Place:Nanaimo, Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada

Watchers


NameNanaimo
TypeCommunity
Coordinates49.133°N 123.967°W
Located inNanaimo, British Columbia, Canada
source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names


the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

Nanaimo is a city on the east coast of Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada. As of the 2021 census, it had a population of 99,863. It is known as "The Harbour City". The city was previously known as the "Hub City". This was attributed both to its original layout design, where the streets radiated from the shoreline like the spokes of a wagon wheel, and to its centralized location on Vancouver Island. Nanaimo is the headquarters of the Regional District of Nanaimo.

Nanaimo is served by the coast-spanning Island Highway, the Island Rail Corridor, the BC Ferries system, and a local airport.

History

the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

The Indigenous peoples of the area that is now known as Nanaimo are the Snuneymuxw. An anglicised spelling and pronunciation of that word gave the city its current name.

The first Europeans known to reach Nanaimo Harbour were members of the 1791 Spanish voyage of Juan Carrasco, under the command of Francisco de Eliza. They gave it the name Bocas de Winthuysen[1] after naval officer Francisco Javier Winthuysen y Pineda. When the British Hudson's Bay Company established a settlement here in 1852, they named it Colvile Town after HBC governor Andrew Colvile. In 1858 it was renamed as Nanaimo, after the local indigenous people. The city has been called "The Harbour City" since the lead-up to Expo 86.


The HBC attempted to start a coal mine at Port Rupert but the project had been unsuccessful. In 1850 Snuneymuxw Chief Che-wich-i-kan, commonly known as "Coal Tyee", brought samples of coal to Victoria. A company clerk was dispatched and eventually the governor James Douglas visited the future site of Nanaimo.

While open to selling coal, the Snuneymuxw wished to retain control of it and retain the exclusive right to mine it. Chief Wun-wun-shum offered to sell coal for five barrels in exchange for one blanket. The HBC representative Joseph William McKay deemed this "impertinent". The Snuneymuxw retained their rights to the resource for a while, but gradually lost them due to other tribes and miners from the failed Port Rupert project.[2]

By 1852, the first shipment of Nanaimo coal was loaded on the Cadboro.

Construction of the Nanaimo Bastion began in 1853 and was finished in 1855.

On 27 November 1854, 24 coal miners and their families from England arrived at the settlement aboard the Beaver and Recovery. They had travelled seven months on the ship Princess Royal arriving at Esquimalt two days earlier. They transferred to the two smaller vessels for the trip to Colvile Town.[2] They were greeted by Joseph William McKay and 21 Scottish miners.

During World War I, the provincial government established an Internment camp for Ukrainian detainees, many of them local, at a Provincial jail in Nanaimo. It operated from September 1914 to September 1915.

In the 1940s, lumber supplanted coal as the main business. Minetown Days have been celebrated in the neighbouring community of Lantzville to highlight some of the locale's history.

In the late nineteenth century, numerous immigrants came from China and settled here. What was known as the first Chinatown in Nanaimo was founded during the gold rush years of the 1860s; it was the third largest in British Columbia. In 1884, because of mounting racial tensions related to the Dunsmuir coal company's hiring of Chinese strikebreakers, the company helped move Chinatown to a location outside city limits.

In 1908, when two Chinese entrepreneurs bought the site and tried to raise rents, the community and 4,000 shareholders from across Canada combined forces and bought a site for the third Chinatown, at a new location focused on Pine Street. That third Chinatown burned down on 30 September 1960 but it was by then mostly derelict and abandoned. A fourth Chinatown, also called Lower Chinatown or "new town", boomed for a while in the 1920s on Machleary Street.[3]

Research Tips


This page uses content from the English Wikipedia. The original content was at Nanaimo, British Columbia. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with WeRelate, the content of Wikipedia is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.