There are many resources to use to find historical information. Three such resources are specific archival type items, old newspapers and photographs. There are others, of course, but for today's column let's just think about these three.
Many people have asked about Columbian College in New Westminster, a degree granting institute of higher learning that was located on First Street across from Queen's Park - think of the local street College Court. Last fall, there was an excellent presentation on this school, its formation, its management, its experience and then its demise in the 1930s.
To find out more about Columbian College and what it would have been like to attend classes there, one additional resource offers some special insight. This resource? A school calendar. A booklet that laid out for the prospective student how to enrol, the courses of study, details of accommodation, semester programming, images of the school and all those other things that fill a college student's year. These calendars, while not common, are available and offer valuable information.
We have frequently talked of old newspapers and will do so again. They are an incredible resource, and the early local papers offer a fantastic array of information. But there are also newspapers from other places that talk of this town. An example of such a paper is Toronto's Saturday Globe from November 1891.
This paper, founded in 1844, became The Globe and Mail in 1936 after a merger with another publication, but the November 1891 edition gave its Ontario readers a look at a growing city in the far west, a city that had a promising future - New Westminster, British Columbia. The issue included a photo essay of the city showing numerous buildings that would unfortunately disappear in the Royal City's Great Fire of 1898. It is an excellent selection of images, many hard to find, presenting an interesting look at our city as others saw it.
On their own, photographs are a valuable historical resource. The photos in the previously mentioned Toronto paper are wonderful to see, and some are not available elsewhere. The most recent books on New Westminster focus on photographs, and we use photos constantly in our work to answer questions and tell stories. We will occasionally carry photos on walking tours. Sometimes the old image is clear enough to allow bits of the print to be reproduced as a close-up to tell a separate story. Photos truly are an incredible and often underestimated resource.
If you want to find out more about these resources, where to find them, and the story they tell about Columbian College, the Saturday Globe story of 1891 New Westminster, and some intriguing close-up photos (early store windows and interiors) come to the historical society program, Wednesday, May 16, starting at 7: 30 p.m. in the New Westminster Public Library auditorium.
