Looking back article from March 2017

*This image features a formal portrait of William and Jeannie Struthers. Shot in a studio in late 1800's or early 1900's. 

19 years into confederation and Canada is going strong, with the Parliament buildings in Ottawa opening in June of 1886.  1890 is a year of controversy with the Dominion government stopping public funding to Catholic schools and this will lead to the Manitoba Schools Question in 1895.  In June, 1891 John A. MacDonald passes away while in office -- of the 24 years Canada had been a country, John A. had been Prime Minister for 18 of them.  That same year Frederick Banting is born and will discover insulin 30 years later.

Meanwhile, out on the west coast, Vancouver is growing and incorporates on April 6, 1886 and then suffers the great fire in June.  Pitt Meadows and other lower Fraser Valley communities along the CPR see the advent of the daily “milk run” known as the Fraser Valley local.  Pitt Meadows itself is still a neighborhood of Maple Ridge but that will change 10 years later when residents petition for and win the right to be removed from Maple Ridge and return to unincorporated territory being governed from Victoria.  The reason for the petition centred around dyking and drainage issues and this was likely aggravated by the major flood of 1894.

1890 had been a year of land purchase in the northern part of Pitt Meadows with the BC Drainage and Dyking Co. acquiring 17,0000 acres in what would become the Pitt Meadows Dyking District (1894) with the intention of reclaiming the land to sell to sell to potential farmers.  The venture does not meet with success and the company fails by 1905 and their lands will revert to the crown a year later.

1895 dawns with the election of the first woman to public office, Maria Grant to school board in Victoria, B.C., and Victoria is in the news again the following year with the collapse of the Point Ellis bridge resulting in the death of 55 people.  1897 marks the founding of Women’s Institutes around the world with the concept for such originating in Canada, and Pitt Meadows will establish an Institute in 1921.  William Manson has acquired the land once owned by John McKenny (now the Hoffmann Park area),and he will eventually develop a colony of 7th Day Adventists on the site leading to the eventual name of Advent Road.  New Westminster is destroyed by fire on September 11th, 1898, and in the Pitt Meadows area the Province takes control of dyking functions.

1899 ends with Canada entering the Boer War in October and 1900 ends with Reginald Fessenden, a Canadian, sending the first transatlantic wireless radio message.  Marconi, not a Canadian, received the first wireless radio message at St. Johns the following year, and that same year Japanese Canadians won the right to vote in BC.  In 1903 Canada’s second trans-Canadian railway (now known as the CN) was begun and the Alaska Boundary Dispute was settled in the United States’ favour.  In 1904 the North West Mounted Police become the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Billy Miner stages his first Canadian train robbery.  The Yukon Territory had entered confederation in 1898 and this 18-year period finishes with two more provinces entering confederation in 1905 – Alberta and Saskatchewan.

Thirty-eight year’s post confederation Canada had Wilfrid Laurier as Prime Minister, nine provinces and two territories, a population of more than 5,000,000, and had experienced one woman in public office, massive fires in major urban centres on the west coast, transatlantic wireless radio messages, train robberies that would become infamous, and the renaming of our national police force.  Pitt Meadows by that time was still an isolated community with fewer than 100 residents.  There were farms and more settlers with names such as Park, McMyn, Manson, Bonson, and Callaghan, and, perhaps, one small store near the banks of the Fraser. There was still no industry and no schools, churches, etc.  In April, we will look at the years 1906 through 1924.

Leslie Norman

Pitt Meadows Museum