In order to establish Canada’s border with the United States and assert its claim to British Columbia, Britain had sent the Royal Engineers to survey the area in 1858. The Engineers were invited to take up 160 preemptions of land and settle in the area following their service with the Crown. John Cunningham Maclure was one of the surveyors who took the Crown up on the offer and settled here. He is quoted as saying, “This is the promised land. When we disband, this is where I will settle” when he first laid eyes on Matsqui Prairie. In 1889 the former Royal Engineer applied for, and received, his crown grant on 160 acres (65 ha) of bush land. Flooding was an issue in the area even then, and after only 68 days of ownership, Maclure transferred the title to his son, John Charles, who in turn sold the title to Robert Ward just 67 days later. The C.P.R. was granted right of way through the 160 acres on condition that they would put a station there. This ensured that a town centre would grow in the area. When Mr. Maclure was asked what to name the place, he suggested it be named after his good friend Mr. Abbot. Harry Abbott was the Western Superintendent of the C.P.R. and the two men had worked together and had become friends in this land which must have seemed very wild and very far away from everything that was “home”. On July 9th, 1891 Mr. Ward filed the town site subdivision plan, and the Village of Abbotsford was born. Maclure was followed by other settlers, who had made their homes on the ridges around Sumas Prairie in the 1860’s. The completion of the CPR to Vancouver in 1887 brought an influx of new settlers to the area, and the District of Sumas was incorporated on January 5th, 1892, while Matsqui was incorporated on November 21st,, 1892.

Once the C.P.R. line was laid through Abbotsford other railways soon followed suit; the Vancouver, Victoria and Eastern in 1909, the B.C. Electric Railway in 1910, the Great Northern in 1913 and the C.N.R. in 1915. It was these railways and easy access to the Fraser River that made commercial development possible, which in turn drew more newcomers to the area. The settlers equaled taxable income that could be used for improvements to infrastructure, such as new roads and dykes to stem the annual flooding. In the meantime, dense forests that could be logged and milled right here in the Valley drove the economy. Unskilled labourers from India, China and Japan were provided with an income while the newcomers worked as loggers and workers at the many small mills, and the cleared land that resulted from the logging proved to be fertile and attractive to farmers forced to leave Europe as the result of over-population, famine and changes in the political and religious structures in their homelands. Of the many mills, The Abbotsford Lumber Company was the largest. In its heyday it was not only the largest employer in the community but soon became the third largest forestry employer in the province. When the Sikh workers at the mill initiated construction of a gurdwara, a temple, the Tretheweys donated the lumber for it. The Tretheweys employed Japanese, Chinese, and East Indian workers at wages only slightly lower than those of the ethnic white workers, which encouraged these minority groups to settle in the community.

Early settlers had to contend with some trying conditions. The once logged out land was still covered with large stumps that had to be cleared before the land could be used for farming, the mighty Fraser River and Sumas lake both flooded annually, and following the floods, swarms of mosquitoes hatched in the shallow, standing water. It got so bad that schools were closed for up to six weeks, young children had to be kept inside, and young livestock was sometimes lost to blood loss. This meant that any outside activity, including labour, was virtually impossible. Despite the flooding, drought and irrigation problems were always issues the rest of the year, but despite of these challenging conditions, almost all of the land around the lake was settled by 1871. After some extremely high water had flooded out most of Chilliwack and all of Sumas Prairie, the Sumas Dyking Act was passed in 1878. The Act, however, did not change conditions by much. In 1890 the Chilliwack River changed its course, and instead of emptying into the Fraser, it now began to empty into Sumas Lake. That, of course, was a wonderful thing for the Sardis farmers, who no longer had to contend with the river flooding, but for those who lived along the new channel, the Vedder River, and for the farmers around Sumas lake, for whom this meant an increase in the average water level, this was disastrous. Attempts at reclamation followed, and in 1919 the Sinclair Plan was chosen from among a number of other proposals, in the hopes of better protecting the prairie. The pumps, the most powerful in Canada in their day, were started up on July 3rd, 1923, but it took almost a year, until June 24th, 1924, to fully drain the lake. The fertile lake bed immediately drew settlers to the area and new enterprises such as hop and tobacco farms were established, while and the dairy industry expanded. Mennonites fleeing religious persecution found the area well suited to their agricultural practices. With the exception of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s farms in Langley, the first systematic farming on the Lower Mainland took place on Sumas Prairie. Dairy cattle had actually been brought to Chilliwack from Oregon back in the 1860’s, and the first manufactured product had been butter. During the Caribou Gold Rush butter was shipped to the Caribous via Yale. The first creamery built to make butter and cheese for distribution in the other direction, into the coastal market, was established at Sardis in 1887, and by 1910 almost 500,000 pounds of butter was being shipped to the coastal markets annually. With the establishment of the B. C. Electric Railway the lower mainland was opened up to Fraser Valley fresh milk sales and the Fraser Valley Milk Producers Association was formed in 1913. When the Abbotsford Lumber Company closed the mill in the 1930’s, the land that had been logged was parceled and sold off as farmland to new settlers. More farms sprang up on these parcels of land, and over time, agriculture began to replace the lumber industry.