Overview

Nanaimo is the second oldest city in British Columbia. In 1891 it was the fourth largest city in the province, with a population of 4,595. Nanaimo was bustling, confident and growing in the 1890s. If there was a golden era for Nanaimo, it occurred during this decade.

We know the economy depended on coal mining. We know the New Vancouver Coal Mining and Land Company [NVCMLC] was the city's largest employer and landowner. But who were the miners and where did they live? Who worked for the city's second largest employer, Nanaimo Sawmill? Who resided in the city's many hotels? Who comprised the white-collar, professional class in Nanaimo? Who were the Chinese and what was Chinatown like? These were some of the questions addressed by History students at Vancouver Island University in a collaborative research project that began in the Fall 2003 semester.

Our objective is to understand the social ecology of Nanaimo in the 1890s. We want to recreate neighbourhoods, streetscapes, and urban spaces. We want to know who lived where, who lived next to whom, and who worked in various occupations and industries. Our project is informed by secondary works, but our tools are primary records. In particular, we're using 1891 census records, tax assessment rolls, and directory listings available on the viHistory.ca web site.

Here's a summary of our research to date. In the 1890s, the city was divided into three municipal wards - South, Middle and North Ward. Having looked closely at all three wards, it would appear that Nanaimo was becoming a modern industrial city. But there were many pre-industrial characteristics to the place. That is, people lived near their workplace; employers and workers lived in close proximity.

For example, everyone employed by Nanaimo Saw Mill Company in the city's North Ward lived next to the mill site. The mill's wealthy proprietor, Andrew Haslam, also lived close by, albeit in a sumptuous mansion. However, the newly surveyed Newcastle Townsite — located on the other side of the Millstone River and away from industrial activity — was emerging as the favourite neighbourhood for professional men and their families. Nanaimo doctors, dentists, architects and school principals lived there.

Nearly all 685 miners employed by the NVCMLC lived in the city's South Ward. There was a high concentration of miners around Gillespie Street — close to the incessantly-noisy machinery and ever-belching smokestacks at the pithead of the NVCMLC's No. 1 Mine. Most of the miners were British-born or the sons of British immigrants, but there was a substantial Finnish community here, too. There were no Chinese in the South Ward. They lived nearby in Middle Ward, in a relatively compact and self-contained Chinatown.

Historians have often suggested that white miners disliked the Chinese, because Chinese mine labourers worked for lower wages and were sometimes used as strike-breakers. We found no instances of racial animosity between the Chinese and the white miners' community in 1891. Possibly this was because no Chinese residents in Middle Ward actually worked as mine labourers and so were not competing with their white neighbours in South Ward. Rather, the residents of Nanaimo's Chinatown were enumerated as launderers, cooks, general dealers, opium merchants and joss priests, to name a few occupations from the 1891 census. As for the Chinese who did work as mine labourers, most of them lived in Wellington, not Nanaimo. Most of them were employed by the firm of R. Dunsmuir & Sons, not the NVCMLC.

The Nanaimo Indian Reserve abutted South Ward. We were able to identify nearly 80% of the Nanaimo Indian Band (now known as the Snuneymuxw First Nation) on the 1891 census. At that time, many aboriginal people were living in traditional cedar structures, with two or three families sharing a residence. Among the adult males who were enumerated with formal occupations, the majority were fishermen and hunters. One Snuneymuxw man worked as a hotel porter.

Several dozen hotels were operating in Nanaimo. With the exception of the Temperance House, every hotel had a bar. In advertisements placed in the Nanaimo Daily Free Press, hotel saloons boasted about their "fine liquors and cigars." But as we discovered, very few hotels catered for tourists or travellers. Most of these establishments were residential hotels. They provided a permanent home for several hundred Nanaimo residents, including miners, carpenters and cigar-makers. Since the hotels were classified as census households, we were able to identify proprietors, employees and lodgers.

Some hotels employed female waitresses. However, the needle trades occupied most of the women in the paid workforce. Over one hundred females were employed in this sector in 1891. As we found, there were notable distinctions between seamstresses, dressmakers, and tailoresses. Seamstresses were generally younger than dressmakers; tailoresses were older. Many of the women were employed by local firms, like Perkins & Spencer, dry goods merchants and milliners. And as we learned from tax assessment records, quite a number of women, including dressmakers, owned property in the city.

This is our first foray into Nanaimo using primary records on the viHistory.ca web site. It's been a fascinating and fruitful one and will not be our last. We now have a better idea about how these records can be deployed in a micro history project. And we can see how these records might be used to address myriad research questions — questions that relate not only to Nanaimo but to other Canadian cities at the close of the nineteenth century.

Patrick A. Dunae
Spring 2004