Qualla: Riverview Hospital

Riverview Hospital: Introduction

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Greg_Salter (talk) (Uploads), CC BY 2.5. It was built for 480 people. By the end of its first year it held 919. The permanent provincial mental hospital that opened on a Coquitlam hillside in 1913 was overcrowded before its plaster had properly cured, and it stayed that way for most of the century that followed — an arithmetic of need outrunning capacity that describes the institution's entire history in two numbers. What surrounds the buildings, though, is one of the finest collections of trees in western Canada, planted deliberately, by patients, on the theory that working among growing things could heal a mind. Both facts are true about the same place, and neither cancels the other.

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Image: Greg_Salter (talk) (Uploads) | CC BY 2.5

Riverview Hospital: Room Was Always the Problem

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit waferboard, CC BY 2.0. British Columbia's first facility for people with mental illness was the Royal Hospital in Victoria, converted to the purpose in 1876 and closed almost immediately for crowding; its patients moved to the Provincial Asylum for the Insane in 1878. That filled too. In 1904 the provi...

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Image: waferboard | CC BY 2.0

Riverview Hospital: The Botanist

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Greg Salter (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1911, before the permanent hospital existed, British Columbia's first Provincial Botanist arrived on the grounds. John Davidson laid out an arboretum, a nursery, and a botanical garden across the hospital lands, and he did much of it with patients working alongside him — the e...

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Image: Greg Salter (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Riverview Hospital: A Company Town

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Niall Williams from Coquitlam, Canada, CC BY-SA 2.0. Adjacent Colony Farm was worked largely by patients, and by 1913 it was producing more than 700 tons of crops and 20,000 gallons of milk a year — an operation that fed the institution and was described as occupational therapy, though the people doing the work were not paid for it...

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Image: Niall Williams from Coquitlam, Canada | CC BY-SA 2.0

Riverview Hospital: Emptying Out

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit waferboard, CC BY 2.0. The decline began in the 1960s and ran for half a century. Antipsychotic medication, psychiatric wards inside general hospitals, and a shift toward outpatient care all reduced the case for a single enormous institution, and the Mental Health Act of 1964 aimed to make mental healt...

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Image: waferboard | CC BY 2.0

Riverview Hospital: Place of the Great Blue Heron

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit waferboard, CC BY 2.0. A 1992 review titled Listening finally established that patients must be told, and given the chance to object, before being certified incapable — rights granted less than twenty years before the hospital shut for good in July 2012. The site was added to the Canadian Register of H...

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Image: waferboard | CC BY 2.0