The sawmill in Fort Langley.

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salishan Place by the River currently maintains a collection of over 9000 photographs, 2000 archival documents, 9000 objects, 500 works of art, and 300 oral history recordings. This collection, spanning hundreds of years, is a wonderful window on the past and present life of our community.

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Object Description

Object Name

Print, Photographic

Object ID

4880

Title

The sawmill in Fort Langley.

Date

1948.

Description

The sawmill in Fort Langley, with the platform in the foreground. The "Langley Sawmills" stack comes out of the boiler room. The building on the back left is the main mill building, and the sawdust pipe running out to the left took sawdust to a barge or the river. The building in front of the main mill and behind the sawdust pipe is the building for the hog fuel for the boiler fire.

People/Subject

Fort Langley Sawmill

Sawmill located in Fort Langley, on the Fraser River on the west side of the Haldi Bridge. Developed in 1920s by Messers Irvin, Young and Kidd of New Westminster. Believed they started using the site as a tie mill in about 1928 or 1929, and later enlarged the operation to include dimension lumber. Wilfred (Winky) Muench used to graze his cattle on the west end of the mill site. The mill used to burn their waste on the land to the west of the mill, but with a breeze it got all of the village ladies laundry dirty. Local tradition records the mill as having a series of short-term owners in the 1930s. An Indo-Canadian, Lal Singh, bought the mill in the mid 1930s and ran it as the Fort Langley Sawmill. Singh sold the mill to a New Westminster firm (John R. Morley) who ran it as "Fort Langley Sawmills Limited" and subsequently sold it to McLellan and Fred Chadwick in about 1942. Chadwick built the water tower. The Langley Advance newspaper reported on May 11, 1939, that Langley businessmen were among the 17 who formed a company to acquire the Sawmill, which had been sitting idle for the previous 18 months. Due to flooding in the 1940s, a raised platform was built, as well as a larger dyke in 1949. The mill burned in the early 1950s and was rebuilt in 1951-52 as McDonald Cedar, by Bob and Ian McDonald. The McDonalds built the beehive burner in the mid 1950s. Sauder Industries purchased the mill in 1973, but retained the familiar McDonald Cedar name for many years afterward. The mill later became part of the Interfor network of mills. Dimension lumber ceased to be manufactured in about 1977, when the mill was retooled to become a remanufacturing plant. The mill operated until 1996 and was demolished and sold as the Bedford Landing housing development in approximately 2006. Also includes the Fort-to-Fort trail, which, in 2010, began including artifacts along the trail, including a 50 foot saw, to commemorate the mill.

mills

See From: sawmills
See Also: logging, logging camps

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