Fort Vancouver Village

The officers of the Hudson's Bay Company lived inside the stockade at Fort Vancouver. The people who did most of the work lived outside it, in a village that grew up with the fort from 1829 on the open ground between the walls and the river. At its peak more than six hundred people lived there, families of the men who ran the company's farms, sawmill, gristmill, dairies, shipyard, tannery and fur brigades. Company and Catholic church records list English, French-Canadian, Scots, Irish, Hawaiian and Iroquois workers and people from some thirty Native nations. Few spoke English at home; French, Gaelic, Hawaiian and many Native languages were heard in the lanes.

Hawaiians were there from the beginning. In 1829 the company opened an office in Honolulu to sign young men to three-year contracts as laborers and sailors; Hawaiians, the park's history notes, called the store the big debt. Many of their contracts required the company to send them home when the term ran out, but some stayed, married into Native families and settled. By the 1850s there were so many Hawaiian workers that the settlement was called Kanaka Town, from the Hawaiian word for person.

The company left for Victoria in 1860, and the Army, which had moved in beside it, took over the ground. Archaeologists have been digging in the village since the 1960s, looking for the traces of a Hawaiian life lived far from the islands. Two houses have been rebuilt on their old sites, and panels along the trail tell the village's story.