|
Whonnock, British Columbia is a rural, naturally treed, and hilly community on the north side of the Fraser River in the eastern part of the City of Maple Ridge, British Columbia, Canada. It is approximately thirty-five miles (56 kilometres) east of Downtown Vancouver on the Lougheed Highway Whonnock shares borders with three other Maple Ridge communities. To the west the borders are 256th Street with Albion and upper Kanaka Creek with Webster’s Corners. To the east Whonnock Creek〔 (Whonnock Creek - National Resources Canada )〕 forms the border with Ruskin. To the north is the municipal border and to the south the Fraser River. 〔Thornhill, the western part of Whonnock is recently viewed by some outsiders as a separate community.〕 The name Whonnock〔("Whonnock, what's in a name?" ''Maple Ridge News'', 22 March, 2013 )〕 is derived from a Halkomelem word for humpback salmon or pink salmon, the only kind of salmon to ascend Whonnock Creek. Whonnock Creek flows from the north, above Dewdney Trunk Road, south to the Fraser River passing Whonnock Lake. ==Whonnock First Nation== Whonnock Indian Reserve No. 1 is located at the confluence of Whonnock Creek and the Fraser River. This Reserve is under the jurisdiction of the Kwantlen First Nation, headquartered on McMillan Island at Fort Langley. 〔(BCGNIS entry "Whonnock Indian Reserve 1 )〕 First Nations have been living continuously in the area for more than 10,000 years. 〔 "The stylistic qualities of surface scattered artifacts collected from 68 sites in the inundation zones of Stave and Hayward Reservoir suggest that the area has been continuously occupied since late Pleistocene times." (Duncan McLaren, 2009), 〕 About 25 years before Simon Fraser came downriver in 1808 a wave of smallpox wiped out, or nearly so, the villages in this area, including the one at Whonnock Creek. Those villages were connected to a First Nations tribe of the Boundary Bay area that was also destroyed by the epidemic. Around the time of settlement of Fort Langley (ca. 1827) First Nations people started to repopulate the deserted places. 〔 "Katzie Ethnographic Notes", Wayne Suttles, ''Anthropology in British Columbia'', Memoirs No. 2 and 3., British Columbia Provincial Museum, 1955, 1979 printing. page 12 〕 In historical times the Whonnock Tribe of the Kwantlen First Nation lived here. They had their own Chief. The last member of the Whonnocks tribe living on the reserve died in 1951. ==Settlement & History== The first permanent white settler and landowner in Whonnock was a man from Shetland, Robert Robertson, who settled in Whonnock with his First Nations wife in 1861 and in the following 25 years raised a family next to the village of the Whonnocks without any white setters close by. 〔("Robert Robertson & Tselatsetenate", ''Whonnock Notes'' No. 7, Winter 2000/2001 )〕 The selection of Whonnock for a railroad station on the transcontinental railroad (Just because the place happened to be 10 miles from the next station, Hammond) initiated the community of today. After the trains started running regularly in 1885 the railroad brought a stream of new settlers. From 1885 onward Whonnock rapidly became the focal point for settlers all over the eastern part of Maple Ridge as well as Glen Valley across the Fraser and on lands across the Stave River. Whonnock soon boasted, aside from a railway station, a post office, a school, and a general store, amenities not available elsewhere for some time. Added to that were a growing number of churches. Most of the new residents were of British descent and came from other parts of Canada, but other nationalities were also here. Norwegian immigrants and their descendants played a significant part in the history of the community.〔("The Trondheim Congregation'" ''Whonnock Notes'' No. 3, Winter 1997 )〕 In general the settlers made their livelihood fishing and logging. Subsistence farming was essentially the only kind of farming in this mostly poor neighbourhood but, as elsewhere in Maple Ridge, a few residents developed small-scale commercial fruit growing and poultry farming. There was a small number of affluent permanent or summer residents – hobby “rangers” – who could afford employing others to do the manual work. From the 1920s until their expulsion in 1942, the Japanese settlers – a large part of the population – made use of the slopes facing south for extensive berry farming.〔"Destruction of a Community,”''Maple Ridge News'', 14 December 2011. Published in ''Whonnock Notes'' No. 19. For link to ''Whonnock Notes'' see External links below.〕 Lumberyards and mills continue to be active on the waterfront until the present day although today on a smaller scale than before. Women, through the church and other organizations, played an important part in the shaping of community life. In 1912 they created and started operating a community hall that remained the centre of social activities for some forty years. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Whonnock」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|