General Store

Once you have a settlement, you need some place for people to purchase goods in the community. Our fifth layer in our story of Pitt Meadows is a building we are all too familiar with…the Pitt Meadows Museum…wait…the Pitt Meadows General Store!

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The General Store was built in 1886 on Herring Road on the banks of the Fraser River. In 1908, it was moved by horses on logs to its current location which is south of the railway on the east side of Harris Road. This was beneficial due to its proximity to the railroad (which the author would like to note on particularly bumpy train days her computer does shake in the upper story of this building). It was known as Struthers Store and Post Office. The General store is made up of wooden horizontal boards. It had a wooden sidewalk and an upper deck. In 1930c, the owners at the time (the Struthers family),closed the General Store to turn it into a family home. Simultaneously, opening a more modern structure for a new consolidated Grocers Store, just to the south of the building (where cars exit the West Coast express parking lot onto Harris Road).

In 1988, the McEwan family had the building designated a municipal heritage structure. This was the first building in Pitt Meadows to have that designation. Our beautiful iron gates go up on the front of our building at this time. By the 1990’s the building was unoccupied and fell into disrepair. The District of Pitt Meadows purchased the building in late 1997 and undertook the restoration. The Museum moved in and opened the building as a public museum in 1998!

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Built heritage often stands the test of time because a building’s use evolves to make it relevant in the community as time goes by. This grand old lady was once the place to go to get supplies, pay bills, send mail and meet or greet and catch up on news, and, at the same time, house the storekeepers’ families. When that time had passed, she became a home and a storage facility with the last of these homeowners realizing the necessity of heritage designation for the site. After a short period of neglect through offshore ownership in the 1990s, a thoughtful municipal council came to her rescue by realizing her continued existence could only be guaranteed by making her relevant again – enter the museum and archives.

Discover the other layers of Pitt Meadows.