Places Remembered: Greater Vancouver, New Westminster and the Fraser Valley

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

Most of the photographs in this interesting collection by the authors of
Postcards from the Past: Edwardian Images of Greater Vancouver and the
Fraser Valley (1996) were produced by “local commercial photographers
who generally acted as their own publishers and distributors.” The
photos were first produced as “picture postcards, in the ‘Golden Age
of Postcards,’ the years between the turn of the century and the
beginning of the First World War.”

Sixty to seventy years ago, Vancouver and its environs was largely a
work in progress, a town on the verge of becoming a city, surrounded by
water on three sides, and by forest and bush on the other. This book
includes photos of boats whose names will be familiar to local residents
even today: the Princess Margaret, built for the CPR on the River Clyde
in 1914; the Beaver, the famous Fraser River sternwheeler; and the
Charmer, the first steamer on the B.C. coast that was equipped with
electric light and that—go figure—was involved in more collisions
than any other CP coastal vessel. There are many photos depicting the
logging and lumbering operations that fueled, and continue to fuel, the
growth of the region. The text accompanying the photos is informative
and illuminating, nostalgic in places, but never smarmy or overblown.

Places Remembered is an essential purchase for the public library’s
B.C. history collection.