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Hallowed Ground

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This book makes it easy with its compelling collection of stories about the people who are buried at the Yale Pioneer Cemetery, an antique burial ground "at a stopping point between Fort Langley and Fort Kamloops," BC. Established in 1858, the Yale Cemetery offers final refuge to some 300 souls, many of them among British Columbia's earliest pioneers, including immigrant railroad labourers who toiled and died building the Canadian Pacific and Canadian Northern Railways. Here lies Dr. Maximilian Fifer, murdered in 1861 at the hands of a patient who felt the physician has mistreated him; Ned Stout, who, when he died in 1924, included Yale's 1858 gold rush and the 1880 construction of the CPR among the memories of his 100-year lifetime; and the Elley brothers, three of at least eight children taken by scarlet fever as an epidemic tore through the town in the 1880s. As for the more than 200 unmarked graves in the Yale Cemetery, Hallowed Ground unearths their stories, too. "Yale is the focal point of our realistic and romantic history," a passerby wrote the Yale and District Historical Society in 1980.

252 pages, Paperback

Published August 1, 2017

2 people want to read

About the author

Ian Brown

211 books44 followers
A Canadian journalist and author.

He is currently the host of Human Edge and The View from Here on TVOntario, and has hosted programming for CBC Radio One, including Later the Same Day, Talking Books, and Sunday Morning.

He has also worked as a business writer at Maclean's and the Financial Post, a feature reporter for The Globe and Mail, and a freelance journalist for other magazines including Saturday Night.
Brown is also the editor of What I Meant to Say: The Private Lives of Men a 2006 collection of twenty-nine essays by prominent Canadian writers, including Greg Hollingshead, David MacFarlane, Don Gillmor, Bert Archer, and Brown himself, who asked his contributors to write on subjects that they'd like to discuss with women but had never been able to.

Brown has also published three books, Freewheeling (1989) about the Billes family, owners of Canadian Tire, and Man Overboard. He is an occasional contributor to the American public radio program This American Life. The Boy in the Moon, a book-length version of Brown's series of Globe and Mail features dealing with his son Walker's rare genetic disorder, Cardiofaciocutaneous Syndrome (CFC), was published in the fall of 2009.

In January 2010, Ian Brown won British Columbia's National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction for his book The Boy in the Moon: A Father's Search for His Disabled Son. The award is Canada's richest non-fiction prize and offers the winner a $40,000 prize. In February, 2010, the book won the Charles Taylor Prize, a $25,000 prize which recognizes excellence in literary non-fiction.

Brown is married to Globe and Mail film critic Johanna Schneller.

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67 reviews
November 4, 2017
I enjoyed reading this book. It's nice to learn about the lives of the people who are in the Yale cemetery. There is so much history there.
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