page_title: Shalalth
section_title: Post-War Bridge River townsite
hierarchical_section_title: Shalalth / 20th-century history / Post-War Bridge River townsite
context_page_description: Shalalth, pop. c. 400, is one of the main communities of the Seton Lake Band of the St'at'imc Nation and location of the two main powerhouses of the Bridge River Power Project.
  The word Shalalth means simply "lake" or, particularly, the lake, meaning Seton Lake, a freshwater fjord stretching twenty miles through a desert canyon westwards from the Fraser River at Lillooet.
context_section_description: After the war, construction of the hydroelectric project resumed with a vengeance, and along with a new boom in traffic to the mines came a surge in equipment to finish the power project.  For the next twenty or twenty-five years, Shalalth became the main transportation hub for the surrounding region, with nearly 24-hour heavy traffic over the pass, either to and from the mines or to the new, expanded damsite just over the pass at the head of the Bridge River Canyon.  In addition to lakeside hostelries such as Seton House and Shalalth Lodge at Shalalth itself, a large hotel was built above the hydro townsite's railway station, adjacent to the managers' houses and the semicircle of barracks built for workmen (which had been used for the Japanese relocation, as had the empty houses in the townsite itself).  The hotel's guests included not only project-related visitors but businessmen and investors en route over Mission Mountain to visit the Bridge River mines.  The hotel sadly burned down around 1949.
  During the 1950s, the population of the Bridge River Townsite on Seton Lake and Seton Portage area mushroomed into the thousands, mostly single men as is typical of construction booms but with enough families to boost the schools population into the hundreds.  Other hydro townsites were located at Terzaghi Dam in the Bridge River Canyon, at Lajoie, below the site of Lajoie Dam 35 miles upriver, and also caused a building boom in Lillooet, filling in the formerly empty land between the old Main Street and the train station.
caption: Bridge River townsite at South Shalalth – closeup of hotel and residential area, 1940s
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