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New museum exhibit shows ‘employment opportunities’ have always been a part of Port Moody’s history

As Port Moody wrestles with becoming a self-sustaining community where people can live and work, a new display at Station Museum shows "employment opportunities" have always been a driving force in building the city.

While Port Moody councillors assess development proposals for the number of “employment opportunities” some may bring, a new exhibit at the Station Museum tells the story of the city’s industrial history, when jobs at steel factories, brickyards and scores of lumber mills were plentiful and saloon life was raucous.

Museum coordinator Markus Fahrner said the new display, which is to become a permanent fixture, presents quite a different picture of Port Moody.

Instead of towering condos, belching smoke stacks stretched high into the sky. Instead of small craft breweries, the city’s Murray Street corridor was renowned for producing high-quality televisions and sophisticated hi-fi radios. Instead of recreational sail boats crisscrossing the Burrard Inlet, tugs churned the waters.

All that economic activity didn’t make the city better than its current incarnation as a suburb to Vancouver, Fahrner said. It was just different.

“It was more like a working class town; it’s a different culture.”

Blessed with both access to the sea and a rail link to the rest of North America, it was only natural for heavy industries like steel, pipes, bricks, lumber and oil to find a home in Port Moody.

Lumber came first as loggers felled trees to create room for the burgeoning community, sawmills like Port Moody Shingle, Pioneer Lumber Company and Burrard Inlet Red Cedar Mill turned them into boards, shakes and shingles to build the homes, hotels and rooming houses for Port Moody’s growing population.

They also churned out railway ties and timber beams used to construct bridges, wharves and stations.

The mills were also the landing pad for new immigrants from countries like China and India who weren’t afraid of the hard, physical toil to gain a foothold in their new country.

The cosmopolitan workforce came with its own challenges, though. White workers were paid more than immigrant employees, housing was often segregated, discrimination and racially-motivated laws made it difficult for newcomers to improve their lot.

Sometimes, said museum director Jim Millar, the tensions boiled over, like the time a drunken patron at a local saloon was so infuriated he’d been cut off from the bar, he returned with a chainsaw threatening to chop down all the hotel’s support columns unless he could continue his bender.

On the heels of lumber, other industries followed. The first brickyard started in 1890 but didn’t last long. Three more, operated by John Hutchinson, soon followed, sourcing their clay from the end of the inlet to feed the kilns that ran day and night.

The acrid, black smoke that roiled into the sky and the loud whistles signalling the end of a shift were seen as signs of progress, Fahrner said. Sometimes the pollution was so bad, motorists had to perch a passenger on the hood of their vehicle to help them navigate through the pea soup.

Between 1910 and 1925, financial incentives offered by the Canadian government lured four steel mills to the city, producing nails, bolts and pipe as well as rails for the railroad.

At their peak, they employed nearly 200 workers. But the boom didn’t last as several went bankrupt and one was enveloped by a financial scandal involving Port Moody’s first mayor, Perry Roe.

In 1955, steel returned to the city with the opening by Canadian Western Pipe Mills of a massive new plant for produce pipes for pipelines. The 145,000 sq-ft factory that also included the company’s head office, a laboratory and machine shop, was the largest industrial structure in Western Canada, and employed 220 people.

But in 1989, the economy soured and the plant’s owner since 1973, Interprovincial Steel Pipe Company, closed it for good.

Other industries that alighted in Port Moody included two oil refineries, Chisholm Industries that produced table radios and televisions until it closed in 1964, Andres Winery that was established in 1961 and Reichold Chemicals that produced special resins used in manufacturing plywood.

The Burrard Thermal generating station on Port Moody’s north shore used natural gas to generate enough electricity for about 700,000 homes. It closed in 2016.

Pacific Coast Terminals opened in 1960 as a depot for coal being transported from British Columbia’s Interior, as well as sulphur, wood chips and gypsum.

Fahrner said while many of those industries succumbed to international trade and growing concerns about their environmental impact, their industrious spirit continues at a much smaller scale in Port Moody’s small craft breweries and multitude of independent shops.

“Now we’ve switched to more of an artisanal industry,” he said. “Being smaller is more sustainable.”

Fahrner said the current conversation about the importance of providing employment in the city is not much different than it’s always been.

“Without jobs there is no survival,” he said. “It’s the backbone of our society.”