The Coffee Creek coffeehouse

Years ago I came across something odd in one of the Dorothy’s Stormy Lake books: mention of a coffeehouse (or teahouse) at Coffee Creek.

The five-volume series reprints letters and journal entries written between 1930 and 1966 by Dorothy Graham Brown, who lived at Walkers Landing (now the site of Yasodahra Ashram) on Kootenay Lake’s East Shore.

Nathan Wilkinson illustration/@nathancomics

Unfortunately, I couldn’t remember which volume I saw the reference in and the books aren’t indexed, so I was slightly worried I hallucinated it. Fortunately, Dorothy’s daughter Brenda Dau, who compiled the series with her sister Joan Wooliver, searched the text for me and found the passage in question.

It was on page 35 of the fifth volume, dated Oct. 12, 1950. Dorothy reported that she, husband Bobby, and their daughters took their launch across the lake and had a “happy picnic” at Coffee Creek after “wanting to get over there for a very long time.”

Four years ago a man bought all the property round the creek with the idea of developing it. As we no longer ever go to Nelson via Ainsworth and that road we had not seen the changes. On the beach there is a little storage cabin. We have seen the building from here and have wondered just what it was. They were several all aluminum boats on the beach. They have made a very good trail right up to the road. We walked all the way and were quite astounded to find a complete house and tearoom, etc., with building almost finished along the creek but nearly at the road. We looked in the windows and it is well finished. We walked about and had a chat with the owners. The older man who owns it seems to have his daughter and her husband running the place. There were masses of cats and dogs about and we actually brought home a dear little grey kitten. We just couldn’t resist. We also bought half a lemon cream pie to add to our tea. We came back and had tea.

Like Dorothy, I was also astounded to learn about this given Coffee Creek is in a canyon with no obvious place for a house or business, at least near the highway. The road makes a hairpin curve down to the bridge and back up again against sheer bluffs.

1950s postcard of Coffee Creek. (Orrell photo/Greg Nesteroff collection)

Coffee Creek was listed in the civic directory from 1898 to 1900 as a “mining camp near Ainsworth” but only one resident was listed, William Lynch, manager of the Taylor air compressor plant. Directories also listed a sternwheeler landing there from 1918 to 1948 but no residents. A steep trail goes down to the lake from the north side but there is no road on either side.

“I do have rather vague childhood memories of being in a little eating place near the old narrow winding road at Coffee Creek, so it definitely existed,” Brenda Dau told me. “It seemed to me, as a small child, a long walk up to the road from the beach.”

(The coffeehouse and creek name were coincidental but delightful. Coffee Creek was first mentioned in 1888 and is believed to have described the creek’s muddy water.)

Dorothy provided enough information in her journal entry that it didn’t take long using the digitized Nelson Daily News to identify the coffeehouse’s proprietors. They were Joseph Fiala, his daughter Alice, and her husband Sven Hallgren. What follows is drawn from obituaries and other sources.

Joseph Fiala (also spelled or misspelled Fialla, Faila, and Fiela) was born in Russia around 1887 and came to Canada as a child. He lived at Esterhazy and Rosetown, Sask. and from 1928-42 was an electrician in Winnipeg.

He and wife Margaret had a daughter, Alice Viola, born in Saskatchewan in 1915, who became a hairstylist in Winnipeg. Alice’s husband Sven was a native of Skellefteå, Sweden who immigrated to Canada in 1925. I don’t know when they met or married, but thereafter Alice often used her maiden name as her first name and went by Fiala Hallgren. They came to BC in 1942 along with her father, who logged at Campbell River, while her mother stayed in Winnipeg.

(Greg Nesteroff collection)

Around 1946 or ’47, Sven, Alice, and Joseph moved to Coffee Creek, where Sven had mining interests. He eventually bought about 40 claims around Ainsworth. As peculiar a location as it was for a home and business, Alice put her entrepreneurial flair to work. Her obituary explained: “[A]t Coffee Creek … Alice operated a ‘coffee house’ while Sven prospected — more than once Alice had to set out overnight to find Sven when he did not return on time from his mountain sojourns.”

The first mention of their enterprise was in the Kaslo Kootenaian of July 15, 1948: “Sven Halgren [sic] of Coffee Creek Lunch Services was a business visitor to Kaslo Monday.”

Then, according to the Daily News of Dec. 31, 1949, when a bus carrying a dozen people from Kaslo to Nelson was blocked by a snowslide, “The party stayed at a Coffee Creek resort several hours thawing out and waiting for plows to clean the road.” We aren’t told anything else about the resort and if the Hallgrens advertised anywhere, I haven’t found it.

Our next insight appears in the July 7, 1950 issue of The Prospector, a Catholic newspaper published in Nelson. Father Joseph Boyle wrote in his “Kootenay Kopy” column:

Sven Hallgren is the renowned proprietor of Coffee Creek Resort … One of Sven’s tourist attractions is the privilege of prospecting; you get all the scientific equipment and skilled instructions “on the house” … Guests at the Resort are often confused when they pick up a copy of The Prospector. Expecting to find it a print about mining and the doings of the hills, they shake their heads and blink their eyes and begin to ask questions. For the majority, it is the first time they have ever looked into the pages of a Catholic paper.

So it was a resort, coffeehouse/teahouse, lunch service, and school for prospectors … or some combination thereof.

