A small heritage park preserving the remains of Vancouver Island's early coal mining era.
Morden Colliery Historic Provincial Park
Morden Colliery Historic Provincial Park is a compact heritage site on the east coast of southern Vancouver Island, in the Regional District of Nanaimo, British Columbia. Established as a historic provincial park in 1972, it preserves the physical remnants of one of Vancouver Island's significant coal mining operations, a defining industry of the island's late 19th and early 20th centuries. The park's central feature is the surviving concrete headframe and tipple of the former Pacific Coast Coal Mining Company (PCCM) Morden Colliery, an unusually intact artifact of industrial mining heritage. Set within a small area near Nanaimo, the park functions less as a natural landscape destination and more as a cultural and industrial heritage site, with interpretive trails along the old railway right-of-way connecting visitors to the broader story of Vancouver Island coal.
Beyond the headframe itself, the park documents the working life of an early 20th-century colliery, where coal was hoisted to the surface, moved through a tipple, and loaded directly into railway gondola cars. The story extends from the original Fiddick mine, the founding of the adjacent settlement, and the eventual community that grew around the mine site. Interpretive plaques and a cairn commemorating miners lost in Vancouver Island coal operations add layers of social history to the industrial remains.
The park is also a gateway into a regional trail network, with a route planned along the former PCCM railway corridor toward the Nanaimo River and Hemer Provincial Park. For visitors interested in industrial archaeology, settlement history, and the cultural landscape of Vancouver Island, Morden Colliery offers a deeply localized but nationally rare example of preserved mining infrastructure.
