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Tough Times for History
by Debi Osborne
Since its inception in the fall of 1988, the Morice Bulkley Heritage Museum Society (MBHMS) has experienced everything from high spirits to hardship. Once numbering 138 members, the small group continues to meet the first Monday of every month and has become the epitome of the word tenacious.

Like the first pioneers, they work in uncharted territory, sometimes going backward as well as forward.

Some of the Founding Members

(photos courtesy of the MBH Museum Society)
It began as a passion for two men, the late Harold Thornton and former Society President Lloyd Gething, a Fraser Lake man working at the Telkwa Coal Mine. The dream was to build a miniature "Barkerville" in the Morice-Bulkley area. With machinery and times changing faster than the weather, they realized the need to protect and preserve the ways of the past and envisioned a large park with working box car loading machines, shake makers and sawmills used in the '40s and a simulated coal mine time tunnel. There would be footpaths joining five categories showing examples of mining, forestry, farming, pioneer and native life and the railroad. Visitors would feel transported to the year 1904.
Footpaths joining the categories
Three pioneer homes would be relocated to the park and display collected antique artifacts. A 90 by 40 foot farm implement shed could be built to store horse drawn seeders, hayrakes, freight sleighs and wagons.

The estimated cost of the first phase was $294,000 and plans were scheduled to open in the summer of 1991.

Optimism abounded.

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