People uprooted from Mill Bay (3)

Mill Bay, on the Nass River near Nisga’a village Kincolith (Gingolx), was established by non-Indigenous settlers in 1879. That year the Mill Bay Cannery was built at the site of a former mill. In 1912, the mill re-designed the layout of the cannery, replacing cabins along the path to the workers’ quarters with a large mess house for European workers. Japanese Canadians and other visible minorities were segregated in smaller bunkhouse areas. The two-story cannery was built on pilings over Nass River and by 1923, covered almost twenty-five thousand square feet.

The cannery included a machine shop, blacksmith shop, boat-building shed, and net storage. It was among the first BC canneries to install can-making equipment on-site, and supplied cans to other canneries in the area. BC Packers Ltd. closed the plant in 1937, although it continued to operate as a camp until 1959. Many Japanese Canadians working in the area listed their address as Nass River due to the region’s many canneries.