Coombs takes its name from Commissioner Thomas Bales Coombs, who headed the Salvation Army movement in Canada in the early 1900s. When Coombs retired in 1911, the Army honored him by naming their newest colony after him. The commissioner never visited the community that bore his name. It was a common enough practice in the colonial era: places were named for administrators, benefactors, and officials whose connection to the landscape was entirely abstract. The people who actually lived in Coombs had a more immediate relationship with the land, namely the hard work of clearing it.

The community was established in 1910 under a Salvation Army emigration plan that relocated families from overcrowded British cities to rural Canada. Walter Ford and his brother-in-law John West were sent ahead to prepare the land, and Ensign Crego, trained in farming, led the newcomers from England to their new home. What the settlers found was Vancouver Island forest: dense, damp, and nothing like the English countryside they had left behind. They cleared stumps, built a log schoolhouse in 1910, and raised a General Store in 1911 that also served as the post office. That building functioned as a general store for 110 years, finally closing in 2021 and reopening as a shop selling Dutch products.

The Salvation Army settlers were not the first people on this land. The area was historically inhabited by the Coast Salish peoples, including the Snuneymuxw First Nation, who have lived in the region for more than 5,000 years. European settlement, with its logging, road-building, and farming, overlaid itself on a landscape that already had a deep human history. The Snuneymuxw presence predates the English newcomers by millennia, a fact that the Coombs origin story sometimes eclipses but does not erase.

Modern Coombs, with its population of about 1,672, has leaned into its eccentricity. The Old Country Market draws tourists by the busload, and the goats have become unofficial ambassadors for the entire Parksville-Qualicum region. Butterfly World offers a small indoor tropical rainforest. Every B.C. Day weekend, the Coombs Rodeo Grounds host the Coombs Bluegrass Festival, filling the valley with banjos and mandolins. The Coombs Fall Fair, first held in neighboring Hilliers in 1913 and moved to Coombs in 1923, has been running for over a century. For a community that exists because the Salvation Army needed somewhere to send surplus Londoners, Coombs has done remarkably well at finding its own identity.

Coombs sits at the northernmost edge of the cool-summer Mediterranean climate zone, which means warm, dry summers and mild, wet winters. The combination makes for lush vegetation and a long growing season unusual for this latitude. Surrounding forests of Douglas fir, cedar, and hemlock remind you that this is still the Pacific Northwest, even if the summer weather feels almost southern European. From the air, Coombs is a small clearing in the green canopy west of Parksville, Highway 4A cutting through as a thin line connecting the coast to the island's interior and the road to Tofino.