Loggers from the International
Timber Compnay camp
near Campbell River, 1926
D-04857
The forest industry is the most important industry in British Columbia, producing more wealth, jobs and government revenue than any other industry.

However, because of the isolation of British Columbia in the nineteenth century, and the special character of its geography and forests, the exploitation of the those forests came much later than in the rest of Canada.

The climate and forest on the coast and in the interior of the province are very different from one another. The coast, with its mild and wet climate, and steep mountain slopes has dense and productive forests of large trees such as Douglas fir, Sitka spruce and cedar.

The interior of the province has a drier and colder climate and is less mountainous in some areas. The forests there are somewhat less productive and the consist of very different kinds of trees. This has meant that there are, in effect, two different forest industries in the province - the coast and the interior.

First Nations peoples used the forests to provide food, clothing, building materials, and tools. During the fur trade period the traders mostly used the forests to construct log buildings.

The Stamp Mill at
Port Alberni in 1864
A-04513
On the coast the tall and straight trees were much desired for masts on sailing ships. These remained the main purposes of the forests during the gold rush period of the 1850s and 1860s, with the addition of small sawmills to produce lumber for the construction of buildings and paddlewheel steam boats.

The earliest exploitation of the forests took place on the coast and by the time Canada entered Confederation in 1871 the coast had a well established industry of logging and lumbering.

Horses dragging logs from the
forest on the B.C. Coast, 1904
A-07086
In those early years only those trees close to the sea were logged as the technology did not exist to access them farther inland or up the slopes of steep mountains. Markets for lumber included Australia, Hawaii, Chile, and Shanghai (China).

The building of the Canadian Pacific Railway in the 1880s required large amounts of timber and lumber for the construction of rail lines, bridges, buildings and temporary structures.

Ship loading lumber at
the Moody Sawmill on Burrard Inlet
in the 1860s
A-00397
This period saw the first major development of a forest industry in the southern interior of the province. On the coast, production concentrated around Burrard Inlet. After completion of the railway in 1887 the forest industry in British Columbia went into decline until the late 1890s.


Continued...





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