Friday, January 18, 2008

Hastings Mill
Hastings Mill was a saw-mill on the south shore of Burrard Inlet and was the first commercial operation around which the settlement that would become Vancouver developed in British Columbia, Canada.
In June, 1867, Captain Edward Stamp began Stamps Mill at the foot of what is now Dunlevy Street. Stamp lost ownership of the mill after a falling out with his English investors, after which the name changed. The early settlement was in effect a company town; people shopped at the Hasting's Mill Store and sent their children to the Hastings Mill School. This would change after the CPR chose Vancouver as the terminus for the transcontinental railway. Nevertheless, the lumber industry remained the backbone of the new settlement's economy, and Hastings Mill was the "the nucleus around which the city of Vancouver grew up in the 1880s," and remained important to the local economy until it closed in the 1920s.