When we moved to Lee Creek in 1969, after driving our old truck and most of our possessions from Berkeley, Cal., the only person who lived nearby was Beatrice Riley.
The wife of Will Riley, an original Celista homesteader, Beatrice was a schoolteacher and a remarkable woman and could speak and write in seven languages. She shared our pacifist worldview, was enamoured with Bertrand Russell, dreamed of travelling to China and owned the former homestead of James Freeman, who was the father of Oliver Freeman, the patriarch of Lee Creek.
Beatrice lived near the highway in a vertical log cabin built by Emil Martinovsky, who arrived with his wife Eva after the Second World War and lived in a squared-timber house on the lake below Freeman Road. Emil owned a substantial amount of land in Lee Creek, had a sawmill above the creek and built a number of timber cabins along the lake that remain today. Emil and Eva also became good friends of ours and I worked with him building a timber ore loading facility in the early 1970s for a mining company that was operating on the Adams Plateau.
In May 1971, Beatrice informed us she sold the property to her son Mike’s company, Longview Developments, as she needed to move to Victoria to care for her daughter Ann, who was ill with cancer. In the early 1970s, residential subdivision developments were just beginning around the lake, as the Shuswap was becoming a popular place for vacation and retirement homes.
Mike had recently developed Lucerne Estates west of Anglemont and soon his bulldozer was carving out the hillside above Beatrice’s cabin.
Having fled city life to homestead in the “wilderness,” I was aghast to see the trees fall and the roads being built, knowing that houses and pavement would soon sprout up between us and the lake. We had been good friends with Mike, having enjoyed Christmas dinner with his family in 1970. That relationship soured when he and his major investor, Chase high school principal Tom Campbell, arrived on July 9, 1973, with his plans to build a road through five acres of our property to access the upper bench of proposed development.
Read more: Column: The 1980s were the golden years for the Lee Creek Harvest Festival
Read more: Column: Remembering the famed Lee Creek Harvest Festival
We also learned of his plans to block our only access with steel water tanks for the subdivision’s water system. At the time, our access was a forestry road that began at Freeman Road, which cut through Beatrice’s property and our property, and then carried up to the Adams plateau. This road was likely built in the late 1940s and as was typical then, it did not have legal easements through both the private properties and the Indian reserve. The ministry of forests was not pleased to see their road blocked, nor was BC Hydro as it was building the powerline from Mica Dam at this time, nor were the miners or our new neighbours who were in the process of homesteading the property above us.
Mike presented us with a plan that had been proposed by the forest service to build a massive road with two switchbacks that would take up the entire six acres of land we owned on the other side of the road and, in return, we would get a paved access and hydro. The alternative was no decent access. We attempted to get help from the government, but soon learned there was nothing they could do. At one point, the miners had a confrontation with Mike and tried to block his bulldozer, but of course they were no match with his powerful machine. After the tanks were installed, the only way we could drive into our properties was up a steep cat track along Mike’s property line we nicknamed “the ski jump.”
Eventually Mike built a new road around our property that joined the road through our neighbour’s land, which gave them access. We then either had to drive up the ski jump or park on the new dirt road and walk in. This road went through a new addition to the proposed subdivision, a property that Tom Campbell had purchased from Emil Martinovsky.
Soon, Mike and Tom approached us with a new plan that would provide access to both of our properties. He only needed one acre, which was unusable wetland, and in return we would have a paved road and power. After being cut off for over a year, there was no way we could turn it down and as soon as we signed the papers, as Mike and I became good friends again.
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