Vacation in Canada, eh? 10: The North Pacific Cannery National Historic Site, British Columbia

July 28, 2025

Time to read: 11 minutes

It was more than a factory – it was a seasonal village, where people of diverse ethnicities gathered every fishing season.

a grouping of simple, white wooden buildings sits on stilts above the edge of a river. — The North Pacific Cannery – for nearly a century, part of the flourishing fish-canning industry along the BC coast; now a National Historic Site.

We have good reasons to choose Canadian vacation destinations these days. And we have great destinations to visit – especially if you’re interested in architecture. This is one of a series of blogs meant to shine a light on some of our built treasures.

By Peter Coffman

If visiting this remote, long-closed fish cannery isn’t on your bucket list, it should be. Okay, it’s a bit off the beaten track. If you reckon that British Columbia is all about Vancouver and Victoria, you won’t get anywhere near the North Pacific Cannery. Or even the closest town, Prince Rupert. But you’ll be missing out. This country is vast and varied, and good things await those prepared to go beyond the obvious destinations.

A white wooden building the size of a large barn is perched on stilts above a tidal mud flat. — The net loft, where the fishnets were serviced and repaired at the North Pacific Cannery.

Once upon a time, canneries like this – over 200 of them – dotted the BC coast. They were a staple of the provincial economy. Every spring, thousands of workers poured in. Through the summer, they fished, processed the catch, ate, slept, and socialized at the cannery. In the fall, they went home, with plans to return the following year.

View through a doorway onto a wooden wharf floor, with the receding lines of the planks leading to machinery at the edge. — View onto the wharf from inside the cannery building.

During the fishing season, the North Pacific Cannery became a stand-alone, self-sufficient town. It centred around its wharf and cannery building. But it also contained a wide variety of housing, a machine shop, a net loft, a general store, a laundry, and a mess hall. It had a multicultural community and a clear social hierarchy. It was a whole society, squeezed into a cannery. It was a place where people of diverse backgrounds gathered – even though, paradoxically, it was a place where they were nominally kept apart. All of this can still be experienced in the buildings of North Pacific Cannery, which opened in 1889 and became a National Historic Site in 1985.

The Cannery

The whole complex revolved around the cannery building and adjacent wharf. Fishing boats brought the catch to the wharf, where it was unloaded and moved inside for processing.

A large, almost empty wooden wharf surface is in front of a broad, low white wooden building with a steep red roof. — The wharf, where fish were unloaded from the boats, and the cannery building, where they were cleaned, butchered and canned.

Once inside, the fish were cleaned, butchered, canned, cooked (hands up if you knew that canned fish was cooked after being canned?) and shipped to market.

A factory interior showing rows of empty tin cans waiting to be filled with fish. — Empty cans await their fill of salmon. The cannery closed in 1981, so it will be a long wait.

All this work, from the fishing to the cooking, required a small army of workers. They came from three distinct cultural groups, each of which brought their own traditional specialty skill to the canning process. Their living spaces were strictly segregated – Indigenous on the western fringe of the complex, Chinese to the north across the train tracks, and Japanese on the east edge.

The Indigenous

Whole Indigenous families lived and worked here during fishing season. Some were fishermen but many – especially the women – worked in the net loft maintaining the nets, without which there would be no fishery. They lived on a long, low ‘street’ (actually a boardwalk) of tiny one-room houses at the west end of the complex, clearly visible on the extreme left of this archival photo dating from 1936:

An old black & white photo with an expanse of water in the foreground, and a large complex of wooden buildings behind. — The Cannery from across the river, as it appeared in 1936. The row of small uniform buildings on the left is where the Indigenous workers lived. Photo by William W. Wrathall, Prince Rupert City & Regional Archives, JRW2369.

All those houses are gone, but there are plenty of photographs of them and two have been reconstructed. They give us a tangible sense of how the Indigenous families lived at the Cannery during fishing season.

Two very simple, rustic wooden cabins each with a door and one window sit on the edge of a boardwalk. — Two reconstructed Indigenous houses. A long row of these once extended from the west edge of the complex (see previous photograph).

A simple domestic interior room contains a dining table with 5 place settings, two beds, and a crib. — Interior of one of the reconstructed Indigenous houses. Conditions were cramped, but not squalid.

The Chinese

Chinese labourers formed a large and important part of the workforce – as they did in the mining town of Barkerville, which I looked at in another blog. They too had their own housing, just across the railway tracks north of the processing building. No trace remains of it, but we can still see where they worked.

