1914 until his retirement in 1948, whereupon his son, Frank Jr., replaced him. Frank the younger continued as operations manager with Inland.)

However, by the time of the Inland deal, the retort house had not been used for gas-making for several years. In 1949, the city decided to switch to a propane service and soon after converted the old building into a garage/public works warehouse. When it proved unsuitable, the city put it up for sale in 1952, following a referendum that passed easily.

Local businessman M.F. (Kelly) Ozelle was the lone bidder at the minimum price of $9,000. The deal required him to demolish part of the building, “thereby eliminating the traffic hazard existing at the blind corner at Railway Street and Government Road.”

The partial destruction of a heritage building (although the term wasn’t yet in local use) didn’t set off any alarm bells, for according to a Nelson Daily News editorial:

Improvements of the city’s west entrance alone argues for disposal of the gas works building. When it is considered that present proposals would make it revenue producing and that stone from [the] dismantled building would be available for other city construction projects the value of the move is further enhanced.

Work in September 1953 resulted in about 25 feet being cut off the retort building, which Ozelle converted into a warehouse and truck terminal for his business, Kelly’s Cartage. As Bob Inwood explained in Fall 1981 issue of Heritage West magazine:

Fortunately the new owner hired a stonemason of considerable skill to handle the alteration and the removed end of the structure was rebuilt of granite. Unfortunately, the elderly stoneworker took sick and the rock work was only completed to a 15-foot height, necessitating that the remaining area be filled with metal siding.

Therefore only about half of the stone building seen in the construction photo at top is still standing. A contract to demolish the old gasometer tank was also issued in December 1954.

Inwood said the old gas works remained a “dingy, drafty” place until 1978 when a group of visionaries known as the Nelson District Heritage Conservation and Recreation Society bought the retort building and began its restoration.

At some point Inland Gas had stopped using the old meter and governor house but in 1979 the company moved its administration office back there and embarked upon a restoration that Inwood guided. That same year the gas works buildings became the first two in Nelson to receive municipal heritage designations (there are only 10 others).

The retort house, numbered 612-614 Railway, became Gasworks Antiques and over the years was also home to Moss Glass Works, Jody’s Classical Glass, Justine’s Restaurant, Nelson Home Brewery, Art of Brewing, and Cabinets Plus, among other businesses.

The gas works buildings circa late 1970s or early 1980s. I do not know what business was associated with the Heritage shingle above. (Al Peterson photos)

More views of the gas works buildings in the 1980s. (Al Peterson photos)

The southernmost part of the building has been Selkirk Veterinary Hospital since the early 1990s. In 2021, the building was the subject of a major adaptive reuse project that saw the vet clinic expanded into the vacant space where the Art of Brewing used to be and the upper level renovated to add two new residential suites.

The gas works buildings today.

I’m not sure when Inland Gas (later BC Gas) left the meter house/administration building at 610 Railway, but the property reverted back to the City of Nelson. It has been offices for Timberland Consultants and Madburn Enterprises, but mostly it’s been vacant. In 2017, the city received $100,000 from the Columbia Basin Trust for exterior restoration but the money was redeployed to Civic Centre upgrades. The gas works project was back burnered but went ahead a few years later.

Back to the old photo at top: at least two homes in the background are still standing, one of which I have written about before, the Home Private Hospital. The other is at 203 Victoria Street and is now the Victoria Falls Guest House.

The photo’s seller was in East Longmeadow, Massachusetts. It never ceases to amaze me how anything can be anywhere.

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Another interesting thing about the photo is that its creator stamped his name on the back: O.B. Jacobson of Nelson.

I’d never heard of him, but a little bit of poking around online revealed him to be Osval B. Jacobson, born in 1874 in Iowa to Jacob and Inger Jacobson, both Norwegian immigrants. The family was living in Tacoma by the late 1890s.

Osval’s younger brother John came to Nelson first, in 1898, and was listed in the 1899-1900 civic directory as proprietor of a flour and feed store on east Vernon Street. Osval followed in 1899 and brought his fiancee, Ruth Jeannette Brown. Their wedding on July 17 of that year earned a mention in the Nelson Daily Miner:

On Monday evening at the Methodist parsonage Oval [sic] B. Jacobson and Miss Jeanette Brown of Tacoma were united in marriage by Rev. John Robson, B.A. Mr. Jacobson is a photographer and artist and proposes making Nelson his home.

According to the civic directory, their home was on Stanley at the corner of Silica, which at the time would have been the Royal Hotel.

Jacobson didn’t advertise his services anywhere that I can see and wasn’t otherwise mentioned in the newspapers. However, one other photo has been attributed to him, showing the Hall Mines smelter in 1899. It was extensively reproduced on postcards.

Jacobson didn’t stick around Nelson long. He and his wife appear on the 1901 census but neither he nor his brother were listed in the civic directory that year. He moved to Spokane, where he was listed in 1904 working for the Brown and Jacobson Lumber Co., which I presume had a family connection. He went back to Tacoma the following year and picked up his camera again. He ran a photo studio there at 1128 Pacific Avenue, an address that had previously been home to several other professional shutterbugs.

Then tragedy. On Feb. 1, 1906, Osval died at Glovers Hospital, a sanitarium in Tacoma’s Fern Hill neighbourhood. The cause was not indicated in his obituary. He was 31. Despite the fact he was a photographer, we have no portrait of him. He was survived by his wife and one child, about whom I haven’t been able to learn anything. His widow continued to run the photo studio for at least a year, but after that I can’t find any trace of her.

When Osval’s brother John and his wife Adelaide had a son in 1908, they named him Osval. While Osval the elder had once gone to British Columbia to seek his fortune, in 1932 Osval the younger went to Colombia, where he worked for the coffee department of W.R. Grace & Co.

He too met with tragedy. On Aug. 8, 1939, he died at Bogota of a sudden illness. Like his namesake, he was 31 and survived by a wife and a child. Unlike his namesake, a photo of him exists, taken from a college yearbook and seen here.