People uprooted from Cumberland (428)

Cumberland was established by non-Indigenous settlers after coal deposits were discovered near Comox Lake around 1852. Originally known as Union, the town expanded alongside mining and logging operations in the 1860s and 1870s. By the late 1880s, segregated mining camps had developed, each with its own schools, services, and recreational facilities, including the No. 1 and No. 5 Japanese Town sites.

In 1891, one hundred Japanese Canadians labourers arrived, and a new townsite east of Union was established as Cumberland. Japanese Canadians remained in Union and the mining camps and by 1913, 306 Japanese Canadians lived in Cumberland. The No. 1 Japanese Town, northwest of the No. 1 mine, was largely abandoned after the 1920s. In 1927, twenty-six houses burned down in the No. 5 Japanese Town, located along present-day Maple Street. Residents temporarily occupied empty houses at No. 1 while it was rebuilt. Japanese Language schools opened in the two camps in 1912 and 1914. At the time of uprooting, Cumberland was home to the largest Japanese Canadian population on Vancouver Island, and Japanese Canadians constituted almost half of the students at the high school.

The nearby Nikkei No Haka Japanese Cemetery contains approximately 198 graves of Japanese Canadian workers from the mining and logging industries and associated trades, along with their families from the Comox Valley, dating from 1891 to the uprooting in 1942. The oldest surviving headstones are for the nine Japanese miners lost in 1901 in a series of three explosions at No. 6 mine, which killed all 64 people working in the mine at the time.