Chilliwack’s Chinatowns: Tenant Farming
Video by Hawkins Media for the Chilliwack Museum and Archives
Informant: Dr. Chad Reimer, author of Chilliwack’s Chinatowns (Chinese Canadian Historical Society of British Columbia, 2011)
Date: 2016
Location: Chilliwack, British Columbia
Dr. Chad Reimer discusses Chinese contributions to agriculture in Chilliwack, particularly in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Transcript:
A title slide is shown, reading “Chinese tenant farming. A person who farms the land of another and pays rent with cash or a portion of the produce.”
Tenant farming develops where a Chinese immigrant would enter into a white immigrant farmer, who owned the land, would enter into an agreement where they would say you get, you know, here is these, are these five acres of land, and you agree to clear this land, put it into production, of, mostly it was feed product, like it was potatoes and mangrel and that, for cattle, dairy cows.
A slide is shown with a black and white photo of an early Chilliwack farm, next to text reading “The Chinese played a big part in clearing the land for farm use in the Chilliwack area. They had a very big area they ran a tenant farm, known as China Ranch, which is now where the heritage buildings are”.
You agree to clear the land, put it into production, and in exchange for that you get the produce of what you grow.
A black and white photo of the Edenbank farm, showing a barn, a slough, and livestock is shown.
The biggest operation of that, like the Edenbank, the Wells family, entered into a number of those.
A colour photo of the front of the Chilliwack Heritage Building is shown.
Charles Evans, where Evans road is, and especially the heritage buildings, those red buildings, that was called “China Ranch” because a large amount of acreage was given over to Chinese tenant farmers.