An old factory interior with barn-like wooden construction, with machinery filling the aisles. — Interior of the cannery building.

Chinese workers formed the backbone of the processing itself – cleaning the fish, trimming the meat, getting it into cans and cooking it. This happened along what was essentially an assembly line in a multi-step, labour intensive process.

Into the 20^th century, that process became more automated. Such was the prominence of Chinese workers in the canning process that the machine that replaced much of their labour was known as – brace yourself, this is ugly – the ‘iron chink’.

A 1918 newspaper advertisement for a cannery machine with the odious name 'iron chink'. — Newspaper ad reproduced in the North Pacific Cannery.

A large, green metal machine dominated by a large mechanical wheel and a conveyor. — The machine that automated much of the fish processing.

This racist slur says much about the crass attitude towards migrant labour common in the first decades of the 20^th century. Before we get too self-righteous in our condemnation, it’s worth considering whether current attitudes toward foreign workers demonstrate much progress.

The Japanese

The Japanese workforce consisted largely of fishermen, a skill which they’d honed for generations in their homeland. They too had their own section of the complex, on the eastern fringe along the shore. Quite a bit of the Japanese area survives, and it gives us a fascinating glimpse into how the community found its place in this industrial village.

A grouping of very modest white wooden buildings suspended on stilts above a tidal flat, with a steep incline behind. — The exterior of the Japanese area at low tide.

A simple domestic hallway with doors leading to separate rooms and a staircase leading to a 2nd floor. — The entrance area of the Japanese Bunk House as it would have appeared around 1930. The text panels are interpretive material installed for modern visitors to the museum.

Their living quarters were very modest, but not shabby. They consisted of common areas and small individual bedrooms.

A rustic, unornamented domestic interior with a few wooden chairs, a small table, and a woodstove. — A common area in one of the Japanese residences.

A rustic, undecorated bedroom interior with a single bed, side table and two windows. — A bedroom in a Japanese residence.

An especially interesting survival is the large shared bath, which reflects the importance of bathing and cleanliness in Japanese culture. While there’s no denying the systemic racism of the time, they were at least allowed to be Japanese (before and after World War 2 that is – during the war it was another story).

A very simple wooden interior space with a large wooden bathtub raised on block and entered by a set of 3 wooden steps. — The bathing room in the Japanese Area.

Who’s the Boss?

As is often the case, the smallest group held the power and money. And they were white. The Cannery was owned and run by men of European nationality or descent. They had their own housing in the village, and it was, unsurprisingly, larger and more comfortable than that of the workers.

A comfortable domestic interior with several chairs, a desk, flowers, an elegant china cabinet and an organ. — The interior of the Manager’s house, which was the most spacious and luxurious house on the site.

What should we make of the ethnic segregation at the Cannery? There are shades of grey here. It could be interpreted as an example of the colonialist mindset exhibiting its preoccupation with keeping the races separate – a spatial expression of systemic racism. Equally, it could be considered a service to each group. Japanese workers would be immersed in a micro-community that shared their cultural practices and assumptions, ditto the Chinese, ditto the Indigenous. Of course, both of these explanations can be true at the same time. It’s clear from oral histories that the groups intermingled freely outside of their quarters, and no effort was made to prevent this.

Much as at Barkerville, economic opportunity brought people of very different cultures together at North Pacific Cannery. The nuances of their coexistence are embodied in the buildings of the North Pacific Cannery.

Epilogue

View through an old, rough 6-paned window of a large wharf, reflective with rainwater, and several wooden cannery buildings. — View through a window from the cannery building to the wharf.

In the later 20^th century, the canneries gradually vanished from the BC coast as production moved mostly to Asia. The North Pacific Cannery closed in 1981. Four years later, it was designated a National Historic Site.

For me, it’s also something of a personal historic site. My maternal grandmother, who was the daughter of Japanese immigrants, worked for a time in a cannery like this one, sometime before World War 2. I don’t know which one or what her job was, and there’s no one left alive who can tell me. But my visit to North Pacific Cannery opened a window into a part of her life that had been completely opaque to me. For all of us, it opens a window into a now-vanished way of life for generations of Japanese, Chinese, and Indigenous Canadians.

Peter Coffman, History & Theory of Architecture program
peter.coffman@carleton.ca
@petercoffman.bsky.social