Webster's Corners

James Murray Webster first settled in this area in 1882, and opened a Post Office in his house in 1891. The area was wilderness at the time, and enormous first growth trees had to be cleared in order to plant crops. A school was built in 1896 in a small clearing near the location of the present day school, and a Methodist Church built on Dewdney Trunk Road in 1912.

The first Finnish settlers moved here after the failure of the utopian socialist commune at Sointula on the the north end of Vancouver Island. Casting about for a way to sustain the settlement, their leader, Matti Kurikka, obtained a shingle bolt contract at Webster’s Corners, and several families arrived here on January 1, 1905 to work on this contract; some of them stayed in the area, and a small Finnish community was born. To this day a number of early Finnish homes still retain their separate saunas. Credit: District of Maple Ridge, HERITAGE RESOURCES OF MAPLE RIDGE, page 96.