In the days of the earliest settlers the Lower Fraser Valley was a vast forest, broken here and there by stretches of open prairie. The latter were islands, and other natural meadows, subject to flooding at high water.
It was there that the first farming took place. Around 1840 the Hudson's Bay Company started a farm on Langley Prairie in connection with the fort. Similar areas were settled twenty years or more later by miners, teamsters, and others from the Fraser River gold fields.
By then the Pre-emption Acts of 1859 and 1860 had made it possible for anyone to take up land, and quite a few of them settled on the large accessible prairies around Sumas Lake and the lower reaches of the Chilliwack River. They brought in cattle from across the border and fattened them on the wild grass and the pea vine.
Although they had little or no clearing to do, they had to cope with annual floods, and hordes of mosquitoes that hatched out when the waters receded. This story is told in "Floodland and Forest"
(Sound Heritage Series, No. 37)
By contrast, most of the people who concern us now pioneered the uplands of Surrey, Langley and Mission. They arrived during the 1870's or the two following decades, by which time all the suitable land had been taken up, and there was nothing for it but to move in among the firs and the cedars, which presented them with a very different challenge.
Access was by wagon roads or trails, meandering through dark woods and marshy bottom lands.
Some had been made by Indians—like the one which ran from Semiahmoo Bay on the U.S. border to Brownsville, a small settlement and landing on the Fraser, opposite New Westminster. Another ran from Bellingham Bay to Fort Langley, the so-called Smugglers' Trail.
One trail had been cut in 1865 for a telegraph line that was to have been built all the way to Alaska, and then to Siberia. That it never got there is another story. But the trail itself was used by riders and pedestrians prepared to wade or swim any creeks they encountered.
There were no bridges. In the 1870s, the new provincial government worked to open wagon roads, starting with the Semiahmoo Trail, previously improved by the Royal Engineers and improved again in 1873. A new road was cut through Surrey, Langley and Matsqui.
The Yale Road led settlers to build trails north and south to homesteads. About then, the Old McLellan Road was cut from the top of Wood wards Hill on the Semiahmoo Trail to Langley Prairie; later, the Coast Meridian opened from the Yale Road south to the border. These wagon roads brought homesteaders into Surrey and Langley woods and to New Westminster for supplies.
For years, they were muddy trails dodging stumps, best when frozen hard. Roads and bridges were immediate concerns of the newly formed municipal councils, and many settlers worked on roads in lieu of taxes. They began using gravel. Loggers and shingle makers also helped open the country.
Like farmers, hand-loggers started at the water's edge, working along the Fraser and smaller riverbanks. Pushing further inland, they built skid roads and used ox teams to haul logs to a river landing or a ditch they had constructed. Logs were towed to big mills near New Westminster or the one at Elgin. In 1891, the New Westminster and Southern Railway was built from Brownsville through mid-Surrey via Cloverdale and Halls Prairie to link with the American line at the border.