Maple Ridge East.
4 candidates, one seat.

The Katzie First Nation's website calls its territory q̓ic̓əy̓, which it translates as land of the moss, and says Katzie have lived and thrived there for thousands of years. It names the places now called Pitt Meadows, Maple Ridge, Surrey, Langley and Delta as parts of that territory, and it lists portions of Pinecone Burke, Golden Ears and Garibaldi Provincial Parks. The City of Maple Ridge acknowledges that the city stands on the traditional territories of the Katzie and Kwantlen (qʼʷa:n̓ƛʼən̓) First Nations.

The Kwantlen First Nation's primary reserve is at Fort Langley. A 2016 article in the Langley Advance Times reports that Kwantlen also has reserve lands and traditional territories well to the north of the Fraser River. At Whonnock Lake that year, Fern Gabriel of the Kwantlen First Nation described the Whonnock area as the location of the pink salmon, and she named the peaks of Golden Ears as Kwantlen's mountain. BC Hydro's page on the Powerhouse at Stave Falls says the site is on the traditional territory of the Stó:lō people and is considered the core territory of the Kwantlen First Nation.

BC Geographical Names gives Whonnock a Halkomelem origin: a word meaning place where there are always humpback salmon, the only salmon species that goes up Whonnock Creek. BC Geographical Names and Braches both say a post office took the spelling with two n's in 1885, named for the Indian village nearby.

Braches's paper on the Whonnock band of the Kwantlen First Nation says the Royal Engineers began marking out reserves in the summer of 1861, including one for the people living on the Fraser shore between the slough of York Creek and the mouth of Whonnock Creek. That reserve is today's Whonnock Indian Reserve No. 1. In 1864 the surveyor William McColl projected a much larger reserve of 2,000 acres, running from the Fraser River up to Dewdney Trunk Road between today's 280th and 272nd Streets.

The Government Gazette of December 26, 1868 listed the Whonnock reserve at 92 acres. The same notice said that land earlier supposed to lie in the reserves would be open for pre-emption on and after March 1, 1869. In 1880 the Indian Reserve Commissioner, Gilbert Malcolm Sproat, set out three new reserves on the Stave River. Braches lists the reserves now governed by the Kwantlen First Nation as Whonnock No. 1, Langley Nos. 2, 3 and 4 on the Stave River, Langley No. 5 between Whonnock and Albion, and McMillan Island No. 6. He adds that many people driving the Lougheed Highway between Whonnock and Ruskin do not know they are crossing reserve land.

The Whonnock Community Association dates the first permanent white settler at Whonnock, the Shetlander Robert Robertson, to 1861. The Maple Ridge Museum gives the year as 1860. The association says few followed until the early 1880s, when the railway built a station there, and that Whonnock became the focal point for settlers across the eastern part of Maple Ridge. The museum adds that Norwegian settlers joined the mostly British community. On September 12, 1874 a group of settlers met at John McIver's farm and voted to incorporate Maple Ridge, which the City calls one of the first municipalities in British Columbia.

The Maple Ridge Museum says the first European settler at Albion was Sam Robertson, who took land east and south of Kanaka Creek. The area was first called East Haney. BC Geographical Names records that the Albion post office opened on October 1, 1907, with William Ritchie as postmaster, and that a committee of settlers chose the name Albion, the ancient Celtic name for Britain. Yennadon was once called South Lillooet. When Canada Post decided there was one Lillooet too many, the first postmaster chose the name Yennadon Manor, the grand house of the town where he was born.

BC Geographical Names says the Canadian Co-operative Society, formed at Mission in 1895, named its sawmill and settlement at the mouth of the Stave River Ruskin Mills, after the English art critic and writer John Ruskin. The Ruskin post office opened on January 1, 1898. The Maple Ridge Museum says the co-operative failed after a few years and that E. H. Heaps took over and expanded the sawmill. The Whonnock Community Association says the mill brought in workers and their families, who needed a school, and that a railway station named Ruskin was built circa 1910.

That station was tied to the dam at Stave Falls. BC Hydro says construction of the Stave Falls Dam and Powerhouse began in 1909 and was complete by January 1, 1912. The Maple Ridge Museum says the Western Canada Power Company built one of Canada's shortest railways from Ruskin to Stave Falls between 1908 and 1912 to carry materials and workers, and that power from the dam travelled by line along Dewdney Trunk Road to Burnaby. B.C. Electric took over the company by 1920.

BC Hydro says construction of Ruskin Dam began in 1929 in a granite gorge 5.6 kilometres downstream of Stave Falls, and that a second generator was added in 1950. BC Hydro gives the address of the Powerhouse at Stave Falls as 31338 Dewdney Trunk Road in Mission. The commission lists Stave Falls as a community of this district. The powerhouse's own address is in Mission, so this profile does not place the building inside the district.

The City of Maple Ridge says James Murray Webster first settled in the area circa 1888 and built his homestead at Dewdney Trunk Road and 256th Street. He opened a post office in his house in 1891, and a school followed in 1896. The Maple Ridge Museum explains the final s in Corners: a place needed four corners, a full intersection, to earn the plural, and Webster was reportedly fond of standing in the middle of his intersection to hand out the mail.

The Finnish community began in 1904 and 1905 when families from Sointula on Malcolm Island came to work on a shingle bolt contract that Matti Kurikka had won. The museum says they pooled their money to buy a 159-acre farm for $2,700 and called it Sampola. The commune disbanded after seven years. In 1913 the land was divided among the families and one acre was set aside for Sampo Hall, which the museum says volunteers built in 1915.

The Finnish settlers organized a co-operative store in 1931. In 1985 a gathering at Sampo Hall marked the 80th anniversary of their arrival, and the stone monument from that day now stands in Webster's Corners Park on the former Sampola farm. The City lists Sampo Hall at 25470 Dewdney Trunk Road, built circa 1915 to 1916, among the historic buildings of Webster's Corners.

The Whonnock Community Association says Japanese settlers made extensive use of the soil for berry farming from the 1920s until their expulsion in 1942. The Maple Ridge Museum says that between the two World Wars, Japanese Canadian residents owned half the agricultural land in Ruskin and built fruit growing into a major industry there. The same museum page says Japanese farmers took fruit growing in Whonnock to a height it had not reached before.

Halls were where social life gathered. The Whonnock Community Association says women created and began running a community hall in Whonnock in 1912. It remained the centre of social activity for some forty years in the association's account, and it was the forerunner of the present Whonnock Lake Centre. Ruskin Community Hall opened in 1924 and, the association says, survived because of the dedication of volunteers while Ruskin lost its railway station, post office, general store and elementary school.

The Maple Ridge Museum says that for most of the settler era the communities of Hammond, Haney, Albion and Whonnock were more closely connected to Langley and Fort Langley across the river than to anywhere else. In winter the river sometimes froze, and people crossed on foot, on skates, on horseback and by wagon. The last car crossing on the ice came in the winter of 1952. In summer the first teacher of the Maple Ridge School rowed a boat across to collect children from the far bank.

Langley residents wrote to their council asking for a ferry in 1924, and the provincial government approved one later that year. The project stopped for lack of signatures and a ferry port. Residents then spent 33 years petitioning councils and the province. The Albion to Fort Langley ferry started in 1957 and made its last run on July 31, 2009. The museum says TransLink gave rising costs and the opening of the Golden Ears Bridge as its reasons for ending the service.