| Mission, British Columbia |
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Mission is a Canadian City , in the Province of British Columbia and is situated on the north bank of the Fraser River, overlooking the Fraser Valley . Mission is the twenty-third largest municipality in British Columbia, with a population of 31,272 ( 2001 ). Mission was incorporated in 1892 and is 225.78 km² in size. Originally it was two separate incorporations, the District Municipality of Mission and the smaller Town of Mission City; these were amalgamated by plebiscite in 1969. GEOGRAPHY Unlike the other Fraser Valley municipalities Mission is mostly forested upland with only small floodplains lining the shore of the Fraser River, with some benches of relatively poor-quality farmland rising in succession northwards above the core developed area of the town. What agricultural land there is in Mission was once the heart of the berry industry in the Fraser Valley, but this ended due to the consequences of the great Fraser flood of 1948 which flooded the lowlands; that industry is now largely centred across the river in the neighbouring municipality of Abbotsford. The municipality is bisected by the lower reaches of the Stave River system, which are mostly the lake waters of two hydroelectric reservoirs, Stave Lake and Hayward Lake, although a small portion of the Stave still runs free in its last two miles before its confluence with the Fraser at Ruskin , which is on the border with the larger municipality of Maple Ridge, British Columbia to the west. This hydroelectric system was the largest hydroelectric project in southwestern British Columbia until the 1950s and was built to provide power to the electric street railway and interurban system in Vancouver. Although the vast majority of the population of Mission lives well to the east of the Stave, over 50% of the municipality is west and north of that river. The eastern boundary of the municipality roughly coincides with the division between the Mission upland and the alluvial floodplain of Hatzic Prairie, which resembles much of the rest of the Fraser Valley Lowland. The unincorporated communities from Hatzic eastwards to Deroche are part of the social and commercial matrix centred on Mission but have never joined the municipality; their local societies are built on dairy, berry and corn farming. GOVERNMENT The District of Mission uses the current Council-Manager system of local government. The present Mayor and Council, was elected on November 19, 2005. The current mayor is James Atebe, who beat out the other candidate by an astounding 67%. Past Mayor Abe Neufeld has retired from local politics. LIVING Housing prices in Mission are some of the lowest in the Fraser Valley. Mission also has over 200 acres (0.8 km²) of municipal parks; and a provincial park, Rolley Lake. The city receives an average annual precipitation of 1,631 mm a year (64 inches0. An average daytime high of 24°C (75°F) in July, with overnight low of 12°C (54°F). In October daytime highs are averagely 14°C (58°F), with overnight lows of 6°C (44°F). December daytime highs averagely are 5°C (41°F), with overnight lows of 1°C (35°F). April daytime highs are averagely 13°C (56°F), with overnight lows of 5°C (41°F). PEOPLE Mission has a low volume of new local employment opportunities and a high proportion of residents (nearly 6 out of 10) who commute to work in other locales. The community has a young population, 73% of which is under 35. Mission's largest religious group is Christianity at 55.1%, of which the largest denomination is Protestant . The second largest religious group is Sikh , comprising 5.1% of the population. The largest ethnic group is Caucasian , comprising approximately 91.6% of the population. The largest ethnic minority group in Mission are South Asians, primarily Indo-Canadian s comprising 5.1% of the population.. INDUSTRY Forestry and agriculture are Mission's chief resource sectors and provide the basis for varied related retail and service activities. Over the past few years, transportation improvements have enabled the manufacturing sector to expand beyond sawmilling and food processing. Forest and wood related industries dominate the manufacturing sector, with an emphasis on Redcedar shake and shingle mills. Mission also holds the only municipal tree farm license in British Columbia. Agriculture is restricted to a narrow belt along the Fraser River, and the unincorporated Dewdney-Deroche district east of Mission contains the majority of the farms in the area. There are about 96 commercial and hobby farms in the area. Dairy is the chief agricultural enterprise; other income sources include poultry, hogs, beef and vegetables. TRANSPORTATION Mission is served by a regional transit system that connects the District of Mission with the City Of Abbotsford . The service is operated by BC Transit, the City of Abbotsford and the District of Mission. Transportation infrastructure includes Abbotsford-Mission Highway 11 , and the Lougheed Highway . Mission is also accessible through commuter rail, the " West Coast Express ", which runs from Vancouver to Mission. HISTORY The Town of Mission City had an interesting beginning as a land promotion, with the town's core commercial properties and residential streets auctioned off at the "Great Land Sale" of 1891, with buyers brought in via the CPR mainline from Vancouver as well as from Eastern Canada. Some of the early houses and commercial buildings were, in fact, specifically designed to be reminiscent of small towns in southern Ontario in order to encourage buyers. Hailed at the time as a new metropolis, the fledgling town's location at the intersection of the Canadian Pacific Railway mainline with a northward extension of the Burlington Northern Railroad brought name suggestions that included East Vancouver and North Seattle. The name Mission City was chosen due to the site's proximity to the historic St. Mary's Mission of the Oblate order just east of town, which was founded in 1868. At the time of founding, the swing-span Mission Bridge was the only crossing of the Fraser River in the Fraser Valley below Yale, and all