Welcome to the North Ruckle Project.

This project is a work in progress towards a comprehensive history of the North Ruckle area of the city of Grand Forks, B.C. Go here to see what might be coming.

Background

Grand Forks has been an official ‘city’ since 1897. The Ruckle subdivision got its name from how it started out – as a farm homesteaded by the Ruckle brothers in that same year of 1897.

Eventually, in 1970, this area became part of the city.

The residential parts of Ruckle are called North Ruckle and South Ruckle.


The Flood

In 2018 the city experienced a once-in-200-years flood that inundated the North Ruckle area after the dike was breached.

A number of areas of the city were flooded and houses in those areas have been removed or repaired and the areas are still useable. But the result with North Ruckle was a decision to turn it into a floodable greenspace.

This meant that:

  • all the properties were to be purchased by the city
  • the houses and infrastructure removed
  • the in-place dike removed
  • the ground profile tailored to purpose
  • a new dike installed to protect the rest of Ruckle

It is now February 2022.
Only the first step has taken place. All but 2 residencies are empty.
By April 1st of this year the ones in the way of the to be constructed dike will be gone. By fall all the buildings will have been removed.

By this time 2 years from now a new visitor to Grand Forks won’t see any remnants of a residential area.

This is History happening to us – we, as a community, are living through this.

Who is doing this?

My name is Les Johnson and this is my little project – to capture North Ruckle before it goes away completely and present that, along with the history, in a way that makes it accessible to everyone, at any time, on the web.

History is something I have an interest in.
My first job here in Grand Forks was at the Boundary Museum.
I’ve been involved with local history ever since.

  • When the City and Boundary Museum parted ways I was the last employee at the museum
  • first owner and operator of the website boundarymuseum.com
  • sometime volunteer support person at the museum
  • Past President, and Lifetime Member, of the Boundary Historical Society
  • layout person and producer of the last 3 Historical Society reports
  • creator of the Historical Society’s website boundaryhistory.com

In my other role (I had gftv.ca) I made sure everyone could see and hear almost everything that happened during the flood and after by recording and / or broadcasting all media scrums, public meetings, and whatever happened that impacted the community.
So I’ve got material to share and a place to share it – the web.

As 2021 came in, and the end of the last vestiges of the community drew closer, I felt that someone needed to do something to capture as much of the community of North Ruckle as could be collected before it goes away completely.

The work so far

So last year (2021) I’ve did two periods of image capture:

  • Earlier in the year (May/June) I travelled North Ruckle taking 360 degree pictures with the intent of implementing something akin to the StreetView facility in Google Maps
  • In mid November, just after Remembrance Day, I walked through the area taking pictures of every house from numerous angles in a circle around them. This is to work towards being able to provide a mechanism to choose a house from a map and ‘see’ it from all those angles.
  • I’ve built proof-of-concept examples to show this imagery. Those are currently installed on another of my development sites but soon I’ll be porting them to this site for you to view.
    UPDATE: You can see that through this post.
  • For the 360degree shots I’ve used a product called Marzipano to produce web content. There’s much work to be done to bring that to a finished state.
  • For the second set of images I’ve hand crafted and adapted web code – JavaScript, PHP, CSS and HTML – to show what I have in mind.

For the Future

There is a lot to do before I’ll feel this project is complete.

  • The two presentation schemes I’ve described above need to be integrated so the viewer can slip from one into the other without backtracking out of one and into the other. So a house can be selected in the StreetNav and brought up just like it was selected off the overview in the House Viewer. Or a street selected in that overview map and take you into StreetNav (like you can transition from Maps to Street View in Google Maps)
  • Archival material about the history of each house needs to be added. When they were built. Who lived there first. What was the value back when they were built and what was the value at their end?
  • Historical information about the area and people.
    The Ruckle brothers came from elsewhere and settled here. Where? When? They lost part of their property in a lands title claim – how many now know about that?
    The sawmill grew from a different facility that used wood for constructing its products.
    There used to be a place called Firemen’s Park – it had a race track and was the home for the Fall Fair. When the City absorbed Ruckle they took that away and gave the land over to Industry.
    History – things happened and I’d like to place them in their context.
  • Anecdotal material needs to be collected and integrated. By this I mean pictures and stories from those who lived there. So we can try and get a sense of what the community was like – how it was to live there. What did they like about the area? Or dislike? What did they value about being there? I cannot presume to know what the former residents might have to share – everything has its own uniqueness and researching to uncover that is part of the learning process.
  • Ultimately, using Augmented / Virtual Reality technology, I’d like to be able to tie the web presentation to its physical real world location. So a future visitor can take out their digital device while in the area and literally see what was there in front of, and around, them if they’d been there before the removal. Using the same type of technology that empowers the Pokemon Go app. There’s a couple of large learning curves for the Application Software that makes that possible . . . maybe that could be something that helps a younger person springboard themselves into a career.