Nanaimo journalist and historian Jan Peterson lived in Port Alberni from 1972 to 1996, where she worked as a reporter for the Alberni Valley Times. In the opening sections to her memoir More Than Just a Mill Town, she describes the history of the town leading up to the boom years of the 1970s and hints at the coming period of economic decline.
When our family moved to Port Alberni in 1972, some friends questioned why we would want to live there.
“It’s just a mill town,” they scorned. The term seemed so negative, and conjured up images of the forest industry in the worst possible way. It was obvious the town had a reputation, but we also heard about the wonderful recreational facilities available. The city had the highest wage-earners in the province. Driving through any residential area of town you could see evidence of this prosperity with campers, boats, and cars parked in the driveways of mill and forestry workers. This was MacMillan Bloedel’s valley; if you didn’t work for MB, the town’s major employer, you worked for one of its related industries.
My husband, Ray, a professional engineer, had worked for MB’s Vancouver Plywood Division, then MB Manufacturing Services, when he was offered a position as plant engineer in charge of maintenance at Alberni Plywood Division. The decision was easy. We had three small children and were willing to make the career move. Putting all negativity aside, we remained positive.
We had visited Port Alberni briefly in 1964, the summer following the tsunami caused by an earthquake in Alaska. The tidal wave on Good Friday that year played havoc with the mills in low-lying and residential areas, tossing logs, lumber, houses and cars all over the place. Fortunately there was not one single fatality. As we passed through town on the way to visit friends at nearby Sproat Lake, we expected to see evidence of the destruction that had enveloped the community only a few months before, but the cleanup had been remarkable.
Ray began work at the Alberni Plywood plant in the fall of 1972. A month or so before moving, we checked out the housing available in town and discovered this was not going to be an easy task. It was quite common in those days for MB to move staff and workers around their divisions, and the company had recently moved an entire division from the Queen Charlotte Islands to Port Alberni. Those families had taken up many of the homes.
Real estate agent Ramon Kwok gave an introductory tour of the city, then asked which part we wanted to live in — South Port, Central Port or North Port? Ramon explained there were once two cities, Alberni and Port Alberni, until they amalgamated in 1967. As we quickly learned, South Port refers to the former Port Alberni, which dates back to the first 1860 settlement, while North Port is the old town of Alberni. Ramon also pointed out that the community centre had a wonderful swimming pool, and that the police and hospital facilities were all located in the central part of town. Having already heard reports that Maquinna Elementary School was one of the best primary schools in School District 70 and that it was located in South Port on the edge of Maquinna Forest, this was the area we chose.
In the excitement of finding a home, I had paid little attention to the weather, which on that particular November day was foggy. As we drove down into Port Alberni, fog totally immersed the city, blanketing everything for miles. Only the peaks of the mountaintops in the distance were visible from the summit above the fogbank. Driving into the fog felt like driving into a tunnel of grey darkness.
The beauty of the town remained hidden until we moved into our new home on Boxing Day 1972. That day the sun shone and the picturesque scene of forest and mountains was revealed. From the living room window, we could see the sparkling waters of Alberni Inlet to the west, and to the north the Beaufort mountain range covered in snow. From the dining room window looking east was the stunning snow-capped peak of Mount Arrowsmith. The mountain views were breathtaking, though eventually obscured as the trees in Maquinna Forest grew each year.
The forests surrounding Port Alberni have been the mainstay of the city’s economy from the start. In 1860, Captain Edward Stamp, an English shipmaster and entrepreneur, opened the first sawmill in the area. The mill was later sold to James Anderson and became known as the Anderson Sawmill. A small community of about 200 people lived in the vicinity of the mill and made their living from forestry. In 1864, the mill closed because it had run out of available logs. The technology did not exist to log higher up the mountains, so only those trees close to the water were felled and dropped into the inlet. Workers left to find employment elsewhere.
The opening of the Canadian Pacific Railway (1886) across Canada created opportunities for immigrants, and those with farming skills began pre-empting land in the Alberni Valley. The Anderson Company, which still owned 1,000 hectares of land, began developing a townsite with the hope of selling land and recouping some of its investment.
The settlement was named Alberni, after the young Spanish lieutenant-colonel Don Pedro de Alberni from the Nootka expedition to the West Coast — though there is no evidence he ever sailed down to the head of the Alberni Inlet. Capt. George Albert Huff built a wharf at the site of today’s Victoria Quay that enabled supplies and mail to be shipped up-Island from Victoria.
The next venture was a paper mill, the first of its kind in British Columbia, constructed by the B.C. Paper Manufacturing Co. Ltd. in 1891. It was built on the banks of the Somass River, where the present-day Paper Mill Dam Park is located. By 1896, another settlement developed south of Alberni. Entrepreneur Arthur E. Waterhouse arrived at the instigation of the Canadian Pacific Navigation Company to build a wharf; this he located at the foot of today’s Argyle Street. He then opened a warehouse and a store that catered mostly to miners working in nearby China Creek.
This new settlement was first named New Alberni, then changed to Port Alberni on March 1, 1910. The arrival of the Esquimalt & Nanaimo (E&N) Railway in 1911 benefited both communities by providing a further link to communities on the eastern side of Vancouver Island.
There were other logging and sawmill operators over the years, but it wasn’t until 1951 — when Bloedel, Stewart & Welch and H.R. MacMillan merged their holdings to become one of the world’s largest forest companies, MacMillan Bloedel Ltd. — that Port Alberni benefited from some stability and continuity in the forest industry. The corporate merger with Powell River Company in 1959 further secured a future for forest workers in both towns. By 1972, mills stretched along the Port Alberni waterfront, from the mouth of the Somass River at the north end of town to Polly Point in the south. They included Alberni Plywood Division (Alply), Alberni Pacific Division, Somass Division and Alberni Pulp and Paper Division (Alpulp).
The waterfront in 1972 was a busy place; tugs, barges and giant freighters were familiar sights in the harbour as they loaded forest products for delivery to all parts of the world. Floating log booms were common along the inlet, as were giant logging trucks on the highway and railway cars carrying freight on the E&N Railway to Parksville, then south to Nanaimo or Victoria. Residents were used to the constant sound — the hum of industry — their lives so intertwined with the forest industry.
Forests were vital to the city’s economic stability. Trees surrounded the town; they grew up the hillside of Mount Arrowsmith, which at 1,819 metres (5,968 feet) towered like a sentinel over the city; they grew along the mountains on both sides of the Alberni Inlet, and north to the Beaufort Mountain Range.
There appeared to be a limitless supply of timber, and in earlier days few paid attention to planning or conservation. But in the 1970s there were those in the forest industry who began to fear for the future unless major reforestation took place. MB had already embarked on an intensive forestry program to ensure its future wood supply, but by the 1970s and 1980s, logging was taking place higher up the mountains and in more difficult terrain, and stands of virgin old-growth were fast disappearing.
