Morden Colliery Historic Provincial Park is a provincial park in British Columbia, Canada.
Morden Colliery Historic Provincial Park protects features of Vancouver Island’s rich coal mining history. This small, undeveloped day-use park contains the only remaining coal tipple on the Island. This concrete tipple was built in the early 1900s by the Pacific Coal Company, and was the first of its kind in the region. The tipple is all that remains of the Morden Coal Mine, which once thrived here. The first sod was turned at this mine in 1912; in its first year of operation the mine produced 76,000 tonnes of coal.
The Regional District of Nanaimo maintains a trail that runs through the park to the Nanaimo River along a historic railway right-of-way.
Park Size: 4 hectares
Morden Colliery Historic Provincial Park is located 7 km south of Nanaimo on southern Vancouver Island. Access to the park is off Hwy 1 on Morden Road. The parking lot for Morden Colliery is also used as the trailhead for the regional district.
Visitor Safety: The area around the coal tipple is fenced off for public safety. Access inside the fenced area is prohibited .
There are no developed trails within Morden Colliery Historic Park, however the Regional District of Nanaimo maintains a trail that runs through the park to the Nanaimo River.
Interpretive signage at the parking lot offers more information about the mine site.
Famous quotes containing the words historic, provincial and/or park:
“Never is a historic deed already completed when it is done but always only when it is handed down to posterity. What we call “history” by no means represents the sum total of all significant deeds.... World history ... only comprises that tiny lighted sector which chanced to be placed in the spotlight by poetic or scholarly depictions.”
—Stefan Zweig (18811942)
“In sci-fi convention, life-forms that hadn’t developed space travel were mere prehistory—horse-shoe crabs of the cosmic scene—and something of the humiliation of being stuck on a provincial planet in a galactic backwater has stayed with me ever since.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)
“The park is filled with night and fog,
The veils are drawn about the world,”
—Sara Teasdale (1884–1933)