Dorreen

Dorreen was located six miles further east from Pacific, along the railway track. Dorreen, like Pacific, was a Grand Trunk Pacific railway town. In 1912, the town was named Dorreen, for the surveyor’s wife. After the railway was put in, in 1912, Dorreen became a very busy little community. Along with mining and farming, there were also riverboats stopping at Dorreen to pick up cord wood or prospectors. The General Store in Dorreen was owned and operated by the Horwill family for 36 years from the early 1930’s to the late 1950’s. The Horwill family moved to Dorreen in 1924. The Horwill family also ran the post office and farmed too. In those early days about 200 – 300 people lived there, and in the later years about 100 people lived there. The first school at Doreen was located next to the store. Following this a new school opened in 1932 teaching grades 1 though 6 and 7 through 10 were done by correspondence.

Dorreen had and has no electricity, no telephones, and no running water, just like Pacific. There is a little white train station, a former one room schoolhouse, an old general store, and some houses. Even though there is a general store, it has not been opened since 1958. Nowadays, there are just a few permanent residents and about 20 people who live there seasonally.

For many years the town was busy with farmers and miners, but in the 1940’s, when the road went in on the south side of the Skeena River, Dorreen started to decline. A German man by the name of Knauss is said to have kept the town going with all the gold he found. This lasted until the 1950’s. The mountain just behind Dorreen was named after him - Mount Knauss.