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Phoebe McInnes was born in 1878 to parents Fergus and Margaret McInnes (née MacKinnon). She lived at the corner of Hunter Road (200th Street) and 32nd Avenue in Fernridge with her family, who were early Langley pioneers. Phoebe attended the Belmont School on the west side of the Townline Road (216th Street), a quarter of a mile south of Murray's Corners. In the 1893-94 school year she was listed in the Provincial Honour Roll for Proficiency. In 1901 when Phoebe was 21 years old, she taught at East Kensington School, just inside the Surrey Border. She would ride her bicycle with her brother, William McInnes, to church. When she was 23, Phoebe kept a diary that describes eight months of her life as a teacher in the Fernridge district of Langley.
Phoebe married Charles Fulton and never returned to teaching school, instead raising their four children in Vancouver. An evaluation of this diary was written by K. Jane Watt and can be found in the book The Small Details of Life: 20 Diaries by Women in Canada, 1830-1996 edited by Kathryn Carter. Phoebe passed away at the age of 60 on September 7, 1938.