History
The area was first inhabited by the Coast Salish people, including the Kwikwetl'em people. The first European settlers began farming beside the Pitt River in 1859. A major impetus to the creation of a municipality was when the Canadian Pacific Railway moved its freight terminus from Vancouver to "Westminster Junction", where a spur line branched off to the Fraser River port of New Westminster in 1911. Port Coquitlam was first incorporated as a municipality on March 7, 1913. Port Coquitlam was originally mostly farmland; however, because of the densification and expansion of Vancouver, it has now become mostly suburban housing, especially in the northern and southwestern areas of the city. The economy has diversified with a variety of industrial and commercial developments, including metal fabrication, high technology industries, and transportation.
Read more about this topic: Port Coquitlam
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“What would we not give for some great poem to read now, which would be in harmony with the scenery,—for if men read aright, methinks they would never read anything but poems. No history nor philosophy can supply their place.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)