Mission (British Columbia)

Mission is a town and district municipality of about 39,000 people (2016) in the Fraser Valley region of British Columbia. It was founded in 1892 in the land of the Stó:lō First Nations people. It is home to early BC railway links and hydroelectric power, and a Benedictine monastery on a hilltop with stunning views.

Understand


Historically, forestry, hydroelectricity and agriculture were Mission's chief resource sectors and provided the basis for varied related retail and service activities. Transportation improvements have enabled the manufacturing sector to expand beyond sawmilling and food processing. Forest and wood related industries dominate the manufacturing sector, with an emphasis on red cedar shake and shingle mills.

Agriculture is mostly restricted to a narrow belt along the Fraser River. Dairy is the chief agricultural enterprise; other income sources include poultry, hogs, beef and vegetables.

History
The Town of Mission City began as a land promotion. The town's core commercial properties and residential streets were auctioned off at the "Great Land Sale" of 1891, with buyers brought in via the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) mainline from Vancouver and from Eastern Canada. Some of the early houses and commercial buildings were designed to be reminiscent of small towns in southern Ontario in order to encourage buyers. Hailed at the time as a new metropolis, the fledgling town's location at the junction of the CPR mainline with a northward extension of the Burlington Northern Railroad brought name suggestions that included East Vancouver and North Seattle. The name Mission City was chosen due to the site's proximity to the historic St. Mary's Mission of the Oblate order just east of town, which was founded in 1868 (now the Peckquaylis Indian Reserve).

At the time of founding, the swing-span Mission Railway Bridge (opened in 1891) was the only crossing of the Fraser River in the Fraser Valley below the Alexandra Bridge, and all rail traffic between Vancouver and the United States was necessarily routed through Mission until the New Westminster Bridge at New Westminster was built in 1904.

The western part of the district, the Stave Valley, is largely rural and forested but its watercourse is home to what was the largest hydroelectric project in British Columbia until the Bridge River Power Project opened in 1961. It was built by the British Columbia Electric Railway (BCER) to provide power to the electric street railway and interurban system in Vancouver.

The building of Highway 1 on the south side of the Fraser in the early 1960s brought huge population growth and large shopping malls to formerly rural Abbotsford, Matsqui, Sumas and Langley; as a result Mission lost its "anchor", the main Eaton's department store in the valley, and the town's Main Street businesses lost much of their business to the new shopping malls a few minutes away across the river.

Outside of the core "urban" area was a collection of distinct rural communities, each with their own history and sometimes distinct ethnic flavour. Silverdale, 7 km west of Mission on the east bank of the lower Stave River, was homesteaded in the 1880s by Italian immigrants; their descendents reside there to this day. Neighbouring Silverhill was founded by a Finnish Utopian sect who were superseded by Scandinavian and German settlers following a forest fire that virtually wiped out the Finns.

Other localities such as Ferndale, Cedar Valley and Hatzic were farming communities of mixed origin, with Europeans and anglicized French-Canadians alongside the usual British-Scottish Canadian mix typical of much of the Fraser Valley. Throughout the Mission area before World War II, there was a large Japanese-Canadian population involved in berry farming, logging and milling and in the fishery on the river.

One of Mission's major industries was logging, and the town's several mills were noted for being the world's largest suppliers of red cedar shakes and shingles. In the 1960s and 1970s there was a large cluster of productive mills on the waterfront in Mission, for many years world capital of red cedar shake production. Nearby Eddy Match Co., between Mission and Hatzic, was the largest matchstick-making plant in the world until it closed in the 1960s.

Mission is the home of a long-established professional dragstrip, Mission Raceway Park, which was moved outside the lower part of town to reduce noise in residential and commercial areas nearby.

In 1972 a large tract of land in central Mission's Ferndale area was developed by the federal government into two large penal facilities.

Get in
Drive on Hwy 11 from Abbotsford across the Abbotsford-Mission bridge or come on Hwy 7 from the east Hope or west Vancouver.

By train
There are two train stations in Mission and the train services described below do not stop at the same train station.


 * West Coast Express commuter trains travel between in Mission and Waterfront station in Vancouver. Trips operate Monday to Friday. Trains travel from Mission to Vancouver during the morning rush hour and travel from Vancouver to Mission during the afternoon rush hour. Fare prices for travel from Vancouver's Waterfront Station are: $10.25 one-way, $19.00 return (adult).
 * For westbound trips from Toronto to Vancouver, the train stops at in Abbotsford.
 * For eastbound trips from Vancouver to Toronto, the nearest station where train stops is north of the Fraser River at (at the west end of Harbour Avenue) in Mission.
 * For westbound trips from Toronto to Vancouver, the train stops at in Abbotsford.
 * For eastbound trips from Vancouver to Toronto, the nearest station where train stops is north of the Fraser River at (at the west end of Harbour Avenue) in Mission.