Nanaimo
Nanaimo is a city on the east coast of Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada. As of the 2016 census, it had a population of 90,504. It is known as "The Harbour City". The city was previously known as the "Hub City", which has been attributed to its original layout design where the streets radiated out from the shoreline like the spokes of a wagon wheel, as well as its generally centralized location on Vancouver Island. Nanaimo is also the headquarters of the Regional District of Nanaimo.
History
The Indigenous peoples of the area that is now known as Nanaimo are the Snuneymuxw. An anglicized spelling and pronunciation of that word gave the city its current name.
The first Europeans to find Nanaimo Bay were those of the 1791 Spanish voyage of Juan Carrasco, under the command of Francisco de Eliza. They gave it the name Bocas de Winthuysen after naval officer Francisco Javier Winthuysen y Pineda. When the Hudson's Bay Company established a settlement in 1852, they named it Colvile Town after HBC governor Andrew Colvile. In 1858 it became Nanaimo. The city has been called "The Harbour City" since the lead-up to Expo 86.
The HBC attempted to start a coal mine at Port Rupert but the project had been unsuccessful. In 1850 Snuneymuxw Chief Che-wich-i-kan, commonly known as "Coal Tyee" brought samples of coal to Victoria. A company clerk was dispatched and eventually, the governor James Douglas visited the future site of Nanaimo.
While open to selling coal, the Snuneymuxw wished to retain control of it and retain the right to mine it exclusively. Chief Wun-wun-shum offered to sell coal for five barrels in exchange for one blanket. The HBC representative Joseph William McKay deemed this "impertinent". The Snuneymuxw retained their rights to the resource for a while but gradually lost them due to other tribes and miners from the failed Port Rupert project.
Construction of the Nanaimo Bastion began in 1853 and finished in 1855. While the Bastion was being constructed miners from Newcastle arrived aboard Princess Royal in 1844.
An Internment camp for Ukrainian detainees, many of them local, was set up at a Provincial jail in Nanaimo from September 1914 to September 1915.
In the 1940s, lumber supplanted coal as the main business although Minetown Days are still celebrated in the neighboring community of Lantzville.
Nanaimo has had a succession of four distinct Chinatowns. The first, founded during the gold rush years of the 1860s, was the third-largest in British Columbia. In 1884, because of mounting racial tensions related to the Dunsmuir coal company's hiring of Chinese strikebreakers, the company helped move Chinatown to a location outside city limits. In 1908, when two Chinese entrepreneurs bought the site and tried to raise rents, in response, and with the help of 4,000 shareholders from across Canada, the community combined forces and bought the site for the third Chinatown at a new location, focused on Pine Street. That third Chinatown, by then mostly derelict, burned down on 30 September 1960. A fourth Chinatown, also called Lower Chinatown or "new town", boomed for a while in the 1920s on Machleary Street.