People uprooted from Sarita Bay / Sarita (10)

Sarita Bay (also Sarita or Sarita River), in the Barkley Sound, was a winter village of the Huu-ay-aht First Nations. In 1877 a Roman Catholic Mission was established. In the early 1900s, small mining operations began in the area but were never fully developed. In the 1920s, Vince & Company opened a fish saltery and reduction plant that provided bunkhouses for employees, but the plant was abandoned in 1940 when the previously abundant pilchards [sardines] deserted the island’s west coast. Sarita operated strictly as a company town. Non-Indigenous forestry occurred in the area, but was not heavily industrialized until the late 1940s.