rail traffic between Vancouver and the United States was necessarily routed through Mission (until the CNR bridge at New Westminster was built in the early 1900s). The rail bridge at Mission doubled duty as a one-way alternating vehicular bridge until the 1970s, when a long-promised new highway bridge was finally completed. The bridge's location is geographically important as the head of the tidal bore on the Fraser River, and its water level gauge is an important measure of the Fraser's annual and sometimes dangerously large spring freshet. Mission City's original retail core was in the small area of lowland between the CPR mainline and the river, but following the great flood of 1894 a few years after the town's founding was relocated just north of the rail line at the foot of the hillside rising above the rail junction. This small commercial strip, only four or five blocks long, was one of the principal commercial centres of the Fraser Valley for many decades and had a lively retail trade and social life. The western part of the district, the Stave Valley , is largely rural and forested but its watercourse is home to what was the largest hydroelectric project in British Columbia , built to supply the British Columbia Electric Railway . The Stave Falls Power Co. operated a light-gauge railway for passenger and freight service up the lower canyon of the river to the first dam at Stave Falls, British Columbia , which is the foot of Stave Lake (actually it's a pair of dams because of a low hillock-cum island in between them. It is now owned by BC Hydro Flanking the outraces of the powerhouse at Stave Falls there was once a fairly large community (300 houses), which was served by the railway via connections to the CPR line at Ruskin , although the (then very rough) Dewdney Trunk Road used the dam to cross the Stave . Population in the Stave Falls area is now away from the dams, west along the Dewdney Trunk towards Maple Ridge, in a rural farm-and-wilderness area south of Rolley Lake Provincial Park . Later another dam was built at the foot of the canyon which was higher and therefore also more powerful, and also flooded out the railway, which was built along its shores. Its roadway is now maintained as a public hiking and biking route connecting the two dams, and Ruskin Dam is also a roadway, connecting to Silverdale and Silverhill on the east side of the Stave, and the rest of Mission. Up against the Maple Ridge boundary near the waterfront on the west side of the Stave, and halfway between the dam and the mills at Ruskin , was a large drive-in theatre for many years. It is now a large trailer park, and the most populated of Ruskin's neighbourhoods. Following the building of the Highway 1 freeway on the south side of the Fraser in the late 1960s, which brought huge population growth and large shopping malls to formerly rural Abbotsford, Matsqui and Langley, Mission lost its "anchor", which was the main Eaton's department store in the Valley, and the town's Main Street businesses lost much of their business to the new shopping malls a few minutes away across the river; this process was accelerated with the opening of the new bridge in the mid-1970s. Despite a cohesive business community and carefully planned new retail malls on the edges of the old core, Mission's retail community has never regained its former prominence in the Fraser Valley . Burgeoning " Exurban " population growth connected with the rapid growth of the population of the Lower Mainland and encouraged by a new Commuter Rail line direct to downtown Vancouver, the West Coast Express , has reversed this trend although Mission's real estate remains some of the cheapest in the heated Fraser Valley market. Outside of the core "urban" area, most of which had been the Town of Mission City, the former District of Mission was a collection of distinct rural communities, each with their own history and sometimes distinct ethnic flavour. Silverdale, 7 kilometres west of Mission on the east bank of the lower Stave River, was founded by Italian immigrants in the 1880s, with neighbouring Silverhill originally founded by a Finnish utopian sect who were superseded by Scandinavian and German settlers following a forest fire that virtually wiped out the Finns. Steelhead, in the northern part of the district, was originally a weekend retreat for some of Vancouver's press community, and other localities such as Ferndale, Cedar Valley and Hatzic were farming communities of mixed origin, with Europeans and anglicized French-Canadians alongside the usual British-Scottish Canadian mix typical of much of the Fraser Valley. Before World War II, there was a large Japanese-Canadian contingent throughout the Mission area, involved in berry farming, logging and milling and in the fishery on the river. In 1954 , Benedictine Monks obtained land near Mission, where they set up their Westminster Abbey and Seminary of Christ the King. They have lived there ever since, running their own farm and teaching high school and college men at the seminary. The berry industry, formerly the district's largest and most important, formed the heart of the town's annual summer party, the Strawberry Festival, but with the impacts on this industry the relocation of the Japanese during wartime and the devastating flood of 1948, the strawberry theme was abandoned and the town acquired the rights to the Western Canada championships of the Soap Box Derby , which were held annually in a specially-built facility until 1973. | ||
| Up The 1960s-19702 There Was A Large Cluster Of Productive Mills On The Waterfront At Mission, British ColumbiaMission City, Which Was The Capital Of | "http://wwwinformationdelightinfo/encyclopedia/entry/cedar_shake" class="copylinks">Cedar Shake production in the world for many years (the mill at Whonnock, British Columbia{Whonnock outproduced the largest of the Mission mills, but Mission's city of mills was the largest overall producer) Nearby Eddy Match Co, between Mission and Hatzic, was the largest matchstick-making plant in the world until it closed in the 1960s its only rival was in Hull, Que |
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