J. F. Killough Memorial Scholarship

Joe Killough was born near Pense, Saskatchewan, June 2, 1906, the seventh of twelve children of ‘Captain’ J.A. and Lillian Killough.

Joe came to the Castlegar area with his family in 1913 where they homesteaded near the site of the present Castleaird Plaza, later moving to another homestead near the Highways Yard. At the age of 17, Joe acquired his own homestead a couple of miles up the Blueberry/Paulsson highway, building his own one-room log cabin where he and his wife spent their first winter and the next year, their eldest daughter’s first winter. Here he ran a trap line with Charlie and Walter Sahlstrom.

In 1925, Joe was hired by West Kootenay Power as a lineman, then in 1929, the B.C. Forest Service hired him (at age 23) to head the crew building a telephone line from Rossland to the top of Old Glory. He continued to work for the Forest Service from 1930 – 1944, mostly stationed in Rossland. During the Depression years, as this employment was very sporadic, Joe and his brother, Jack, bought and converted a 1930 Ford Truck into a 24-passenger school bus, the first school bus in the West Kootenay. Also during the Depression, Joe worked as foreman of government relief camps for the unemployed in Vancouver and on Vancouver Island.

During the non-fire season months, Joe continued to live with his wife and daughters on his homestead and to trap and run a mill, until he had built his house in Castlegar, with timber taken from his own land and cut on his own mill. Then, living in Castlegar, the winter months were spent working as a carpenter on the building of the Brilliant Dam.

In 1945, Joe became forest ranger in the Kettle Valley District, living and working there for five years until returning as ranger in the Rossland District in 1950 and relocating the Ranger Station to Castlegar. In 1955, Joe became inspector of licensed scalers for the Nelson Forest District, in which position he developed and perfected the Forest Service’s new ‘Weight Scale’ method of scaling timber. This method was then adopted and used throughout the province. He retired from the B.C. Forest Service in 1971.

Joe’s years of employment all related to the outdoors and he was always a great nature lover, extremely knowledgeable about flora and fauna and able to perform amazing feats in mountain climbing, navigating his way through dense bush to locate a fire, finding lost people and having many encounters with bears, cougars and other wild animals with which he seemed to share a mutual respect and concern. In the summer of 1998, he made his last major hike in to the Old Cedar above Kinnaird.

Joe only went to Grade Eight in school. He wrote and passed his ‘entrance exams’ at Central School in Trail in 1919 but as there was no high school in Castlegar, he was unable to go any further. In the winter of 1947 and the fall of the same year, Joe attended the ‘Green Timbers’ Ranger School at the Coast, where he was by far the oldest and least educated student and in those six months, did the basics of a degree in Forestry, topping his class in the first semester and near the top in the second. The thought of a college in the town of which he was so proud and the knowledge that Forestry was one of the programs offered were a source of great pride to him and the J.F. Killough Memorial Forestry Scholarship was his own idea for a suitable legacy.

Joe was involved and very active in many organizations, the Anglican Church as choir leader, envelope secretary, and lay-reader; the Castlegar Heritage Society, Kiwanis Club, Rossland Light Opera Players, Trail Male Chorus, KRC (forerunner to the United Way); Naturalists Club and Meals on Wheels. In 1989, he was chosen as Castlegar’s Citizen of the Year.

After selling his house in March 1998, Joe lived first at Castleview Lodge and finally at Kiro Manor in Trail where he enjoyed the final months of his life and died on September 27, 1999.