The death of The Bay

You can read the first part of this story Not just fur: How the Hudson’s Bay Company built a BC outpost on salmon, butter, and gold here.

Even in the 1800s, Fort Langley seemed like a relic.

During the gold rush, the fort had become an important retail outpost for prospectors and miners, providing men with blankets, pots, pickaxes, flour, bacon, beans, molasses, and dried salmon. But even then, with thousands of men passing through the fort’s storefront, the Hudson’s Bay Company had become associated with quaint, old-fashioned, and out-of-touch practices.

“Inside this trading warehouse there is a look of venerable antiquity that would be difficult to match in any other portion of the world today,” the editor of the Alta California wrote in his newspaper about a recent trip to Fort Langley. “Everything else about the establishment is in keeping with this, and business is transacted exactly as it used to be in the quaint old towns of the thriving Knickerbockers and early tradespeople of staid New England.”

He continued with a description of how HBC employees packaged a bottle of whiskey, carefully corking the bottle and then tying a string around its neck and wrapping it in paper.

“It is to such customs that the Young American applies the expressive title of ‘old fogyism.’”

That “old fogyism”—combined with the establishment of the Colony of British Columbia—heralded the beginning of HBC’s decline in the Langley area.

While there was some talk of locating the colony’s capital in Derby Reach, near the original Fort Langley site, officials ultimately chose the rapidly developing commercial centre of New Westminster.

(There were other considerations too, as Fort Langley was considered too vulnerable to American attack.)

The times were changing, and Fort Langley couldn’t keep up. British Columbia was open for settlement, altering the salmon-salting and fur-trading industries that had kept the fort going for so long. Douglas began establishing reserves for Indigenous nations to stop settler encroachment into Indigenous land and to begin the process of cultural assimilation.

(You can read more about Douglas and Trutch’s differing plans for Indigenous reserves here.)

By 1865, the fort’s buildings had begun to decay in the wet coastal environment. Old lumber pulled from the walls was used to build sheds on the farm, and the riverbank beside the fort had become clogged with silt, pushing steamers further and further away. In the 1870s, the fort’s store had begun to be undermined by businesses in New Westminster that were allowing new settlers to pay for goods with produce. The arrival of salmon canneries on the Fraser River caused demand for barrel-packed salmon to evaporate.

Over its long local decline, the Hudson’s Bay Company tried to lease or sell its lands to settlers in the growing Langley region. But that process took decades, and it only sold the last of its lands to Jacob and Jessie Haldi at the turn of the century.

The Hudson’s Bay Company regretted the demise of its Fraser Valley stronghold, a report noted in 1896 when the fort officially closed, but the practicalities of profit came first.

“It is regretted that it does not appear practical to conduct a remunerative business at this point which is probably the oldest establishment that the Company has in what is now British Columbia.”

The National Historic Site

The Hudson’s Bay Company was gone—from Langley at least. The company had retreated from its old fort, establishing a retail-only business in Vancouver. An enterprise that once supplied would-be miners with essentials pivoted to become a department store for the growing urban upper class.

Meanwhile, Langley itself was emerging as its own community, independent of the empire-building company that had established the community under the name of one of its far off directors.

The Municipality of Fort Langley was officially formed in 1873, with council meetings held in a school building at the fort. (Municipal affairs were later moved to Murray’s Corner in Murrayville.)

The Milner family worked the former Fort Langley farm while the Coulter and Berry families ran a general store out of one of the old HBC shops in town. Slowly, the company’s presence was replaced.

By the 1900s, the cooper’s shop was the only building left on the Fort Langley site. The fort could have disappeared entirely at the start of the century if not for an early group dedicated to the preservation of settler history..

Based on a similar organization in California, the Native Sons of British Columbia aimed to ensure the history of BC settlers was preserved. They took their inspiration for their internal organization from the Hudson’s Bay Company itself, calling their various chapters “posts” and their organization officials “factors.” The group was also notoriously racist, and thought other racial groups—particularly people from Asia—were threats to a white Canadian society.

In 1925, the Native Sons of BC and the Fort Preservation Committee purchased three acres of land around the surviving cooper building for $1,500 from Charles Hope. They planned to use the land for a public park, and hoped to establish a museum in the almost 70-year-old building.

But there was a lot of work to rejuvenate a site that had been declining for decades.

“Much … remains to be done to make the place attractive and worthy of its name,” a 1927 commemorative report on Fort Langley noted. The report called for suggestions on how to turn the site into a museum.

Four years later, the Native Sons of BC started operating a museum out of the cooper building. A hand-carved replica of the 1840 Fort Langley was erected in a place of honour.

In 1955, the building was declared an official National Historic Site, and work began to reconstruct many of the buildings that had once comprised the Fort. In 1958, the Native Sons of BC relinquished control of the museum, moving many of their artifacts to the new Langley Centennial Museum down the road. The Fort Langley National Historic Site welcomed Princess Margaret, in her blue dress and hat, to mark the centenary of British Columbia’s birth.

Vancouver Sun reporter Paul St. Pierre followed the princess into the old cooper building, which had been filled with memorabilia from the Hudson’s Bay Company’s long history in Langley. Margaret lingered over an old safe that once held gold flour traded for company goods, politely declined a glass of water from an old glass jug, and paused beside a desk and chair made in the original fort.

“I believe,” St. Pierre reported Lieutenant Governor Frank Ross as saying, as the princess looked at a blue-lined ledger on the desk, “that there is a register for Your Royal Highness to sign in the new museum.”

“I would like to sign this one.”

As St. Pierre watched, she took the governor’s pen and wrote her name in a clear hand.

The return of The Bay

Fort Langley was established as a National Historic Site, but the Hudson’s Bay Company itself never felt the need to return to the place where it first bought Pacific dominance.

