The Canadian Western Lumber Company had a labour problem, and it solved the problem by going shopping. In 1909 its agents travelled to eastern Ontario and Quebec and came back with 110 French Canadian mill workers, about forty families of whom settled that year on a slope above the Fraser River; another contingent followed in June 1910. Roughly four hundred francophones arrived in total. The company wanted hands that would not simply drift off to the next camp, and what it got instead - unintentionally, and permanently - was the largest French-speaking community west of Manitoba, three thousand kilometres from the St. Lawrence, on a hillside in British Columbia.
The mill came first. Frank Ross and James McLaren opened it in 1889 on the north bank of the Fraser, a $350,000 plant that was modern by the standards of its moment and enormous by the standards of the place. Around it grew the standard apparatus of a company town: twenty houses, a store, a post office, a hospital, an office block, a barber shop, a pool hall - and a Sikh temple, which is the detail that gives away who else was doing the work. Two mill managers' residences were built, and both outlived the industry that produced them. The first is now Place des Arts, a community arts centre. The second, put up in 1909, is Mackin House, a historic house museum run by the Coquitlam Heritage Society. The settlement incorporated as the village of Fraser Mills in 1913.
Maillardville takes its name from Father Edmond Maillard, a young Oblate from France who served the new community in its earliest years. It is a small thing and an enormous one. The French Canadians who arrived in 1909 had come to a province where their language had no institutional footing whatever, and the parish was the institution that held them together - church, school, social calendar and defence of the mother tongue in one building. Name the place for the priest and you have said, out loud, what kind of place it intends to be. It worked better than anyone had reason to expect. French immersion schools, bilingual youth organizations and the annual Festival du Bois still run here, more than a century after the recruiting trains pulled in.
Maillardville is usually told as a French story, and it is only half of one. In the same early years of the twentieth century, Punjabi workers - many of them Sikh - came to the Fraser mills and settled on the same south slope of Coquitlam, in the same wage economy, under immigration laws that were considerably harsher toward them than toward anyone recruited from Quebec. The gurdwara that stood in the company town was there because they were there. Two communities, arriving within a few years of each other for exactly the same reason, ended up with very different room to manoeuvre in the province that had invited them to cut its timber. Both are still on the slope.
Depression-era wage cuts brought labour unrest to Fraser Mills, as they did to every resource town in the province, and the mill went on working through it and through the decades after. In 1971 Coquitlam absorbed the village of Fraser Mills, which handed the city a substantially larger tax base and ended the community's separate municipal life. The mill itself ran until 2001. What is happening on the site now is the familiar Lower Mainland sequence: the industrial land rezoned residential, a masterplanned waterfront district of some fifteen multi-unit buildings and roughly 5,500 homes rising where the saws were. Coquitlam calls it the Waterfront Village Centre. A place that existed because of a sawmill will shortly contain more people than the sawmill ever employed in its entire history.
Maillardville today runs between Austin Avenue at the top of the slope and the Lougheed Highway at the bottom, Blue Mountain Street to the west and Mundy Road to the east, with its town centre tucked into the southwest corner on Brunette Avenue. The 2021 census counted 15,837 people. The neighbourhood marked its centenary in 2009, and the city's 2014 plan anticipates another six thousand residents over two decades - the francophone quarter becoming, like everywhere else near a Vancouver transit line, denser. One export is worth noting. Lucille Starr - born Lucille Savoie in Saint Boniface, Manitoba, and brought to Maillardville at the age of seven - began singing here with a group called Les Hirondelles. In 1964 her recording of "Quand le soleil dit bonjour aux montagnes," retitled "The French Song" because its producer Herb Alpert could not pronounce the original, sold over a million copies, the first Canadian record to do so. She was the first woman inducted into the Canadian Country Music Association's Hall of Honour, in 1987, and a street in Coquitlam carries her name.
Maillardville occupies the south slope of Coquitlam at 49.2374 N, 122.867 W, on the north side of the Fraser River about 12 nautical miles east of downtown Vancouver. From 2,000 to 3,500 feet AGL the terrain does the navigating: find the Fraser River where the Brunette River joins it from the north and the Port Mann Bridge carries the Trans-Canada Highway across, then look at the hillside rising immediately north of the industrial flats - Maillardville is the older, finer-grained residential grid on that slope, bounded by Austin Avenue above and the Lougheed Highway below. The former Fraser Mills site on the riverbank below, now a large redevelopment, is the clearest single marker. Burnaby Mountain with its ridge-top campus lies west, the Coquitlam and Pitt river valleys open north toward the Golden Ears peaks. Pitt Meadows (CYPK) is about 6 nautical miles northeast, Boundary Bay (CZBB) about 11 nautical miles southwest, Vancouver International (CYVR) about 13 nautical miles west, and Vancouver Harbour Flight Centre (CYHC) about 11 nautical miles northwest - busy terminal airspace throughout, so verify current procedures. Autumn and winter bring persistent low overcast and river valley fog; summer afternoons are usually clear with the North Shore and Golden Ears mountains sharp on the horizon.