Welcome to the website of the Wells Museum. We invite you to look around this website, learn about Wells and its history and get some tourist information about Wells, Barkerville, and surrounding area.


In 1927, Fred Wells discovered the fabled motherlode, a vein of gold-bearing quartz 15m in length that was rumoured to be the source of Barkerville's riches decades earlier. Efforts of Wells and his supporters resulted in the 1933 founding of the Wells townsite reported in The Sun. During the subsequent four years Wells became a thriving company town, the promise of steady employment and the town's numerous recreational facilities attracting miners and their families an independent businesses. The two large hard-rock gold mines operating near Wells, the Cariboo Gold Quarta and the Island Mountain mines, made the Depression a time of prosperity. By the early 1940s, the population had grown to 4500 inhabitants, making Wells the largest town and cultural center of the Cariboo.


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