Burnaby
by Pixie McGeachie
After the Colony of British Columbia was officially established in 1858, a hand-picked contingent of Royal Engineers was sent out from England to survey and map areas along the Fraser River and to set up military reserves. With axes, crosscut saws and stumping powder, they cleared kilometres of trails from New Westminster to Port Moody. Today these hard-won routes form Burnaby’s main arterial systems: Kingsway, Canada Way, Marine Drive and North Road.
The Royal Engineers, under the command of Colonel R.C. Moody, also had the task of surveying and laying out district lots in New Westminster and what was to become Burnaby. Assisting Moody was Robert Burnaby, who had come from England to see up a commission merchant business but was, for a short time, appointed by Governor James Douglas as Moody’s aide and secretary. Burnaby volunteered to join a small party searching for a lake talked about by the local natives. Despite foul weather, the patty reached the lake which Moody named Burnaby Lake.
As settlers started to establish homes north of New Westminster, they decided their tax money should be used for their roads and services instead of going to Victoria. They formed a committee and applied for a municipal charter which they received on September 22, 1892. It seemed a good idea to call the municipality Burnaby, after the lake.
A provisional administration was formed and Burnaby was divided into five wards. Charles R. Shaw headed the first council. The municipality’s first election by ballot, held in January 1893, brought in Nicolai Schou as reeve. Schou, editor of Vancouver’s News-Advertiser, was returned as reeve for 10 years before his death in 1903.
With the advent in 1891 of the Central Park interurban line between New Westminster and Vancouver, cluster communities began to form and grow beside the tracks. Power for the system was generated at the powerhouse located at Griffiths Avenue and Kingsway. The line’s first roadmaster, Roderick Sample, and his wife Minnie, ran a 15-room boarding house near the powerhouse to accommodate the tram line’s staff.
With a ready supply of prime timber and the pioneers’ need for lumber to build homes and businesses, Burnaby became a logging centre. Sawmills sprang up on the shores of the lakes and logging outfits laid down skid roads to enable them to drag logs to the mills or to waterways that led to New Westminster’s mills. The mill at Barnet on Burrard Inlet developed into a small townsite and one of the largest processors and exporters of lumber in the British Empire.
The loggers left behind them huge stumps and masses of tangled debris. Settlers wanting to cultivate the land were faced with the backbreaking task of clearing it.
Burnaby’s next phase after the logging era was agricultural. Fruit and vegetable farms, turkey and chicken farms, pig farms, dairies and nurseries thrived. Strawberries grown in Burnaby were considered better than most and received a higher price. Many of the fruit and vegetable pickers were Chinese who travelled up from New Westminster as the seasons required.
One prominent Burnaby strawberry grower was Bernard Hill, who paid $10 an acre for land abutting the southwest end of Burnaby Lake. He first cleared enough land on which to build an eight-room house for his wife and children. The Hills shipped eight rooms of furniture from their home in England around Cape Horn to Vancouver at a cost of $12.50. Many early settlers in B.C. sent their possessions on ships which used the furniture as ballast on their way to pick up lumber for European markets.
In 1895, three years after arriving in Burnaby, Hill moved his family into their new home. The furniture was brought from Vancouver by a team of 16 oxen, at a carting cost of $12.00. Over the years, Hill cleared almost 10 hectares out of the forest and successfully grew strawberries and other small fruits.
Burnaby’s first one-room school opened at Edmonds and Douglas Road (Canada Way) in 1894. One teacher, Ellen Lister, taught all grades for a decade.
The first churches to go up in Burnaby were the Presbyterian Church and the Anglican St. John the Divine, in the Central Park area. Both churches succumbed to fire, but the latter was rebuilt in 1906 and still stands on Kingsway across from Central Park.
While a few large homes with all the amenities of the times were built in Burnaby by early residents, most houses constructed by and for incoming residents were modest structures that lacked running water, electricity and indoor plumbing. There was plenty of wood for heating and cooking but it had to be cut down and dried before burning. Coal oil lamps were the only source of night light so a trip to the outhouse after dark was something to be put off as long as possible.
