Comprehensive information and links about Canada Port Coquitlam

Port Coquitlam is a city in British Columbia, located about 20 minutes east of Vancouver, at the confluence of Fraser River and the Pitt River. Coquitlam borders it on the north, the cities of Maple Ridge and Pitt Meadows lie across the river.

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Most of the activity in the big municipality that was Coquitlam was concentrated around the Junction. Why, Junction leaders began to ask, should the people clustered there subsidize the construction of roads and such for the vast empty areas that lay beyond? Support for a separate city, one centering on the Junction, began to build. On October 17, 1912, a petition to create the City of Port Coquitlam was sent off to Victoria. To get an idea of the size and shape of the new city, Coquitlam’s municipal clerk, John Smith, conducted his own census. It showed there would be 1,342 people there and that 438 of them were “male British subjects of the full age of twenty-one years” (i.e., eligible voters).

One issue of the Star announced a contest to choose a new name for the proposed city. The Vancouver-based Coquitlam Terminal Company, which was promoting the Junction as a site for major industries, sponsored the contest. We haven’t discovered the name of the winner, but we do know the name that won the prize: Port Coquitlam.

It seemed as if the new city, when it was incorporated, would be off to a thriving start. New buildings were popping up everywhere. A contractor named Charles Davies, who had gone into business the year before (and who would later become one of PoCo’s more popular mayors), built the Commercial Hotel, which opened January 18, 1913, and stood for decades at the northeast corner of Flint Street and the Lougheed Highway. The hotel was an ambitious one for a small town: it had forty-six bedrooms, eight bathrooms, a bar, dining room, reception area, ladies rooms and two stores on the ground floor. “The hotel,” said an advertisement, “will be furnished in modern and in every room there will be hot and cold water, each room being heated by hot water radiators and lighted with electricity.” (Renamed Frisco’s Inn, the old hotel was finally torn down in February 1998 after eighty-six years of use, but a memory will remain: the bar from the Commercial Hotel is planned to go into a pub in the residentialcommercial development replacing the Commercial.)

There were predictions of “great elevators” along the local riverfront to hold prairie grain destined for export. In fact, plans to build a grain elevator on the Pitt River were announced in June 1913 but not carried through.

The Coquitlam Terminal Company wrote to council asking it to build more roads and ditches, saying the company itself had spent $17,000 in 1912 on public sidewalks, streets and bridges. “The major portion of this sum,” the company wrote, “represents a permanent improvement of which the Municipality has the benefit.” The letter was signed by Theo. M. Knappen. The company was spending a lot of money on advertising, too: a full-page ad placed by the Coquitlam Terminal Company, LimitedCoquitlam Townsite Company, Limited, was aimed directly at CPR employees. It says in part, “The question of money need not bother you if you are a C.P.R. employee. We will sell you a lot and build you a house on it, or on one of our own on terms that you can meet readily...” Activity was now feverish. The Greer Block, another sturdy office building, went up in 1912 at the corner of what is now Kingsway and Mary Hill. Perhaps it was erected by the brand new Coquitlam Construction Company, which had started April 1.

It was around this time that the little Coquitlam Theatre was built, with 135 individual wooden chairs in neat rows, and locals began going to see Chester Conklin and Fatty Arbuckle, Norma Desmond and the Keystone Kops. A 1912 advertisement for the theatre noted the “programme changed three times weekly.” There were live concerts there, too. A photograph of the building indicates it was rather a ramshackle affair. Long-time resident Annie Osborne remembers sitting in the theatre watching movies and on rainy days having to hold an umbrella over her head to shield herself from the leaking roof.

The year after the war ended, PoCo held a civic election that was notable for a couple of reasons: it brought in as mayor the very popular Charlie Davies, who had been an alderman for twenty years, and it returned to council for a second term Rosina Morrill, only the second woman to win a seat, and the only woman on the ‘46 council. (Jane Kilmer didn’t run that year.) Rosina’s husband Bill had died, and she had to find work to provide for her four kids. She became a nurse’s aide at Essondale…but with not enough income to afford a car, she had to hitchhike to work! (One wonders how many city councils in Canada had members who hitchhiked to work.) Eventually the hospital started a bus service for its employees, but it was tough to juggle work, raise a family and sit on council.

