Cassiar, British Columbia

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For other places with the same name, see Cassiar.

Cassiar is a ghost town in British Columbia, Canada, located at 59°17′20″N, 129°50′45″W. It was a small company-owned mining town nestled in the Cassiar Mountain Range of Northern British Columbia. After forty years of operation, the mine was unexpectedly forced to close in 1992. The closure was driven by a combination of factors including diminished demand for asbestos and expensive complications faced after converting from an open-pit mine to an underground mine. Most of the contents of the town, including a few houses, were sold off and trucked away. Most of the houses were bull-dozed and burned to the ground. Today the streets are bare and flowers bloom where the houses once stood. Residents living between the townsite and the Stewart-Cassiar Highway, and on the highway itself, who originally obtained phone service from the Cassiar exchange, were moved to the nearby Good Hope Lake exchange in fall 2006 and the Cassiar exchange shut down.

The town, which had a population of 1,500 in its heyday, had a school, two churches, a small hospital, a theatre, swimming pool, recreation centre and a hockey rink. Though neglected and now in disrepair the Catholic Church and hockey arena were still standing in 2005. The tramline which transported ore from the mine down the mountainside to the mill was purchased in the auction but the buyer left it and it still stands.

The four old apartment blocks at the east end of town are operational for ongoing site reclamation work. They are currently being utilised as of November 2006 by mining exploration companies conducting underground gold mining at Table Mountain (formerly Erickson Gold) and base metal exploration in the immediate area. There is also seasonal jade mining from the Cassiar waste dumps.