Fraser Mills: the sawmill town that built Coquitlam rises again

Southwest Coquitlam, where the city meets the Fraser River, holds one of the most consequential pieces of industrial land in the province. Fraser Mills was a sawmill, a company town, and for a time a municipality in its own right, and the waves of workers it drew created two of the Tri-Cities' defining communities: francophone Maillardville and the Punjabi Sikh neighbourhoods of south Coquitlam. After decades of silence, the site is being transformed again.

The mill on the river

The industrial story began in 1889 with the Ross McLaren Mill, which opened on the north bank of the Fraser but soon closed after co-founder James McLaren died. The site sat unused for years before reopening as the Fraser River Sawmills, which grew into one of the largest lumber operations in British Columbia. The surrounding district was incorporated as the Municipality of Fraser Mills in 1913, making it a civic entity separate from its neighbours before eventually amalgamating with the City of Coquitlam.

The workers who built two communities

The mill's hunger for labour reshaped the region's human geography. Facing a labour shortage, the company recruited 400 francophone workers from Quebec, who settled in the townsite just north of the mill, the community that became Maillardville, today the largest francophone community in British Columbia west of Manitoba and home to Festival du Bois.

In the early twentieth century, many Punjabi Sikhs also came to work in the mills, settling on the south slope of Coquitlam and founding one of the oldest South Asian communities in Canada. Their story, from mill bunkhouses to the gurdwaras and neighbourhoods of today's city, is now marked each April during Sikh Heritage Month.

Hard times came too. During the Great Depression, layoffs and wage reductions provoked a ten-week strike in 1931, one of the era's notable labour conflicts, studied by historians as a clash of ethnicity and class in a company town.

Closure, landfill, and reinvention

The mill finally closed in 2001, ending more than a century of sawmilling on the site. For years afterward, part of the land served as the Terranova landfill for Greater Vancouver's waste, while big-box development grew along United Boulevard, now a well-known alternate route when the adjacent highways jam.

Coquitlam has designated the area as the Waterfront Village Centre, rezoned for commercial and residential use. Developer Beedie is building a masterplanned community, also called Fraser Mills, on the site: 15 multi-unit buildings with some 5,500 homes, commercial and recreation amenities, a bus station connecting to Braid SkyTrain station, and a 16-acre park. It will be Coquitlam's only waterfront community, giving the city a Fraser River shoreline district for the first time in generations.

Why it matters

Few places in the Tri-Cities compress so much history into one address. Within a short walk of the old mill site you can trace the arc of the region: Indigenous riverbanks, industrial boom, immigrant settlement, labour strife, deindustrialization, landfill, and now urban reinvention. As the new Fraser Mills rises, the story of the old one is the essential context for understanding Coquitlam itself.

The municipality that disappeared

Fraser Mills' 1913 incorporation is one of the region's forgotten civic stories. For a time, the company town ran its own municipal affairs on the north bank of the Fraser, with a council, services, and an identity distinct from both New Westminster to the west and the rural Coquitlam district to the north. Amalgamation eventually folded it into Coquitlam, but the name never left local use, and today's redevelopment has deliberately revived it for the new community rising on the site.

The riverfront itself

The new Fraser Mills' most touted asset is the one the old town always had: the Fraser River. The waterfront stretches along the working river, with views of tugs, log booms, and the Surrey shoreline opposite. The planned 16-acre park will finally give the public continuous access to a shoreline that was industrial or closed for more than a century, connecting into the regional greenway network along the Fraser. For a city whose identity has long been defined by its inland ridges, lakes, and town centre, a true riverfront district is a genuine first.

Visiting the area today

While construction continues, the Fraser Mills story is best read from the edges: the United Boulevard corridor shows the site's big-box era; Maillardville, just up the hill, preserves the millworkers' community with Festival du Bois, Place des Arts, and its heritage square; and the Fraser River itself can be watched from nearby viewpoints as tugs work the same reach the mill once dominated. When the new community's parks and riverfront open, this corner of Coquitlam will be one of the most historically layered walks in the Tri-Cities.

* Cover photo: William John Moore, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0