Way, way back when the Canadian government wanted BC to join confederation and promised a railroad and then promised 20 miles of land on each side of the tracks to the CPR - land that the settler governments had taken for themselves whilst pushing the Indigenous people onto reserves - was then argued about between the BC government and the Dominion government. I should note here that there are ongoing research efforts at the museum to understand and appreciate land use and Indigenous presence prior to settler times.
While there is much more research to be done in regards to the transformation of lands in the Fraser Valley, as you can see on this map, the entire valley from the Coast Meridian upwards through the province was claimed as the Railway Belt. The verbose banter between the different levels of government helped to explain the boon in settler land applications in the mid to late 1880s for the area that now makes up our community.
