Ruskin, British Columbia

Permanent white settlers only came to the Ruskin area after the inauguration of the transcontinental railroad in 1885. The Whonnock First Nation claimed land along the Fraser River between the Stave River and Whonnock Creek as theirs but this land was not included in the Whonnock Indian Reserve and was released for settlement.[2]

The entire area on both sides of the Stave River, including Whonnock and Ruskin, was originally referred to as Stave River. Over time the settlers gave distinctive names to the places where they lived in that large area. For Ruskin the opening of a post office made its name official. That happened with the nomination of a postmaster on January 1, 1898.[3]

After the First World War, Japanese started farming in Ruskin; mostly growing raspberries and strawberries. In the 1930s there were about thirty registered Japanese landowners in Ruskin. Some seventy-five percent of the Ruskin population was Japanese.[8] Photos of school classes of that time show that not more than a handful of the students of the Ruskin elementary school were of European origin. The Japanese settlers had their own community hall on 280th Street. There were Japanese logging operations in the area and a couple of small Japanese sawmills. That all ended with the expulsion and Japanese-Canadian internment in 1942.[9] With the Japanese began and ended any significant type of agriculture in the community.

The mills and the businesses of Ruskin were and are all in the south-east corner of Ruskin close to where the Stave River joins the Fraser River, close to the rail tracks and since 1930 present-day Lougheed Highway.

Already the Canadian Co-operative Society had a general store and later Heaps had one in their building, together with the postoffice. The shop continued to be in that building even after Heaps stopped their Ruskin operation. In 1924, the Cash Grocery store to a new building on the north side of the railway tracks, where it served the community for more than half a century. The building was demolished for the widening of Lougheed Highway. A small shop, mostly combined with a gas station serves the area today.

The Ruskin railway station, built in 1910, stood here until there were no longer enough passengers to warrant a stop of the scheduled trains. The building was dismantled in 1961.[10]

Lumber remained the main industry of Ruskin. With the station also the resident CPR agent disappeared, whose services the industry thought to be "absolutely essential."[11]

After Heaps took over the operation of former Ruskin Mills the school moved to a location on 96th Avenue at the foot of 284th Street. That is where the school stayed until it was closed in 1998. After that Ruskin students attended the Whonnock Elementary School.

For their community events the residents of Ruskin assembled in the schoolhouse or occasionally in the Heaps building. When in 1916 the old schoolhouse was replaced by a two-room building, the residents pulled the old structure across the street and made it their community hall. That first building burned down in 1922—the date shown on the front of the hall today—and was replaced by the present structure, opened in 1924.[12] The hall is owned and operated by Ruskin Community Hall Association, incorporated in 1930.

Ruskin Dam is in the District of Mission, standing at the narrowest point of what had been the Stave River canyon, was completed in 1930 for purpose of hydroelectric power generation. The dam's reservoir is named Hayward Lake, named after one of the company's engineer, and is about 4.5 miles in length. A small employees' village or camp adjacent to the facility is also referred to informally as Ruskin Dam. Before the project, there had been a hunting and fishing lodge still in use as a private residence, and a couple of small farms.

Higher up on the Stave River is the Stave Dam (actually two dams flanking what is now technically an island), built over Stave Falls, once a natural feature of the Stave River and now the name of the community stretching from the dam west along Dewdney Trunk Road as far as Wilson Street, which is the continuation of what Maple Ridge designates as 287th Street (formerly 34th Avenue). The falls is a dry falls now, below Blind Slough Dam, one of the two dams forming Stave Lake; the Stave Falls Powerhouse is immediately below the main dam, which is the western pair of the two. It is now a museum and visitor centre.[13]

In 1899, the year when Heaps took over the Ruskin mill, the Stave Lake Power Company was formed and subsequently obtained permission from the province to use the water of the river at the Stave Falls to generate electric power. It took more than a decade to make that a reality. Only in December 1911 did their successor, the Western Canada Power Company, see power starting to flow from the Stave Dam plant.

The Stave Falls Branch, an electric railway built by the British Columbia Electric Railway Company in 1910, connected the CPR line at Ruskin with the construction site. The traffic generated by the activities around the Stave Falls dam convinced the CPR to approve the building of a rail station at Ruskin that same year – one of the many things by which the residents of Ruskin profited from what happened in their backyard. The railway's track-grade is still extant through the community, and the portion of it along Hayward Lake is now a walking trail; some of its trestles still stand in ruins, partly demolished to keep people from climbing on them. The trail is part of a 10 km (6.2 mi) circuit around the lake which returns to Ruskin Dam on the east side of the lake,[14] which was built by prisoners from the correctional centres in Mission. The older rail grade, from before the dam was built, can also be discerned below Ruskin Dam, with tracks rising out of the water a mile or so below Stave Falls Dam.

• Maple Ridge, a History of Settlement, Canadian Federation of University Women Maple Ridge Branch, 1972.
• McCombs Arnold M. and Wilfrid W. Chittenden, The Fraser Valley Challenge, Treeline Publishing, Harrison Hotsprings, 1990.
• Stanley, Meg and Hugh Wilson, Station Normal: The Power of the Stave River, Douglas & McIntyre, Vancouver (2001)
• Yasutaro Yamaga, History of Haney Nokai (Farmers Association), translated and published by W.T. Hashizume, 2006.

• Whonnock & Ruskin history
• Whonnock Notes
• Looking Back
• Maple Ridge Museum and Archives
• Mission Community Archives