The name is older than the industry by an immeasurable margin. It comes from Tsa-meeun-is, a shaman and prophet whose name means broken chest. The story told of him is that he took a massive arrow wound to the chest in battle, survived it, and became a powerful chief - and that his people took his name as their own. Their descendants are the Stz'uminus First Nation, known for much of the last century as the Chemainus Indian Band. It is a rare and worthwhile thing when a town's name is not a transplanted European surname but a person's, and specifically a person remembered for what he endured.

Chemainus began in 1858 as an unincorporated logging town in the Chemainus Valley, on the sheltered east coast of southern Vancouver Island in what is now the municipality of North Cowichan. The railway arrived in the 1880s, and with it the economics that let timber move at scale; by the early 1920s about 600 people lived here. The pattern was the standard one for this coast - one company, one mill, one payroll, and a community arranged entirely around a whistle. It worked for well over a century, which is longer than most such arrangements last, and long enough that nobody planned for it ending.

The 1980s recession in British Columbia's forest industry was not a bad year. Demand and prices fell together, global competition sharpened, provincial timber stocks thinned, the United States put tariffs on BC forest imports, unresolved Indigenous land claims clouded tenure, and public support for environmental protection grew. Scholars read the whole episode as something larger than a downturn: the shift from a Fordist production system - many workers, standard output - to a post-Fordist one built on flexibility and automation. For a single-industry coastal town that theory arrived as unemployment. MacMillan Bloedel's overhaul of the Chemainus mill produced a plant that was genuinely better at its job, and roughly 455 people who no longer had one.

The response came from local citizens rather than from any ministry: revitalise the main street, and do it by commissioning large outdoor murals depicting the town's own history. It sounds like a craft-fair solution to a structural problem. It worked. Fifty-three murals later, Chemainus supports a theatre, antiques dealers and restaurants that exist because of foot traffic the paintings generate, and a shopping mall went in about a kilometre away. The population reached 3,035 by 2011 and 4,033 by the 2021 census - growth, in a resource town that lost its resource. Geography helped: Chemainus sits between Victoria and Nanaimo, close to ferry terminals and the island highway. So did timing. The early projects leaned on government funding that has since largely disappeared, and some observers note the opportunities for that kind of entrepreneurship have narrowed with it.

The town is still a working place, though not because of the mill just now. Western Forest Products, which runs the restructured sawmill, curtailed it in June 2025 and has kept it down through all of 2026 - a reminder that the industry's boom-and-bust cycle never fully stopped, even after the murals. An industrial park nearby has attracted re-manufacturing firms. Chemainus Secondary School serves students from here, Crofton and Saltair. A BC Ferries terminal runs across to Thetis Island and Penelakut Island, which was called Kuper until the name was changed. And on 13 January 2006, in one of the odder pieces of local economic development, a Boeing 737 was deliberately sunk offshore to seed an artificial reef. The operation was filmed for "Sinking Wings," an episode of the Discovery Channel series Mega Builders. Divers now swim through an airliner in cold green water a short distance from a town that repainted itself back into existence.