Events Archive

April 26, 2021, marks Vancouver’s 135th birthday. On that day 135 years earlier, the little sawmill community of Granville was reborn as the brand new city of Vancouver.
The story has often been told how the Canadian Pacific Railway chose to locate its Pacific terminus at Granville instead of Port Moody in return for a large land grant from the provincial government.

There weren’t many automobiles in Vancouver in 1907 (a five-minute film taken along several downtown streets this year shows precisely one), but there were enough for someone in the Vancouver office of the Imperial Oil Co. to decide that the usual method of fueling them at the time—carrying a sloshing bucket full of gasoline up to the vehicle and pouring it through a funnel into the tank—was somewhat dangerous.

Vancouver was incorporated in 1886.

What else was happening that year outside the city? Well, the first CPR passenger train from the east pulled into Port Moody on July 4. (The first passenger train into Vancouver will arrive in May of 1887.)

It’s October 1, 1940 and Province photographer Claude Dettloff is standing on Columbia Street at 8th Street in New Westminster, his press camera up to his eye, preparing to take a shot. He’s focusing on a line of hundreds of men of the B.C. Regiment marching down 8th to a waiting train. Soldiers of the Duke of Connaught’s Own Rifles are marching past. Suddenly, in the view-finder, Dettloff sees a little white-haired boy…