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.
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“The best history is but like the art of Rembrandt; it casts a vivid light on certain selected causes, on those which were best and greatest; it leaves all the rest in shadow and unseen.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)
“We aspire to be something more than stupid and timid chattels, pretending to read history and our Bibles, but desecrating every house and every day we breathe in.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now.”
—Richard M. Nixon (b. 1913)