Generations: One family's history at the Stave Falls Powerhouse

The only way you’ll get Janis Schultz to leave the powerhouse is if she’s dead.

“I always tease them that they’re going to have to take my cold, dead body out,” she laughed.

Schultz has been a tour guide at the Stave Falls powerhouse north of Mission for 21 years, teaching students and visitors about the national historic site, its history, and surrounding community. But she has learned a lot as well— as the more time she spends at the powerhouse, the more she discovers about her own family history.

In the early 1900s, Schultz’s great-grandfather Albert Miller helped build the generating station. Her grandfather, Charles Miller, began working there as a labourer in the 1930s. And today, Schultz is taking on her family tradition to help shape the next chapter of the dam’s history.

Many of the historical details for this story came from the book Station Normal: The Power of the Stave River by Meg Stanley and Hugh Wilson. 

When Albert Miller and his family arrived at the Whonnock train station in 1903, the vast forests between Maple Ridge and Mission were on the cusp of change.

Miller had come to Canada from England, settling in Manitoba with his wife and infant boy before moving to the relatively unsettled forests near the Stave River. Having bought 160 acres of land from two brothers who were eager to move to South Africa, Miller established himself in Ruskin.

The rural settlement of Ruskin, just south of the Stave Falls, had its start in 1896 as a utopian commune based on the ideals of English social theorist John Ruskin, according to Station Normal. It was founded by the Canadian Co-operative Society, which aimed to create a small socialist community founded around a community sawmill. After just two years, the unsentimental realities of money lead to the mill’s demise, though the community and its name have endured.

(The site was near a former Kwantlen village; the smallpox epidemics in 1780s and 1800s decimated the Kwantlen people, who had three permanent settlements along the Stave River. The village near the confluence of the Fraser River was renamed Sky’ux, place of all the dead, after the smallpox epidemic.)

That early mill failure, though, was a historical blip. By the time Miller was establishing his home in the region, Ruskin was a commercial sawmill hub, with a post office and general store. And the Stave River was beginning a transition from a rugged natural watercourse to a significant power generating base.

The basin of Stave Lake, named for the local white pines that were logged and used as barrel staves, was carved by retreating glaciers 10,000 years ago. The Stave River poured out from the fast-flushing lake, cascading south through rocky outcrops to the Fraser River below. Stave Falls, located a little ways south of the lake, seemed predestined to host a powerhouse. At least, that was what one newspaper writer thought.

“The formation of the river … makes one wonder if an all wise Providence did not have an electrical power plant in mind when fashioning this part of the face of the earth,” Station Normal quoted an unnamed reporter as saying.

Burgeoning Canadian electric companies thought so too. In 1903, when Miller arrived in the region, the Stave Lake Power Company had secured water rights to the river and built a log cabin to house their surveyors and crews. Construction would continue in fits and starts—as financial backers came and went—until 1909, when building began in earnest under the auspices of Western Canada Power.

It’s not clear exactly when Miller joined the construction crew on Stave Falls, but he was among the more than 500 employees who helped transform a natural waterway into one of the Lower Mainland’s first hydro-electric plants.

The technology was still extremely new. Niagara Falls had only been dammed less than a decade earlier to test whether AC power could be sent 36km south to Buffalo, N.Y. BC Electric, through a subsidiary, had just finished building its powerhouse at Buntzen Lake in North Vancouver in 1904, and the company was sniffing around for other places to build hydro-electric stations.

The Stave River, with its fast-flowing waters and steep elevation drop, had the opportunity to be a major power generating source. But the initial dam construction was relatively modest. A concrete sluice dam blocking one of the river’s three natural channels had begun construction in 1907. Its completion diverted waters to a main intake dam through large pipes called penstocks. These penstocks took the water to the horizontal turbines, which generated the electricity transmitted by the powerhouse.

The Stave Falls generating station began operation in January 1912, providing power to residents north of the Fraser. At the time, it was the biggest power generating facility in western Canada.

With the creation of the dam, Ruskin had become home to two large industries: logging and hydro work. The Millers—after Albert’s stint building the dam—had chosen the former, with the family opening their own mill in 1921. That operation, by the nature of early 20th Century logging, was also temporary.

“We ran the mill until all the timber was logged out; then we sold it,” Charles Miller, Albert’s son, said.

Charles would have seen first-hand the significant changes the dam would have made to the region. A company town had sprung up just below the powerhouse, bringing hundreds of construction workers and their families to the region in his youth. (Later, the company town would house permanent hydro employees.) And after working at Ruskin’s general store and in local mills, Charles decided shortly after his marriage in 1925 that it was time to make the switch from wood to power.

Charles went to work building yet another dam downstream of the original Stave Falls generating station. The new Ruskin Dam was part of the expansion of the Stave Falls project under BC Electric, which merged with Western Canada Power in the early 1920s.

The Ruskin Dam was part of a multi-pronged project to increase the generating capacity of the Stave Falls powerhouse. BC Electric built a dam at the base of Alouette to raise the lake level, adding a tunnel to herd the waters into Stave Lake. At the place where the Alouette waters entered the Stave, workers built a powerhouse to generate electricity.