Young George Laking, later to become a Port Coquitlam alderman and mayor, had his own transportation woes at the time. He didn’t have a car, and he was courting Joycelyn Huth, an Essondale nurse-in-training who lived in residence at the hospital. George had to take a cab out to the hospital every time he wanted to see her, and the fare was 50 cents, no small amount back then. (George and Jocelyn were married in 1949.) As a fifteen-year-old, George had started working for the Canadian Western Lumber Company in 1943, doing odd jobs at first. “Within six months I was sawing shingles. Then they shut down the shingle mill, and I went to plywood for four or five years.

“They had as many as 2,200 people working at that mill, but when Crown Zellerbach bought them out in ‘53 they were down to about 200. I got hurt in 1951. I was sawing shingles and the equipment broke. I didn’t want the saw to fall on my feet, so I grabbed it, wrecked my back. I was off for one year and nine months. Three months I was lying on a Foster bed, didn’t move, couldn’t wash myself. The neurosurgeon, he tells me he didn’t think my right leg would ever work. I said, ‘You just leave me alone. I’ll make it work’.” And George did. His recovery included going to what was then the Workmen’s Compensation Board in Vancouver. He drove in for therapy every day for five months. “The WCB doc said he didn’t think I should go back to work. I told him, ‘I’ll go nuts if I don’t’.” He went back. When George retired from Canadian Western on April 30, 1991, he had been there “forty years, eleven months exactly.” To the hard-working and serious Port Coquitlam of the 1940s, Karl and Clara “Babe” Jacobs brought a touch of glamour and excitement. They had come to town in the 1930s and owned several rustic cabins situated near the Coquitlam River. It was said that Mexican-born Clara Jacobs had been a Hollywood actress, and it appeared she was still playing the role. “Heads would turn…when they saw Clara Jacobs, in long scarf and dark glasses, driving her beautiful old car, complete with rumble seat,” wrote a town historian in Port Coquitlam: City of Rivers and Mountains. Karl’s brother was rumoured to be a movie director, and there was also talk that Karl had been a Hollywood stuntman…and one of the first referees in the National Hockey League! (A researcher aches to know how Karl and Clara met.) Their collection of cabins, formally Steelhead Ranch, was informally known as “Hollywood Hideout,” and local legend says that many stars of the silver screen stayed there from time to time, including Errol Flynn. Sadly, in 1961 this scenic vacation retreat was washed out when the Coquitlam River flooded. The Internet Movie Data Base, which has details on every movie ever made and all the people who worked on them, shows no Clara or Babe Jacobs in its vast data bank (and no chronologically correct Karl Jacobs), but perhaps she’s listed there under her maiden name or a screen name. Now and again a fact in a city’s history pops up that gives a delightfully clear picture of what it was like in earlier days. Nancy Ogilvie, a member of the Port Coquitlam Heritage and Cultural Society and a treasure trove of information for this book (and who, incidentally, was the 1942 May Queen), recalls that her family, armed with the proper licences, occasionally made trips to “the flats,” now the Broadway industrial area, to shoot pheasants for Sunday dinner. “The birds were in abundance in those days. We wore big hipped wading boots, and I remember we’d get hung up sometimes on the barbed wire fence.” Her dad raised and trained hunting dogs, including golden and water spaniels, Labrador golden retrievers, Chesapeake Bay retrievers, Irish setters and pointers. They’d be put to work in the hunt, during which young Nancy—carefully taught by her father—would get some shooting in herself.

“We had 1,500 people here in 1942,” Nancy says. “It was like a big family, everyone knew everyone else.” She recalls swimming with friends in the “beautiful unpolluted waters of the Coquitlam River, where deep holes formed as the river made its way to the Fraser and the sea. It is true that you could actually walk across the fish in the river bed at spawning time.” Long-time PoCo resident Don Gillespie recalls fish swimming in ditches alongside some city streets all the way up to Prairie Road.