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Exhibit features history of Gabriola brickyard

The Gabriola Historical and Museum Society opens its season Saturday (June 23).

The Gabriola Historical and Museum Society opens its season Saturday (June 23) with a new exhibit about the Gabriola Brickyard.

Using  never before seen artifacts and archival images, Brick by Brick  offers a glimpse into a time  when the working people of Gabriola Island crafted the very bricks that built the towns and cities of British Columbia.

Little remains today of the brickyard except for piles of broken bricks on Brickyard Beach, and the name of the steep hill on South Road.

But from the end of the 19th century to 1952, the brickyard was Gabriola’s single most important industry, and largest employer.

For more than five decades the brickyard shaped the lives of hundreds of island families, Chinese contract labourers and immigrant workers.

The exhibit opens at 11 a.m. The Gabriola Museum is at 505 South Rd.