And Sven was renowned! Although by whom, Father Boyle didn’t tell us. A week later, Boyle filed “another dispatch from Coffee Creek Resort where a character called Nogy keeps a perfectly good typewriter for the use of prospective prospectors …” But aside from identifying one of his fellow guests as a justice of the peace from Edmonton on a fishing trip, he said nothing else about the resort.

In the 1953 civic directory, the Hallgrens were listed under Ainsworth, with Sven described as a mine operator and Alice as running a coffee shop. And that, in addition to Dorothy Graham Brown’s memoir, is the entirety of our direct knowledge about the Coffee Creek coffeehouse. However, we can make a few deductions about its location.

In 1950, Sven staked the Belle Aire claim, a relocation of an older claim, described variously in mining reports as “astride Coffee Creek, adjacent to the bridge”; “north of Coffee Creek where the Balfour-Ainsworth highway crosses the creek,”; “within 250 feet of the Coffee Creek bridge”; and “just above the Coffee Creek bridge on the Nelson-Kaslo highway.” This isn’t the current bridge but an earlier one-lane crossing a little to the west that was in use until 2007. Its abutments are still there.

Four views of the old Coffee Creek bridge in May 2000. It was replaced in 2007 with the bridge seen below, but the old abutments are still visible.

Sven built another small bridge to access an old tunnel “on the north side of Coffee Creek at about high-water mark” and in 1950, he trucked a four-ton shipment to the Trail smelter that produced eight ounces of silver, 722 pounds of lead, and 61 pounds of zinc.

It was said the Hallgrens lived “on the south side of Coffee Creek near the showings.” Presumably the coffeehouse/resort was also on that side.

Sven continued to work the mine intermittently until 1958 but there is no sign of any other shipments. He was careless with dynamite and was fined $100 under a little-used law for failing to dispose of explosives after leaving 10 boxes at the mine site that an RCMP officer noticed.

A Montana man then took an option on the mine. As of 1968, it belonged to Grenmac Silver Mines Ltd. of Vancouver, who did some diamond drilling but don’t seem to have shipped any ore.

Joseph Fiala died at Coffee Creek in 1953, age 66, and that may have spelled the end of the resort/coffeehouse. In 1956, Alice resumed her former profession as a hairdresser. She started in Nelson at Haigh Tru-Art at 576 Baker Street (now Root 99) before taking over Rose Beauty Parlor at 508 Ward Street and renaming it Fiala’s for Beauty. She then moved the business to 532 Ward (now Scout Clothing) and later ran it out of her home at 815 Baker.

Ad from 1959 Nelson civic directory

Alice was a perennial winner of hairdressing competitions, something that happened locally in those days, and had a daily five-minute radio segment on CKLN called Beauty Notes From Fiala. She was also described as a “science fiction authority” and an “ardent apiarist.”

One day while leaving her salon with some of her models to attend a fashion show, her bees started to swarm. As a friend described it: “[W]hile models dashed about in all their finery; rollers parting from their hair; the ever vigilant Alice — much to the amazement of everyone — quickly sought out and captured the queen and coaxed the workers back to the apiary, located on the front balcony of her Baker Street salon.”

Nelson Daily News, June 21, 1956

Nelson Daily News, June 11, 1964

Sven Hallgren died in Nelson in 1978, age 76, only five years after retirement, survived by Alice, his daughter Florence, and three grandchildren. Alice died in Nelson in 1996, age 80, survived by her partner Lawrence Miller.

In 1987, 52 hectares around the mouth of Coffee Creek was added to Kootenay Lake Provincial Park, along with three other non-adjacent sites at Kaslo Bay, Campbell Bay, and Midge Creek. (Davis Creek and Lost Ledge are also part of this park but Kaslo Bay was inexplicably removed in 1990.)

It’s not clear how Coffee Creek’s inclusion came about. Did Alice still own the property until then? Did she donate it?

Most of the protected area, also known as Coffee Creek Marine Park, is on the south side of the creek but it is on both sides of the highway. I haven’t been down to the creek mouth but no signage exists on the highway indicating you are passing through a park.

BC Parks prepared a purpose statement for the site in 2003 that offered no history but described ”a secluded beach area” with a “small bay along the foreshore and fishing opportunities at the outlet of Coffee Creek” that made it a “desirable stopover for multi-day kayaking trips.”

It added: “The provincial park no longer has vehicle access because of a recent major mud/debris slide on the lower sections of the Coffee Creek Forest Service Road. The lack of vehicle access has increased the site’s popularity as a destination for boaters.”

I thought the forest service road only headed west from the south side of the creek, not toward the lake. When two of Sven Hallgren’s rowboats were stolen from their berth in 1964, it was noted “As there is no access road to the beach it appears they were towed away by another boat.” In any event, the forest service road was deactivated in 2007, around the time the present bridge was built.

My best guess is the house/resort/coffeehouse was somewhere off the forest service road, but Dorothy Graham Brown described it as “along the creek but nearly at the road” meaning just below the highway. Staring at the area on Google Earth is inconclusive. Ultimately I can’t say precisely where the Hallgren place was and don’t know what happened to it.

A few months ago I tracked down Sven’s daughter Florence, who lives in Victoria and was very surprised to get a call from someone asking about her father. She told me she visited him a couple of times at Coffee Creek in the 1950s and recalls a house as well as a bunkhouse for men working at the mine (maybe that was the so-called resort?) but she has no memory of a coffeehouse.