The canoe-travelling church

In the year 2023, buildings are bound to a place, built and never moved.

But long before homes—even supposedly mobile homes—became largely immobile, buildings used to move all the time. You didn’t even need a combustible engine to make it happen. Even so, moving a church 70km in 1873 would not have been an easy proposition.

Which is where the canoes came in.

Information from this story was collected earlier this year by Chilliwack historian Merlin Bunt, who runs a popular Facebook page. You can read his account of the history of St. Thomas Anglican Church here. (We spoke to Bunt for this story too.)

In 1858, settlers formed a new town at the northern end of Harrison Lake they called Port Douglas, for the colony’s famous governor. The town was a key stopping point for travellers taking part in the Fraser Canyon gold rush.

Those seeking their fortune would travel up the Fraser, and up Harrison Lake, disembarking at Port Douglas. From there, they would journey up the Lillooet River, and disembark at the northern extent of Lillooet Lake, near Pemberton. Journeys through a series of valleys and over deep lakes would drop them in Lillooet, Mile 0 of the gold rush.

Its key position on the route led Port Douglas to boom and prosper. But only for a short time. The town was the lake-front version of Yale, hosting tens of thousands of men on their way to seek their fortune.

But just like Yale, it had a short lifespan. By 1863, barely five years after the community’s creation, the town was largely empty. (The main route had shifted to the Yale-adjacent Cariboo Wagon Road.) And St. Mark’s Church, a building erected only four years earlier, was already redundant.

Chilliwack, though, was growing—and destined to get much bigger. So in 1873, St. Mark’s was offered to Anglicans in Chilliwack.

Of course, there was the matter of how to get a sizable church from Port Douglas.

The answer?

Canoes and those who knew how to drive them.

Details of the move are relatively scarce. But the story that has been passed down suggests a remarkably complex endeavour.

As the story goes, six “Haida” canoes were lashed together. The church, then, was loaded on top of the mega-raft. It’s amusing to imagine the sight of a church perched atop canoes, but it’s not clear the move was quite so spectacular: a 1999 Chilliwack Progress article suggests that the church was mostly dismantled before being moved.

It took three days to get the church all the way from Port Douglas to Chilliwack. And even that seems incredibly quick: with no engines, plenty of human power would have been needed to get the church-toting canoe-raft from one end of Harrison Lake to the next.

Once they reached the mouth of the Harrison, the journey would have sped up—but also become more dangerous. The pilots would have needed to use every bit of river knowledge they had to keep the raft out of danger on the Harrison, a river where even today’s motorboats can easily get into trouble.

The pilots would then have needed to get the raft from the north side of the Fraser to the south side in quick order, navigating the immense river’s currents and keeping an eye out for sandbars and other hazards. The shippers’ destination was Chilliwack Landing, around what is now the end of Wellington Avenue. But the pilots wouldn’t have had much room for error.

If their aim was off, if they lingered in the current a little too long, Chilliwack’s new church could have ended up floating to Matsqui or Mission.

Again, details are scarce, but the church did make it to its destination. From there, the church was moved towards Chilliwack’s Five Corners, where it was renamed St. Thomas Anglican Church. It stood there for a couple decades, until the city’s Anglicans decided to build a new church on the same site. That St. Thomas Anglican Church still stands today. It looks similar, Bunt said, to the original one. It has a higher steeple, more room for parishioners, and is presumably less rickety than its Port Douglas predecessor.

It’s also never travelled by canoe.