Ruins of the Forgotten City | Beautiful Abandoned Mansion | Canadas Forgotten Past.

[Music] if you walk along the beach there you probably have no idea the history that's hiding in the forest right beside you being the oldest site on vancouver island there's not really that much left to see but when i first saw the ruins of the old manager's house i could tell there was something pretty remarkable here this house had beautiful paneling inside and lovely staircase that went up to the second story bedroom with a view from the deck no road access in the 1920s in the early days of it it was all by ship so these people were very very isolated [Music] the fact that it is so remote i think is why the remaining ruins are still in such good condition it's a hundred years later and yes there is one road that goes there now but for whatever reason nobody visits the north island and it's a shame because it's such a beautiful spot ever since i was a kid all i wanted to be was an explorer sail the seven seas find new worlds but uncle d everything's already been found what like everything well yeah oh man well so much for that but if i can't be an explorer i can still be an adventurer so i bought a motorhome and i'm hitting the open road my name is dustin porter and this is destination adventure [Music] it's been a while since the old girls seen some dirt road but we're trying to find a place today that was another local recommendation there's no cell phone service here so i'm kind of just trying to find it on the maps i don't know see if we can find it we're on the right road but it's getting a little bit tight for the motorhome so i'm going to find a spot to park out here and then just take the bike in don't get stolen there is a massive stone structure up here my first visit to souq wash was kind of a funny one because i had never heard of it before a local had just told me about it and i didn't even have cell phone reception to research but when i saw it i completely fell in love and that set into motion what ended up being a very difficult task trying to find somebody to talk to that knew the history of it souquash is is a native word from up here and it from what i understand from my research it means where seal meat is cut into strips and at low tide there's large boulders that you can see out in front of the ocean there and that's even to today you can see where seals crawl up on those rocks so the first nations people would paddle down from fort rupert and they'd club these seals and then drag their bodies up on the shore and they would cut the meat into strips and then they would take it back and i presume they would smoke it like they did the fish and whatnot and and hang it in their long houses and that would last them you know throughout the winter when the hudson's bay company arrived in around the late 1840s early 1850s they were looking for a site to trade frozen and so they they built a fort at fort rupert the natives saw them with this coal that they were burning on their steamships and told them that they were just south of where the fort rupert was where their where their village was there was a spot where this coal was available right on the beach so the hudson's bay company went down there and sure enough there were deposits of coal outcrops of coal right on the beach i've been to a lot of old coal mines and i've never seen something quite like what bob is describing but at souquash the coal is actually coming up out of the sand literally in sheets and i don't know why they didn't harvest it back in the day but you can go there today and still see sheets of coal sticking up out of the sand 1849 to 1850 circa apparently there's about 11 tons of coal that was mined from there and shipped now because at low tide it's impossible to get a big ship in there they had the natives from port rupert came down and they manually put the coal into the dugout canoes and they paddled it back out to where the ship was and apparently they had native women pulling up on baskets up and putting this coal onto the ship was very labor intense is very slow around the same time around 1850 51 dunsmere they discovered coal and nanaimo what made nanaimo coal much more profitable for them it was a much harder coal it was anthracite coal and the coalette souquash was bituminous it was a my father-in-law who used to work on the railway and steam engines said that they called it clinker cold so if you took a hammer or a rock and you hit a piece of the chunk of it it would kind of flake off slough off and it meant that you couldn't maintain a really hot temperature and you needed that for a steam engine what they did at souquash is they built a coking oven and it was made with yellow firebrick some of them are still on the beach there and they would coke the coal which meant they would burn that excess sulfur off and it made it it's like the difference between burning maybe a soft wood and a hardwood it made it much better for for their end purpose in the 1930s when suquash had closed down the finnish settlers from santula malcolm island came over and they saw that this yellow firebrick could be used and so they they knocked these chimneys to this chimney down and they took it back and i've talked to people i've worked with who said that you'll still see on some of these homes over there where they have in their backyards these uh saunas that are built with the yellow firebricks from the souquash mine what else was at zooquash there was a two-story manager's frame house there and it had an absolutely magnificent chimney which is still there now in 100 years old over 100 years old built by scottish stone masons and with using river rock and the the concrete cement that they used or mortar is still holding those stones into place and it's right close to the ocean it's exposed to sunlight and the salt water and it hasn't deteriorated over the years finding the ruins to the manager's house that's what made me fall in love with this place as you can probably tell from my intro i've always dreamed of finding a place long and forgotten and i think this is the closest i've ever felt to that experience and it's amazing because we just don't have stone ruins here in in british columbia anyways yet here's this beautiful piece of european masonry just left and forgotten the thing that amazes me is the quality of that structure the um the brickwork the mortar the stones are in the same shape they would have been over a hundred years hasn't deteriorated at all despite the fact that they've been exposed to ultraviolet light in the the salt [Music] there's enough left of the ruins that you can still pretty