Chemainus is a former logging town founded in 1858 on the western shore of Stuart Channel, on the east coast of southern Vancouver Island, about 36 miles (58 km) southwest of Vancouver and 24 miles (39 km) northwest of Sidney, British Columbia. The area is underlain by a thick sequence of Cretaceous-age sandstone, siltstone and conglomerate called the Nanaimo Group, laid down 85 to 65 million years ago in a marine basin. Pleistocene glaciers later scoured and mantled the rock with till, carving the channels and lowlands that define the Cowichan region‘s coastline today. Chemainus lies on the traditional territory of the Stz’uminus First Nation (formerly the Chemainus Indian Band) and takes its name from a 19th-century shaman and chief whose Hul’qumi’num name is rendered in English as “broken chest”. Legend holds he survived a near-fatal chest wound in battle and went on to lead his people for many prosperous years. Stuart Channel is named for Captain Charles E. Stuart, who for years ran the Hudson’s Bay Company post at Nanaimo.

The Stz’uminus people had long fished and gathered shellfish nearby at the village of Shts’emines. By the 1850s Vancouver Island’s growing logging industry needed more processing capacity than the sparsely settled central coast could offer, and Chemainus developed as a support hub for loggers working the surrounding forests. A steam sawmill built at Chemainus Bay (then Horseshoe Bay) in 1862 made the town the busiest log-processing center on the island’s east coast, able to strip, cut, stack and ship lumber from a single port. The mill drew Chinese, Japanese and South Asian laborers alongside European settlers, seeding the multicultural community whose history the town’s murals depict today. New owners, including the Victoria Lumber and Manufacturing Company, expanded and rebuilt the mill over subsequent decades, and it ran near capacity through the late 19th and early 20th centuries. By the end of the second world war, though, the roughly 80-year-old mill was outdated, and newer, more efficient mills elsewhere on the island were eroding Chemainus’s share of production.

In the 1980s British Columbia’s forest industry sank into a deep recession, driven by falling demand and prices amid stiffer global competition, shrinking accessible timber on Vancouver Island, unresolved First Nations land claims and growing environmental opposition to logging. Single-industry towns like Chemainus, dependent on the mill for jobs, were hit hard by rising unemployment. MacMillan Bloedel, then the mill’s owner, responded by rebuilding it with automated, state-of-the-art machinery, a restructuring that cut jobs even as it modernized production and forced the town to diversify. An outdoor-mural project launched around the same time to draw tourists helped remake Chemainus into a heritage and arts destination. That transformation endures: roughly 50 murals, plus a theatre and shops, still anchor the town’s tourism economy, even as the mill itself, now run by Western Forest Products, sits idle after the firm curtailed operations in mid-2025 and extended the shutdown through 2026 because of weak lumber markets and steep U.S. tariffs. Read more here and here. Explore more of Chemainus and Stuart Channel here: