Maple Ridge-Pitt Meadows.
4 candidates, one seat.

The Katzie First Nation's website says its people are traditional hənq̓əmínəm̓ speakers and that most of its community of 614 members live in the traditional territory. At the centre of that territory is sq̓ə́yc̓əyaʔɬ x̌acaʔ, the lake of the Katzie, now known as Pitt Lake. Katzie says its territory extends to the lands within the present municipalities of Pitt Meadows, Maple Ridge, Surrey, Langley and Delta. The City of Pitt Meadows acknowledges that the city is on the traditional, unceded territory of the q̓ic̓əy̓ (Katzie) First Nation, and the City of Maple Ridge acknowledges that Maple Ridge is on the traditional territories of the Katzie and Kwantlen (qʼʷa:n̓ƛʼən̓) First Nations.

The Nation says the name q̓ic̓əy̓ means land of the moss. In its account, Swaneset's sky wife directed people to pile up moss to build the foundation of a village on the Fraser River, and she released the first eulachon, a small fish, into the river at that place. Katzie says the eulachon have returned there every year since, and that the site is now known as Hammond. The Nation also describes wetlands near the south end of Pitt Lake that gave q̓ic̓əy̓ birds, fish, mammals and plants such as wapato, a food plant.

Katzie's contact page gives its band office and its health centre addresses in Pitt Meadows. The Nation says it is working with the provincial and federal governments on a series of separate agreements on self-government.

The Maple Ridge Museum says the Hammond brothers arrived in western Canada in 1863. They first bought land on the Pitt River where it meets the Alouette River, a property later called Codd Island, and then bought land on the Fraser River and applied for a townsite. BC Geographical Names holds a 1905 letter from the postmaster of Port Hammond, written after he spoke with John Hammond. It says the townsite stood on land granted by the Crown to the brothers and was known as Hammonds Landing before it was laid out. It says the word Port was added because the place was for some time the end point of the Canadian Pacific Railway.

The museum says people expected Port Hammond to be both the end of the railway and the main deepwater port of the region, and that the port soon moved to New Westminster and the railway end to Vancouver. The City of Pitt Meadows says the railway was completed through Pitt Meadows in 1885. The museum adds that once the line was built, people travelled by train between Hammond and Haney, which had been separated by several miles of river bank.

In August 1899 the trustees of the Hammond School District met to choose a school site, and a vote of residents on September 9 chose the Hammond property by 25 votes to 15. Peter McTavish was the first teacher. In 1908 a group met at Jim Dale's hall to form the Port Hammond Progressive Association, and the museum says that by the end of the year it had cleaned up Lorne Park and welcomed a branch of the Bank of Hamilton.

The Maple Ridge Museum says St. John the Divine Anglican Church stood first at Derby, east of Fort Langley, where its first service took place in 1859. When the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway brought hundreds of residents to Maple Ridge, it was decided to bring the church across the river. The museum says that in 1882 Samuel Edge and a team of men took the church apart, floated it across the Fraser River and put it up again on River Road. BC Geographical Names quotes a 1927 manuscript that gives 1884 for the move.

The Anglican Diocese of New Westminster says the church was built of California redwood because British Columbia had no large sawmills at the time. It reports that one hundred years after the crossing, the building moved again within Maple Ridge to its present place on a concrete foundation at River Road and Laity. The diocese announced celebrations in 2009 for the 150th anniversary of the parish's first service. The museum calls it the oldest church in the lower mainland of British Columbia, and Elections BC's 2024 results file lists the church as a voting place in this district.

The Maple Ridge Museum says the earliest settlers in Pitt Meadows were Royal Engineers discharged in New Westminster in 1863, and that a second group came when news of the coming railway spread. The City of Pitt Meadows says settlement also began at Bonson's Landing, that the province offered land at low prices, and that dairy farming and logging became the main local industries. The museum describes the land as low and marshy, and says early settlers built the first dykes, which are earth walls that keep river water off farmland, by hand and later with steam dredges, with little help from any level of government.

