People uprooted from Fanny Bay (156)

Fanny Bay, on the east side of Vancouver Island, was established as a company town by the Deep Bay Logging Company (DBL) in 1923. Japanese Canadian Eikichi Kagetsu, founder of the DBL, purchased more than 3,000 acres of land around Fanny Bay from the Esquimalt and Nanaimo Railway (E&N), and built amenities for workers including housing, a meeting and recreation hall, communal bathhouse, gardens, a Japanese Language school, and a kindergarten.

The workforce of the DBL was predominantly Japanese Canadian, with as many as 200 workers and their families living in the town at its peak. The company continued to acquire land over the next 17 years, and became the largest logging operation in the Commonwealth at the time. MacMillan Export was a reliable customer of the DBL, often exporting the purchased lumber to Japan.

Japanese Canadians were also instrumental in bringing oysters to the waters of Fanny Bay. Oysters were introduced as early as 1912, but Kagetsu expanded production by importing nine crates of oyster seed from Japan between 1926 and 1927. The E&N granted Kagetsu ten acres of land along the shore to use for oyster cultivation in the 1930s. Ultimately, the venture did not prove viable from a business perspective, and the operation was shut down. It was not until the 1980s that oyster cultivation returned to the area.