People uprooted from Port McNeill (1)

Port McNeill (formerly Pioneer), near Hyde Creek, was developed as a Hudson’s Bay Company trading hub in the late 1830s. By the 1920s, several small logging operations were active, and in 1937, the Pioneer Timber Company built a logging camp near the present-day Port McNeill waterfront. Around 1939 a permanent non-Indigenous settlement was established.

By the same year, the Nippon Soda McNeil Trading Company (N.S. McNeil), a subsidiary of a Japanese firm, had acquired land west of Port McNeill and was contracting its logging to C&A Logging. C&A Logging established a camp that housed about sixty loggers, with bunkhouses and cookhouses for Japanese Canadian crews. The Japanese Canadian community planted many flower beds of plants native to Japan. Some of these plants remained after the community was forcibly uprooted.