The City says Pitt Meadows was part of the Municipality of Maple Ridge when that municipality was incorporated in 1874, and that the first diking district, a local body for building dykes, was organized in 1893. The Fraser River flood of 1894 over-topped and destroyed the dykes, according to the museum. The museum says the farmers decided they would get more attention from the province as an unincorporated district, and Pitt Meadows formally left Maple Ridge in 1896. It became an independent municipality on April 24, 1914, with Wellington J. Harris as its first reeve, the head of its council.

Pitt Meadows received its first post office in 1908 and its first school in 1909. The Pitt Meadows Museum is in the Old General Store on Harris Road, built in 1908, which the museum calls the oldest known structure in Pitt Meadows. The City says the name comes from the Pitt River and Pitt Lake and that historical accounts differ on the origin of those two names.

The Maple Ridge Museum says the first sawmill on its site on Maple Crescent in Port Hammond opened in 1910 as the Bailey Lumber Company. It became the Port Hammond Lumber Company in 1912, and in 1916 local businessmen Doan Hartnell and Carl Cutter, with partners in Michigan, reorganized it as the Hammond Cedar Company. A Pacific Coast Lumberman article of June 1918, as the museum describes it, reported that Hammond Cedar was the first mill in Canada to employ young women, who graded lumber and loaded trucks. The museum says women returned to mill work in the Second World War.

The museum says that in the early 1920s Hammond Cedar became the largest producer of cedar lumber and shakes in the British empire, drawing timber from as near as Pitt Lake and as far as Knight Inlet. After the Second World War it became a BC Forest Products mill, and the museum gives later owners as Fletcher Challenge in 1988 and Interfor in 1992. The Canadian Register of Historic Places describes the Renstrom Residence, built in 1929, as a home typical of Hammond, a community of workers from the Port Hammond Lumber Company.

On September 4, 2019 Global News reported that Interfor had announced plans to close its Hammond cedar sawmill permanently by the end of the year, which put more than 100 jobs at risk. The report says the mill mainly processed Western red cedar and had run one shift for several years because of limits on the supply of logs. Interfor's chief executive said cedar producers were affected by United States duties on softwood lumber shipments.

The Maple Ridge Museum's account of the Kawamoto family of Hammond describes a berry farm on cleared land. Sansuke Kawamoto was secretary of the Japanese Farmers' Association, the Hammond Nokai. The museum says Japanese Canadian men over 18 had to submit to fingerprinting and registration in 1941, and that at the time of the evacuation the family had to leave its farm, which the government sold without the family's permission. The City of Pitt Meadows says many Japanese Canadian residents there were also forcibly removed and interned in 1942.

The museum's page on the first high schools says Maple Ridge High School, built in 1941 for 450 students, was overcrowded until all Japanese students were removed from the district in the spring of 1942. The school burned down in June 1953 and left the district with no working high school. The class of 1953 to 1954 attended in shifts in makeshift rooms, and Maple Ridge Secondary opened in 1954.

In the 1950s the Pitt Polder, low land that was drained and diked, changed Pitt Meadows. The Encyclopedia of British Columbia says Dr Jan Blom bought 27 square kilometres of marshy lowland on the east bank of the Pitt River and in 1950 formed Pitt Polder Ltd, with money raised in Holland and from the Koerner family. The company drained and diked the land and sold or leased it to Dutch immigrant farmers. The Pitt Meadows Museum describes a surge of Dutch immigrants into the Polder during the 1950s.

The City of Pitt Meadows dates its Pitt River highway bridge to 1957 and its airport to 1963. It records that the District of Pitt Meadows became the City of Pitt Meadows in 2007. BC Geographical Names records that the District of Maple Ridge became the City of Maple Ridge on September 12, 2014.

TransLink's West Coast Express began service on November 1, 1995. TransLink says it runs between Downtown Vancouver and Mission and stops in the municipalities of Port Moody, Coquitlam, Pitt Meadows, Maple Ridge and Mission. The Golden Ears Bridge opened on June 16, 2009. A TransLink post announcing the date said the six-lane bridge would cut travel time by 20 to 30 minutes between Maple Ridge or Pitt Meadows and Langley or Surrey, and that a new express bus route, the 595, would start on June 22. The City of Pitt Meadows says the bridge improved connections between Pitt Meadows, Maple Ridge, Surrey and Langley.