Tag Archives: Gerard St. Jean
British Columbia: The Last Cannery Standing
While British Columbia’s canning industry dates back to the earliest days of Canadian confederation, the canning process itself is even older, invented by a French chef in the early 1800s. By 1864, Americans were canning salmon on the Pacific coast. Three years later, Scottish entrepreneur James Syme established a canning operation near the mouth of the Fraser River in what would soon become British Columbia—the first of 223 salmon canneries that have come and gone in the province since then. The most fleeting of these enterprises, like Syme’s, lasted a season or two. The most tenacious, the North Pacific Cannery in Prince Rupert, boasted almost 90 consecutive years of fish processing, starting in 1889 and ending in the late 1970s. >click to read<09:07
