Hills

Today, Hills is a quiet community along Highway 6, but during the Second World War the area known as Hunter Siding became the site of a logging and sawmill operation where Japanese Canadians were forced to live and work after being uprooted from the British Columbia coast.

Hunter Siding was already an established rural community before the wartime incarceration. Named after early Slocan settler William Hunter, it was home to the DuMont family, who operated a sawmill and employed local workers. In 1932, Marc DuMont built a one-room schoolhouse for the community, replacing an earlier log school. During the war, the schoolhouse was relocated closer to present-day Hills, where it still stands today as the Hills Community Hall—one of the few surviving structures connected to the area’s wartime history.

Beginning in 1942, approximately two dozen Japanese Canadian men—and at least one woman—were sent to Marc DuMont’s logging camp near Hunter Siding, about 3.2 kilometres northwest of present-day Hills. The workers ranged in age from just 18 to 61 years old. Most had been displaced from communities in the Lower Mainland, while others came from Vancouver Island. Many had previously worked as loggers, millworkers, fishermen, or shingle cutters before being forcibly removed from their homes.

Unlike the nearby self-supporting communities of New Denver and Rosebery, Hunter Siding functioned primarily as a labour camp. The men worked in Marc DuMont’s active logging and sawmill operation, harvesting timber and producing lumber while living under forced relocation in isolated camp conditions along the former Nakusp & Slocan Railway line. Historic photographs from the Nikkei National Museum show an extensive industrial operation with rows of buildings, logging equipment, and crews of workers who kept the mill running despite the circumstances under which they had been brought there.

The camp’s residents reflected the broad impact of the forced uprooting. Among them were Canadian-born young people such as Isamu Yamamoto, Kazuo Yamamoto, Takayoshi Yabuki, Toshio Nishikawa, and Matsuye “Molly” Shibata—the only woman currently identified through archival records—as well as Japanese nationals who had spent decades building lives in British Columbia. Several workers were transferred between camps such as Sandon, Rosebery, and New Denver, while others were later forced east of the Rockies or deported to Japan after the war despite having established their homes and livelihoods in Canada.

Little remains of the camp itself. The former Hunter Siding landscape has changed considerably through wetland restoration and conservation work, and the buildings associated with the logging camp have disappeared. Local histories place Marc DuMont’s sawmill near the former railway siding known as Redhouse, just northwest of Hunter Siding. Today, archival photographs, government records, and the stories of those who lived and worked here are among the few surviving reminders that this quiet landscape once housed a forced labour camp for Japanese Canadians.

Hills reminds us that the incarceration of Japanese Canadians extended far beyond the larger internment communities, reaching into remote work camps where individuals were compelled to provide labour while living under government restrictions, separated from their homes, families, and communities.