Ocean Falls: the rain-soaked mill town that almost vanished

Some abandoned places are dramatic. Ocean Falls is not. It is a small, wet town at the head of a remote inlet on British Columbia's central coast, where it rains for much of the year and the forest presses in from every side. What makes it remarkable is the scale of what used to be here: a paper mill that supported thousands of people in a place you can only reach by boat or seaplane.

A town built on water and trees

Ocean Falls began in 1906 as a company town for a pulp and paper mill, built where a chain of lakes could be dammed to power the machinery and the surrounding rainforest could be felled to feed it. The site had everything an early twentieth-century mill needed: fresh water, falling water, and trees without end.

By the middle of the century the town had grown into a full community — houses, a school, a hospital, shops and a hotel — with a population that peaked at close to 3,900. For a place with no road in, it was astonishingly complete. Everything arrived by ship: food, fuel, machinery, mail and new families. It was a working town in the truest sense, and for decades it worked.

The rain people

Ocean Falls is one of the wettest places in Canada, and its residents became famous for it. They were nicknamed the ‘rain people’, and the town recorded rainfall that would make most cities seem arid. The rain fed the lakes, the lakes powered the mill, and the mill paid for everything. It was a closed loop.

But a single-industry town is only ever one decision away from trouble. The mill changed owners several times, and by the 1970s the economics of remote pulp production had turned against it. In 1973 the mill’s owner, Crown Zellerbach, closed the operation. The town’s reason to exist disappeared almost at once — a story that echoes through the whole of Canada’s abandoned places.

What is left

Most of the workforce left. The population fell from thousands to a few dozen, and the buildings that had no further use — the hotel, the shops, whole streets of houses — were left to the weather. A smaller mill ran for a few more years, and a fish hatchery and a small hydro station kept a handful of jobs alive, but the town never recovered its size.

Today Ocean Falls is one of the strangest places on the BC coast: a near-ghost town that is still, technically, inhabited. Around fifty people remain, and the old downtown — the Martin Inn, the rows of empty houses, the great dam and its spillway — stands largely as it was, slowly going green with moss. Like Uranium City in Saskatchewan, it is a place that was not abandoned so much as left, and it shows how completely a company town depends on the company.

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Related places

If this one stayed with you, these entries sit in the same corner of the archive:

• Uranium City: the boomtown that lost its reason to exist — Canada
• Anyox: the copper town that burned and was forgotten — Canada
• Goussainville-Vieux-Pays: the village under the flight path — France