New Westminster

New Westminster is a city in the Lower Mainland region of British Columbia, Canada, and a member municipality of Metro Vancouver. It was founded by Major-General Richard Moody as the capital of the new-born Colony of British Columbia in 1858, and continued in that role until the Mainland and Island Colonies were merged in 1866, and was the Mainland’s largest city from that year until it was passed in population by Vancouver during the first decade of the 20th century.

It is located on the banks of the Fraser River as it turns southwest towards its estuary, on the southwest side of the Burrard Peninsula and roughly at the centre of the Greater Vancouver region.

Before the settlers arrived from various parts of the world, the area now known as New Westminster was inhabited by Qayqayt First Nation. The discovery of gold in B.C. and the arrival of gold seekers from the south prompted fear amongst the settlers that Americans may invade to take over this land.

Richard Clement Moody arrived in British Columbia in December 1858, at the head of the Royal Engineers, Columbia Detachment, having been hand picked to “found a second England on the shores of the Pacific”.[3] Moody ‘wanted to build a city of beauty in the wilderness’ and planned his city as an iconic visual metaphor for British dominance, ‘styled and located with the objective of reinforcing the authority of the Crown and of the robe’.[4] Subsequent to the enactment of the Pre-emption Act of 1860, Moody settled the Lower Mainland and selected the site and founded the new capital, New Westminster. Moody and the Royal Engineers were trained in settlement and selected the site because of its defensibility: it was farther from the American border than the site of the colony’s proclamation, Fort Langley, possessed “great facilities for communication by water, as well as by future great trunk railways into the interior”,[5] and possessed an excellent port.[4] Moody was also struck by the majestic beauty of the site, writing in his letter to Blackwood,

“The entrance to the Frazer is very striking–Extending miles to the right & left are low marsh lands (apparently of very rich qualities) & yet fr the Background of Superb Mountains– Swiss in outline, dark in woods, grandly towering into the clouds there is a sublimity that deeply impresses you. Everything is large and magnificent, worthy of the entrance to the Queen of England’s dominions on the Pacific mainland. […] My imagination converted the silent marshes into Cuyp-like pictures of horses and cattle lazily fattening in rich meadows in a glowing sunset. […] The water of the deep clear Frazer was of a glassy stillness, not a ripple before us, except when a fish rose to the surface or broods of wild ducks fluttered away”.[6][7]