Abbotsford, British Columbia

Abbotsford is a city in the Fraser Valley of British Columbia, beside the Canada and United States border and Greater Vancouver. South Asian settlers, Sikhs among them, first came in the early 1900s to work on farms and in the lumber industry. In the 2021 census 38,395 of its 153,524 people, 25.5 percent, were Sikh.

Key moments

• 1910 to 1912: Sikh settlers build the Gur Sikh Temple at 33089 South Fraser Way, on a hilltop. The Abbotsford Lumber Company donated the lumber. It is a wood-frame hall of one and a half storeys, with the prayer hall upstairs and the community kitchen and dining hall below. The sources date the work differently: the federal register says 1910 to 1912, and Wikipedia says it was built from 1908 and opened in 1911.
• 1932 and the late 1960s: the temple is enlarged to the rear.
• 1983: a larger gurdwara is built across the road, and the original is kept as a reminder of the pioneers.
• 1 November 2002: Parks Canada designates it a National Historic Site, as the oldest surviving example of the temples that played a religious, social and political role in early Sikh immigration. Canada’s register calls it the only surviving gurdwara from the pioneer phase of Sikh immigration, and the oldest surviving Sikh temple in North America.

What it means today. Earlier gurdwaras, at Golden (1905) and in Kitsilano, Vancouver (1908), were demolished or burned, which leaves Abbotsford’s as the oldest that still stands. The old building stands as the Sikh community’s memorial to its first generation in Canada.