Not long after, Stave Lake's dams were raised to increase the capacity of the lake's reservoir; additional generators brought online soon afterwards boosted the amount of electricity that could be produced.

The Ruskin Dam, as part of this power-boosting strategy, was built at a narrow granite gorge in an attempt to capture the excess energy from the water below the Stave Falls station. Construction on the dam lasted only 20 months. When it was finished in 1930, water began to fill up the reservoir that would become Hayward Lake.

When Ruskin’s generating station began operations, Charles lost his construction position. But he walked to the dam every week to see if a permanent position had become available. When one finally did, while he was on vacation in North Thompson in 1931, he rushed back to snatch it up.

Charles worked at the Ruskin powerhouse for 32 years. According to Station Normal, he began his career as a saw filer, sharpening saws at the dam, and worked his way up to a supervisor of the crew that was responsible for maintaining the dam itself. Other sources say he started as a general labourer and ended his career as a labour foreman. Schultz herself remembers him as a carpenter. He never lived in the company town. Instead, he chose to commute each day from his home in Ruskin to its namesake dam.

Although his position would have been important in the day-to-day operations at the dam, his work did not define him.

Miller spent his life beside the ever changing infrastructure on the Stave River. He had always loved the outdoors, and would spend hours fishing in the Stave Valley. He wasn’t the only one inspired by the nature surrounding the dams. By the time Miller retired in 1963, Hayward Lake had become a popular recreation area, attracting anglers from Mission, Maple Ridge, and beyond.

Decades later, Schultz would observe that her grandfather seemed to enjoy a pleasant work-life balance.

“Every person that has talked about my grandfather, he taught them how to fish,” Schultz said. “I’m not sure he really worked.”

In fact, before she applied to work there herself, Schultz knew little about the place where her grandfather had worked for decades.

In the 1980s, BC Hydro had to make a decision. (BC Electric, which had operated the dam for decades, was eventually turned into a provincial Crown corporation.) The Stave Falls dam had become all but obsolete; with the construction of much-larger dams elsewhere in the province, its electricity wasn’t necessary to keep the lights on in the Lower Mainland.

The station was also inefficient; BC Hydro decided to build a new powerhouse nearby that could provide extra power during peak usage hours and act as an important backup if long-distance transmission lines ever broke down. Tunnels would transmit the water from Stave Falls and the original powerhouse to a new generating station.

Construction began in 1995. But no one had decided what should be done with the nearly 100-year-old powerhouse.

Options varied—at one point, BC Hydro considered just erecting a few signs and letting people walk around the outside of the building. But in 1998, the decision was made to turn the Stave Falls Powerhouse into a visitor centre and museum that would document the history of power generation in the Stave Valley, and teach new generations about how electricity gets made.

The visitor centre opened for the first time in 2002 and the first tour guides took visitors on guided explorations of the dam and its history. The following year, when the visitor centre was hiring for another season’s tour guides, Schultz’s mother pushed her to apply.

“I got hired, I think purely because of nepotism, because my mom told me to come down and apply because my grandpa worked here,” Schultz said.

Although Schultz credits nepotism for getting her in the door at the BC Hydro visitor centre, her family connections have also shaped the museum over the past 21 years.

In the powerhouse’s upper walkway, where visitors can look over the station’s five generators, there is an old desk among the glass-enclosed cases of artifacts. On the desk is Charles’ four-cent cheque, a cheque protector (a machine used to mechanically print the amount on cheques and prevent unauthorized alterations), a telephone, and Charles’ 25-year employee certificate.

“I brought them from my collection,” Schultz explained, looking at the items that had once been her grandfather’s. “I brought pictures and different things my grandfather had, because I thought they are better here in the museum.”

As the youngest of Charles’ six grandchildren, Schultz had heard only a little of his stories from the dam. He had already retired when Schultz was born, and had turned his attention to his life-long passions of fishing, outdoorsmanship, and local history. Charles’ passed away in 1988, but Schultz keeps learning more about her grandfather—often from stories brought by the visitors who used to work at Stave Falls or elsewhere.

These Power Pioneers, as they’re called, are the people who make Schultz’s job a delight.

One man, who had worked inside the powerhouse, hated polishing the brass rails on the stairs between the upper levels and the generators. So he would put the brass polish on rags, shove those under his armpits, and slide down the rails. Another former employee explained to Schultz and the other tour guides how to start the generators.

“It never gets boring, because you always find something new,” she said.

“It’s not just a generating station. It was actually people that worked here and their stories about what it was like to work here.”

Now a tour guide leader, Schultz is responsible for not just guiding school kids and other visitors through the history of the powerhouse, but also for managing staff in the building and liaising with guides at BC Hydro’s visitor centre in Revelstoke. (She is re-hired on a contract each spring when the centre opens for the season.)

“It is nice to know that I am part of what he was part of,” Schultz said about her grandfather. “I knew absolutely nothing about the history of this place, or how to make electricity. And it’s been constant learning.”

She said she will keep coming back to the powerhouse for as long as BC Hydro will have her. And each time they hire her back, she will open the centre doors and become enveloped in the same scent her grandfather and great-grandfather would have breathed in decades ago.

Oil. Dust. The hallmarks of two very different eras in the powerhouse’s history, and a connection between past and present.