Looking back article from July 2017

*The image features our interactive Canada Map from 2017

1906 opens with a first for Canada when the Ouimetoscope movie theatre opened in Montreal on January 1st. That same month, in British Columbia the steamship Valencia is wrecked off the west coast of Vancouver Island, taking the lives of almost all on board, and all the women and children.  In Pitt Meadows, the community gets its first school house, Number One School, at the corner of Hammond and Harris Roads.  This simple one room structure with no electricity or indoor plumbing is gratefully received as it means children no longer must make their way to Maple Ridge Elementary in Hammond.

In 1908, the Royal Canadian Mint opened in Ottawa as did the University of British Columbia.  In Pitt Meadows, a building close to our heart also opened – the General Store and Post Office – on the east side of Harris Road just to the south of the CPR tracks.  The first owner and post master was Mr. Plommer.  Today this building houses the Pitt Meadows Museum and Archives.  1908 is also the year a much beloved Canadian classic is published -- Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables.

The big story in Canada in early 1912, apart from Robert Borden’s Conservatives taking power from Laurier’s liberals late the previous year, is the sinking of the Titanic off Newfoundland’s Grand Banks on April 14th.   In Pitt Meadows, several things are happening – the C.P.R. is double tracking their line through the community, a second one room school house, Number Two School, has been built at the north end of Harris Road, and some of the 100-strong population is agitating for incorporation as a municipality.  The following year the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway will be completed to the west coast at Prince Rupert and the poet Pauline Johnson passes away with her ashes strewn at Siwash Rock in Vancouver.

1914 is a pivotal year in Canada and in Pitt Meadows.  In April, our community incorporates as a Municipality with John Blaney, a former Maple Ridge resident, our first Reeve.  Double tracking of the C.P.R. line is complete, and something had to be done with the old single track train bridge.  It was moved up river and in March 1915 would officially open as the first car bridge over the Pitt River, and its 1914 foundations would remain in place until the newest Pitt River bridge opened in 2009.  The Komagata Maru is turned away from Vancouver harbor in May of 1914, and, in Europe, war is on the Horizon.  On August 4th Britain declares war on Germany and Canada, as a member of the United Kingdom is also at war.  Before hostilities end in November 1918 Pitt Meadows will have sent 27 men off to fight.  All but one will return to Canada alive – the one that didn’t, Roland Frances Crosdale Thomson, a recent Irish immigrant to Canada and a member of Pitt Meadows’ first municipal council. 

Names and items from the war years include: The Battle of Ypres; John McCrae and In Flanders Field; Nellie McClung and suffrage; the Vancouver Millionaires and the Stanley Cup; Emily Murphy, Magistrate; Vimy Ridge; Ginger Goodwin and a general strike; influenza and the Spanish Flu; November 11th and armistice.  Canada, including Pitt Meadows, came out of the Great War bruised but not defeated.  Many of the men from this community who went off to fight found new towns to live in upon their return, and the local Seventh Day Adventist colony sold off their land and buildings and left town as well.  The small Community Church Society would benefit from this as they acquired the church that stands today at the corner of Harris and Ford Road.  In June, we look at the years 1919 through 1938.

 

Leslie Norman, Pitt Meadows Museum