much map out the way that the house used to sit you can see the separation between each floor you can see the location and the pitch of the roof you can see all the pillars that went around that would have had a big wraparound deck and in front of the house just along the edge of the cliff i was able to spot what i'll describe is i guess two half moons and it's really hard to tell because they're very overgrown but if you lean far enough over the edge of the cliff which i don't recommend you can actually see that they're man-made and they're stone of course there's no record of any of this but i kind of think that they would have been gardens off each corner of the deck i have a reminiscence of a young girl whose father was the manager of the telegraph cove sawmill she was commenting on that fact that a mine manager must be paid a lot more than a mill manager because the interior of the house was so much nicer than hers her walls were lined with sawdust and they had soda stoves to keep them warm this house had beautiful paneling inside and lovely staircase that went up to the second story bedroom with a view from the deck and unfortunately uh it was burned down when there was no records to indicate it actually was burned down but the chimney is still there and there's two sets of fireplaces one at different levels the first story level the second story level so it must have been absolutely incredible another thing that i'm noticing with this chimney is the different types of rocks it's just cement down into what would have been the basement and then you have like a brick layer and then above that before you get into the second second story it does get into this like cobblestone and then it continues as cobblestone throughout the second floor and then once you get on to what would have been i i'm assuming the roof uh there's a different kind of stone again like a flat rock this one is the same all the way up just remarkable place then you turn around and have this unbelievable view one thing i learned from an engineer who's a chief engineer for port mcnail and uh he went out there to take a look and there's this there's a steam boiler there what we would call a steam donkey with a huge piston it's mounted on a concrete base which is kind of crumbled away now but it's pointing towards a an open pit which is likewise kind of crumbling away but he pointed out to me that the drums on there that would pull the men and the ore up are tapered the one at the front is tapered like the back spokes of a say a 10 speed bike and i had no idea what that was for and he said well it allowed a gear ratio and there's levers there so they could actually change like your derailleur on a 10-speed bike changes the chain over to a smaller sprocket size they were able to do that so if they were lowering men down they didn't need they were just gravity would take the crews down but when they or when they brought the crews up with an empty carriage that's different but with their bringing up a ton or so of coal they needed that extra gear ratio to help them bring that weight up [Music] to properly explore souquash i think you would need days and for me unfortunately i only had hours but exploring here really feels like you're discovering something new because everywhere you go there's ruins that are hidden by a blanket of moss and ferns and you'll only find them if you're really looking for them and that's exactly how i like it [Music] oh my gosh this place is unbelievable oh my gosh [Music] i feel like i'm in another country right now look at this wall oh wow this is amazing tripping right here but i think this might be original foundation i don't want to move that brick but oh i can see so much more through the trees here one thing i'm noticing in this whole area is these trenches all over the place now this is a building here foundation but i'm not sure what the purpose is of the the moat going around it oh it's full of water i wonder if maybe this could be a well huh now she's sealed up pretty tight nothing leaking out and it is cement huh hmm that's bottom right there strange wow wow this place is amazing look at this something funny is about to happen about to find the fourth time accidentally geocache i've never actually been geocaching this is the fourth one i found on accident let's see what's in this baby wow it's definitely the fullest one i've ever seen some money just assorted things huh august 5th 2018. that's when they put it here that's cool let's keep exploring all right here we go huh wow on the trail back to the road you're going to find two more artifacts that you rarely see left at a mine and that is a pair of head frames these would have sat right at the entrance to a mine shaft and fed the ore cars in and out that was definitely a neat find but i only had time to stop for a few shots because unfortunately the sun was already going down and i really wanted to see if there was anything left on the beach there's a black bear just sitting on the rock over here watching me i don't want to stick around too long he's keeping a pretty close eye on me here just sitting there watching me thank you guys so much for watching i hope you enjoyed this video i hope you learned something and a special thank you to all of my patrons that make these adventures and these videos possible i've got a lot of messages lately from people asking where i've been and i do apologize for my absence over the last couple of months but the two episodes before this york island and minto those were kind of trial run episodes for me because i wanted to start producing some something a little bit more professional on the channel and i got an overwhelmingly positive response from that so i've taken the last couple months to really start planning how this summer is going to go i kind of want to get away from the short little vlog style episodes and a lot more of these actually produced episodes this is what i really enjoy doing this is where my background is and you guys seem to love it so i do apologize for my absence over the last couple months but i promise you there is a whole bunch of really really fun stuff coming this summer so stay tuned and thanks for enjoying [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Destination Adventure

Views: 10,931

Rating: 4.9737706 out of 5

Keywords: Destination Adventure, abandoned, lost, forgotten, history, discovered, urbex, historical, Nat Geo, National Geographic, Documentary, adventure, explore, BC, British Columbia, Canada, Suquash, Vancouver Island, found

Id: wryYFaZNSq4

Length: 21min 0sec (1260 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 27 2021