People uprooted from Deep Bay (36)

Deep Bay, an Indigenous fishing site for thousands of years, was developed by non-Indigenous settlers into a saltery and canning hub in the late 1800s. By 1905, a Japanese-operated saltery had been established. From 1917 to the early 1940s, railway logging companies, including the Robert Dollar Company and Thomsen & Clark Timber Company, were major employers in the area and their workers lived in a beach camp across the bay.

Some Japanese Canadians in the area worked in the fishing industry and resided on nearby Norris Rocks (Queenstown), the Flora and Toby Islands, and the spit. In 1917, the Deep Bay Cannery opened and employed many Japanese Canadians until it burned down in 1937 and relocated to Comox. On the spit near Denman Island, a small Japanese Canadian community developed, featuring a pool hall, store, Japanese Language school, flower and vegetable gardens, and a large communal bathhouse.

Logging baron Eikichi Kagetsu purchased 885 acres of land in Deep Bay in the early 1920s. He established the Deep Bay Logging Company (DBL) in 1922, and purchased an additional 3,000 acres of land in nearby Fanny Bay in 1923. The DBL primarily employed Japanese Canadians, and a company town was set up for the workforce in Fanny Bay.