Throughout the 20th Century, the Hudson’s Bay Company steadily reinvented itself as a retail-oriented company. The company restructured itself in 1910 to have three separate departments for land sales, the fur trade, and retail. It began focusing on the construction of new department stores, and by the mid-century had shifted from its made-beaver roots, renaming its fur trading arm the “Northern Stores Department.”

Despite its Canadian focus, the Hudson Bay Company’s head office was located in London for centuries. That only changed in 1970—300 years after the company began—when HBC was granted a new charter by Queen Elizabeth II and became a purely Canadian business. With its head office now in Winnipeg, the company looked to further expand.

“When the Company moved from England to establish itself as a Canadian company in 1970, it was, in the view of most Canadians, a western department store group that also did business in the North,” the company’s 1978 annual report read. Given the importance of the company to Canadian history, the size of HBC was surprisingly modest. That year’s annual report noted that The Bay had eight downtown department stores and nine suburban stores—and it needed to grow to capture new markets within the country.

“To succeed, it would have to tap the rich and expanding markets of eastern Canada, develop further in its traditional markets and move strongly into the growing suburbs,” the report read.

This the company set out to do. It acquired a 57% stake in Zellers, which had 98 stores in suburban shopping centres, for $76 million in 1978. At the start of 1979, there were Zellers in both Langley and Chilliwack, but no stores representing The Bay itself. (Fraser Valley residents would have had to travel to either Vancouver, Kelowna, or Penticton to shop at The Hudson’s Bay Company.)

But further expansion was coming. By the late-70s, Langley had begun to expand. There were roughly 60,000 residents split between the city and the district municipality. The community had its own new mall: the Willowbrook Shopping Centre, which was anchored by a K-Mart and Safeway.

The mall expanded through the ‘80s and by the end of the decade, The Bay had become interested in returning to its Langley roots.

Ground was broken for Willowbrook Mall’s third expansion on June 8, 1989. Representatives from the township, the city, the developer, and the Hudson’s Bay Company were all present. Once construction was complete, The Bay would operate a two-storey, 130,000-square-foot department store on the east side of the mall. The mall’s owner said its presence would help cement Langley as a major shopping destination.

“Regional shopping centres pay big dividends to their municipalities and residents in terms of jobs and revenue,” Alan Whitchelo, senior development manager at Bentall Development said. “Willowbrook will be a big part of growing economic development in Langley and a major retail anchor in the Fraser Valley.”

On Aug. 29, 1990, The Bay officially reopened its doors in Langley. An article in the Aldergrove Star wrote that Alderman Steve Ferguson felt it was “something Langley had waited for a long time.” (Thirty-five years later, Ferguson is still a Township councillor.)

The final fall

In 1925, HBC’s fur department head C.H. French, arrived in Fort Langley to commemorate the cooper building as a site of national importance. He helped a government representative unveil a new bronze plaque, and spoke a few words about the fort’s significance.

“In the development of new countries, changes become necessary from time to time, and while Langley was the Mother of all British Columbia posts up to 1842, it was then found necessary … to build a new centre at Victoria,” French said during his speech. “This new centre was not able to deprive Langley of its place in the sun. She was yet the spot where almost all the industries of the Province had their beginning, and … arose again from her ashes to renewed active life.”

Today, 100 years after French so boldly extolled the virtues of the Hudson’s Bay Company history in Langley, it seems unlikely The Bay will be able to rise again.

In early March, the company announced it was facing significant financial difficulties, and would need to liquidate nearly all of its 96 stores across the country. It hadn’t paid rent due on several of its leased stores

“Put simply, Hudson’s Bay is out of money and cannot meet its financial obligations as they come due,” a court document read.

The company will try to save six of its flagship stores: three in Ontario and three in Quebec. But even if the company manages to save those, HBC’s physical presence will be wiped from Western Canada, where it spent much of its history establishing relationships with Indigenous nations, altering traditional ways of life, introducing European settlers to the west, and most importantly for the company, making money for its shareholders.

“It is hard not to have a sense of melancholy when considering the Application before me,” Judge Peter Osborne J. wrote. “Hudson’s Bay is the oldest company in North America and a very prominent Canadian department store. It was founded in 1670. Now, approximately 355 years later, it is insolvent and seeks protection from its creditors.”

Liquidation began on Monday, March 24. Just a day before, the inside of The Bay in Langley looked much the same as it always had. People were weaving their way through the separate departments, picking through clothes or loitering by the shoes. But racks were more empty than normal, and some glass counters were entirely empty. Large signs stood posted at the entrance, warning customers they had until April 6 to use their gift cards.

When The Bay is gone, its products sold, its mannequins taken down, and its branding removed, all that will be left is the 130,000-square-foot building at the edge of the Willowbrook Mall. Its future will be determined, not by another department store, but by the market forces that have been pushing malls across the Lower Mainland to reinvent themselves.

The Willowbrook Mall has already undergone several major renovations, demolishing the ill-fated Target building in 2018 and creating a new outdoor courtyard with restaurants in 2022.

“We are always finding new ways to innovate and grow. Since opening our doors in 1979, Willowbrook has consistently achieved recognition for its memorable shopping experience and connection to the community,” a 2023 Willowbrook Mall leasing package said.

“Exciting changes are underway to transition Willowbrook to a new level of urban sophistication,” it continued. The package noted that new businesses were slated to come to the mall, while adding that the owners were “analyzing the feasibility of including a mixed-use, livable component to the Shopping Centre in the near to mid-term.”

So the future of The Bay may not be another store. But it may very likely be homes—echoing the history of Fort Langley, when the Hudson’s Bay Company abandoned the fort but created space for new generations of Langley residents to begin their lives in the region.