Ruskin, British Columbia

Ruskin is a rural, naturally-treed community, about 35 miles (55 kilometres) east of Vancouver on the north shore of the Fraser River. It was named around 1900 after of the English art critic, essayist, and prominent social thinker John Ruskin.

Ruskin is one of the historical communities of the municipality of Maple Ridge. In that context Ruskin borders on its west side with the community of Whonnock by the Whonnock Creek and the Whonnock Reserve, and on the east side with the municipality of Mission. The border to the south is the Fraser River and to the north the point where Whonnock Creek crosses the Mission borderline. Ruskin touches the Stave River at the tip of the southwest corner where the Stave River flows into the Fraser River.

The area generally understood as Ruskin goes beyond those boundaries. Ruskin in a social sense straddles the municipal border of Maple Ridge and Mission. In that close-knit community there was and is no border separating residents from Maple Ridge from those in Mission. Residents who lived and are still living along the western shore of the lower Stave River, even if they live in the municipality of Mission, consider their neighbourhood as Ruskin.

Permanent white settlers only came to the Ruskin area after the inauguration of the transcontinental railroad in 1885. The Whonnock First Nation claimed land along the Fraser River between the Stave River and Whonnock Creek as theirs but this land was not included in the Whonnock Indian Reserve and was released for settlement.

The entire area on both sides of the Stave River, including Whonnock and Ruskin, was originally referred to as Stave River. Over time the settlers gave distinctive names to the places where they lived in that large area. For Ruskin the opening of a post office made its name official. That happened with the nomination of a postmaster on January 1, 1898.

Members of the Canadian Co-operative Society, formed in Mission, BC, in 1895, gave the name Ruskin Mills to a sawmill and to the settlement they established at the mouth of the Stave River in present-day Ruskin.

Although nothing in the constitution and bylaws of the Society alludes to the formation of an utopian Ruskin socialist colony, some leading members sympathized with and discussed Ruskin's social ideas frequently.

At first the Canadian Co-operative Society was a success. In 1897 the co-operative counted 54 members, most living close to the mill. There they had built homes and barns and a boarding house. Aside from the sawmill and a logging operation, the members had set up a general store, a smithy, and a shoemaker's shop. They also ran a dairy and a vegetable farm. Not less than thirty students—mostly the members' children—attended the first school in Ruskin in the spring of 1897.

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