Real estate developers expected to get a boost in sales when the Burnaby Lake interurban line was activated on June 12, 1911. Subdivisions were planned for land abutting the lake, but widespread unemployment and an impending world war scuttled the whole idea.
In 1911, when the first police committee was struck, two mounted policemen were hired and $250 was earmarked for the purchase of two horses. The next year three more policemen and a “gaoler” were hired, a patrol wagon was purchased and telephones were installed in police headquarters in the municipal hall at Kingsway and Edmonds.
Concerts were staged during World War I to raise money to buy comforts for men overseas. The Girl Guides, formed in Burnaby in 1914, rolled bandages, knitted socks, sponsored a bed in the Royal Columbian Hospital and printed a newspaper, News from Home, that was sent to local men at the Front.
During the twenties, Burnaby welcomed several amenities: a sewer system was initiated, street lighting was gradually installed along the main streets, the first gas mains were laid, and transportation was enhanced by the Blue Funnel Line of buses running along Kingsway to Vancouver. In 1925 Burnaby crowned its first May Queen, Ruth Bearn. On Saturdays 15 cents admitted adults to silent movies at the Central Park and Heights theatres while children got in for a nickel.
The effects of the 1929 Wall Street stock market crash reached Burnaby, increasing unemployment and stepping up demand for relief money. One bright spot in the 1930s was the slow influx of industries into Burnaby: Dominion Bridge, Van Burn Brick and Glass Company, Ford Motor Company of Canada and Shell Oil Company. While companies like these increased Burnaby’s tax base, their presence did not solve the municipality’s dilemma caused by insufficient funds to keep up with relief payment demands.
With finances completely drained, Burnaby was administered from 1933 to 1942 by the provincial government through a commissioner.
The first five years after World War II ended in 1945 brought to Burnaby a phenomenal 57 per cent increase in population. A burst of residential construction and commercial enterprise began then and has never stopped. With plenty of prime land available for development, Burnaby has evolved from a bedroom community to a vibrant city.
In 1950 Burnaby General Hospital took in its first patients. The sixties brought in the Trans- Canada Highway through Burnaby’s central valley; Brentwood Shopping Centre opened, the biggest of its kind in the province at that time; Simon Fraser University took shape on top of Burnaby Mountain; the British Columbia Institute of Technology opened its doors; and the municipality purchased buildings at the northeast end of Deer Lake and dedicated them as an Art Gallery and a Community Arts Centre.
As commercial ventures continued to move into Burnaby, agricultural pursuits disappeared and the municipality entered the third phase in its growth�business and industry. Industrial centres such as Lake City attracted a growing number of tenants, Discovery Park opened up a central site for technology development, and shopping malls were built throughout the municipality.
In 1971 Burnaby marked the centennial of Confederation by creating Burnaby Village Museum, a turn-of-the-century village replica which has become a tourist attraction and a learning resource for school groups.
Co-hosting the 1973 Summer Games with New Westminster took months of planning and the efforts of hundreds of Burnaby citizens. After the games were over, Burnaby inherited more than a million dollars worth of sports facilities including a 2,200-metre rowing course in Burnaby Lake, one of only three such competitive courses in North America at the time.
The influx of residents and businesses accelerated in south Burnaby when the rapid transit SkyTrain, following the old interurban route from Vancouver to New Westminster, began operating in 1986. Along the line just east of Central Park, Metrotown Centre mushroomed to include highrise apartments, multiple-dwelling complexes, office towers and a huge shoppers’ destination. An integral part of the centre is the Robert Prittie Memorial Library, a striking design by James K.M. Cheng Architects.
Burnaby has been fortunate to have planners with wisdom and foresight to preserve natural green space for recreation. The city encompasses more than 100 parks and open spaces ranging from small neighborhood grassy areas to large expanses such as the Burnaby Mountain conservation area and the perimeter parks around both Deer and Burnaby lakes.
Today more than 175,000 people live in Burnaby, the third largest city in British Columbia. The city’s Official Community Plan envisions a capacity population of 180,000. The 200 people who made up Burnaby’s population just over 100 years ago would be amazed.
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