SUSAN LAZARUK
Vancouver Sun
Lytton has played an important role in B.C.’s history.
The village has been home to Indigenous settlements, a trading post, gold rush miners, European settlers and Chinese railway workers.
At the confluence of the Fraser and Thompson rivers, 260 kilometres northeast of Vancouver, Lytton is intersected by two national rail lines and the Trans-Canada Highway.
The population is about 250 with about 2,000 more in the immediate vicinity, including five neighbouring First Nations.
“Lytton is one of the longest continuously inhabited areas in North America, with a number of Indigenous bands in the area,” Mayor Jan Polderman said in the village’s 2019 annual municipal report. It’s believed that First Nations have inhabited the area for 10,000 years.
According to the village’s website, “in 1808, Simon Fraser’s famous descent of the Fraser River in search of a route to the Pacific Ocean eventually led to the village, then named Camchin — the meeting place — by its people.”
The Fraser Valley Gold Rush brought early European settlers to the area in the late 1850s.
The Hudson’s Bay Co. briefly operated Fort Dallas at the site before the village was named, in 1858, for Britain’s secretary of the colonies, Edward Bulwer-Lytton. The politician was also a novelist and poet, and coined the phrases “the pen is mightier than the sword,” and “pursuit of the almighty dollar.” Bulwer-Lytton opened his 1830s novel Paul Clifford with the famously cheesy line, “It was a dark and stormy night …”
In the 1880s, about 17,000 Chinese workers arrived to build the railway through the Fraser Canyon.
Among their many contributions was a “joss house,” built in 1881 as a combination temple and community hall. Demolished in 1928, the lot remained empty until a couple bought it in 1980 for storage for their business. Fascinated by its history, they instead built a joss house as a home to a museum of about 200 artifacts collected and donated from collectors in the Interior.
The Lytton Chinese History Museum opened four years ago and maintains online archives of artifacts and photos. In May, it was awarded the Drs. Wallace B. and Madeline Chung Prize for Canadian Community Archiving by the Chinese Canadian Historical Society of B.C.
For years, Lytton was a stop on the Trans-Canada Highway connecting the Lower Mainland to the Interior. The opening of the Coquihalla Highway in 1987 diminished that role, offering a more direct route.
Logging was a big part of Lytton’s economy until the sawmill closed in 2008. Ginseng was grown from the 1980s until the collapse of those farms, which dropped in number in B.C. to two in 2012 from a high of 130.
Agriculture continues and tourists visit for rafting and hiking in Stein Valley Nlaka’pamux Heritage Park.
