In 1889, around 60 Black miners and their families made the journey from Pennsylvania and Ohio to Cumberland, recruited to work the coal seams that built the town. It’s a chapter of local history that doesn’t show up in most tellings of the Comox Valley’s mining past.

Dunnett’s reporting for The Discourse traces what records remain, church ties, land holdings, names in old directories, and talks to descendants and local historians piecing the story back together. It’s as much about the gaps in the record as what’s in it: how a community can be present in a place’s founding and still go missing from its memory.

Worth reading alongside the Valley’s better-known mining history for a fuller picture of who actually built Cumberland.