Place:Prince Rupert, British Columbia, Canada

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source: Family History Library Catalog

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Prince Rupert is a port city in the province of British Columbia, Canada. Its location is on Kaien Island near the Alaskan panhandle. It is the land, air, and water transportation hub of British Columbia's North Coast, and has a population of 12,220 people as of 2016.^[1]

History

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

Coast Tsimshian occupation of the Prince Rupert Harbour area spans at least 5,000 years. About 1500 B.C. there was a significant population increase, associated with larger villages and house construction. The early 1830s saw a loss of Coast Tsimshian influence in the Prince Rupert Harbour area.

Founding

Prince Rupert replaced Port Simpson as the choice for the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway (GTP) western terminus. It also replaced Port Essington, away on the southern bank of the Skeena River, as the business centre for the North Coast .

The GTP purchased the 14,000-acre First Nations reserve, and received a 10,000-acre grant from the BC government. A post office was established on November 23, 1906. Surveys and clearing, that commenced in that year, preceded the laying out of the 2,000-acre town site. A $200,000 provincial grant financed plank sidewalks, roads, sewers and water mains. Kaien Island, which comprised damp muskeg overlaying a solid rock foothill, proved expensive both for developing the land for railway and town use.

By 1909, the town possessed 4 grocery, 2 hardware, 2 men's clothing, a furniture, and several fruit and cigar stores, a wholesale drygoods outlet, a wholesale/retail butcher, 2 banks, the GTP hotel and annex, and numerous lodging houses and restaurants. The first lot sales that year created a bidding war.

Prince Rupert was incorporated on March 10, 1910. Although he never visited Canada, it was named after Prince Rupert of the Rhine, the first Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company, as the result of a nation-wide competition held by the Grand Trunk Railway, the prize for which was $250.

With the collapse of the real estate boom in 1912, and World War I, much of the company's land remained unsold. Charles Melville Hays, president of the GTP, whose business plan made little sense, was primarily responsible for the bankruptcy of the company, and the establishment of a town that would take decades to achieve even a small fraction of the promises touted. Mount Hays, the larger of two mountains on Kaien Island, is named in his honour, as is a local high school, Charles Hays Secondary School. The train station, a listed historic place, replaced the temporary building in 1922.

20th and 21st centuries

Local politicians used the promise of a highway connected to the mainland as an incentive, and the city grew over the next several decades. American troops finally completed the road between Prince Rupert and Terrace during World War II to help move thousands of allied troops to the Aleutian Islands and the Pacific. Several forts were built to protect the city at Barrett Point and Fredrick Point.

After World War II, the fishing industry, particularly for salmon and halibut, and forestry became the city's major industries. Prince Rupert was considered the Halibut Capital of the World from the opening of the Canadian Fish & Cold Storage plant in 1912 until the early 1980s. A long-standing dispute over fishing rights in the Dixon Entrance to the Hecate Strait (pronounced as "hekk-et") between American and Canadian fisherman led to the formation of the 54-40 or Fight Society. The United States Coast Guard maintains a base in nearby Ketchikan, Alaska.

In 1946, the Government of Canada, through an Order in Council, granted the Department of National Defence the power to administer and maintain facilities to collect data for communications research. The Royal Canadian Navy was allotted forty positions, seven of which were in Prince Rupert. In either 1948 or 1949, Prince Rupert ceased operations, and the positions were relocated to RCAF Whitehorse, Yukon. The 1949 Queen Charlotte earthquake, with a surface wave magnitude of 8.1 and a maximum Mercalli intensity of VIII (Severe), broke windows and swayed buildings on August 22.

In Summer 1958, Prince Rupert endured a riot over racial discrimination. Ongoing discontent with heavy-handed police practices towards Aboriginals escalated to rioting during BC Centennial celebrations following the arrest of an Aboriginal couple. As many as 1,000 people (one tenth of the city's population at the time) began smashing windows and skirmishing with police. The Riot Act was read for only the second time since Confederation.

Over the years, hundreds of students were said to have largely paid their way through school by working in the lucrative fishing industry. Construction of a pulp mill began in 1947 and it was operating by 1951. In 1958, Indo-Canadian industrialist Sohen Singh Gill established Prince Rupert Sawmills at the location of the old dry dock on Prince Rupert's waterfront. In the 1960s, the majority of the town's workforce was employed either in the fishery or at Gill's sawmill.^[2] The construction of coal and grain shipping terminals followed. From the 1960s into the 1980s, the city constructed many improvements, including a civic centre, swimming pool, public library, golf course and performing arts centre (recently renamed "The Lester Centre of the Arts"). These developments marked the town's changes from a fishing and mill town into a small city.

In the 1990s, both the fishing and forestry industries suffered a significant downturn. In July 1997, Canadian fishermen blockaded the Alaska Marine Highway ferry M/V Malaspina, keeping it in the port as a protest in the salmon fishing rights dispute between Alaska and British Columbia. The forest industry declined when a softwood lumber dispute arose between Canada and the USA. After the pulp mill closed, many people were unemployed, and much modern machinery was left unused. After reaching a peak of about 18,000 in the early 1990s, Prince Rupert's population began to decline, as people left in search of work.

The years from 1996 to 2004 were difficult for Prince Rupert, with closure of the pulp mill, the burning down of a fish plant and a significant population decline. 2005 may be viewed as a critical turning point: the announcement of the construction of a container port in April 2005, combined with new ownership of the pulp mill, the opening in 2004 of a new cruise ship dock, the resurgence of coal and grain shipping, and the prospects of increased heavy industry and tourism may foretell a bright future for the area. The port is becoming an important trans-Pacific hub.

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