Alvin is an unincorporated locality just north of the head of

Pitt Lake Pitt Lake is the second-largest lake in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia. About in area, it is about long and about wide at its widest. It is one of the world's relatively few tidal lakes, and among the largest. In Pitt Lake, there is o ...

in the

Lower Mainland The Lower Mainland is a geographic and cultural region of the mainland coast of British Columbia that generally comprises the regional districts of Metro Vancouver and Fraser Valley. Home to approximately 3.05million people as of the 2021 Canadia ...

of southwestern

British Columbia British Columbia (commonly abbreviated as BC) is the westernmost province of Canada, situated between the Pacific Ocean and the Rocky Mountains. It has a diverse geography, with rugged landscapes that include rocky coastlines, sandy beaches, ...

Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by tot ...

. Alvin was formerly located at the homestead and farm of Alvin Thomas Patterson (1865–1942), a logging contractor and farmer who settled there about 1901, originally from

Parrsboro, Nova Scotia Parrsboro is a community located in Cumberland County, Nova Scotia, Canada. A regional service centre for southern Cumberland County, the community is also known for its port on the Minas Basin, the Ship's Company Theatre productions, and the ...

. A post office operated at that location from 1915 to 1955. In 1959 a new post office opened at the confluence of Fish Hatchery Creek and the

Pitt River The Pitt River in British Columbia, Canada is a large tributary of the Fraser River, entering it a few miles upstream from New Westminster and about 25 km ESE of Downtown Vancouver. The river, which begins in the Garibaldi Ranges of the Coas ...

upstream from the original site. It was operating as late as 1982 with the postal code V0M 1C0.

Background

The Alvin area has been the site of various logging-related industrial operations, which connected to the outside world via tug and barge traffic on Pitt Lake and the Pitt River. There is still a

logging camp A logging camp (or lumber camp) is a transitory work site used in the logging industry. Before the second half of the 20th century, these camps were the primary place where lumberjacks would live and work to fell trees in a particular area. Many ...

in the valley, operated by The Teal Jones Group, which has a sawmill in Surrey. There was once a fish hatchery in the area, as indicated by the name of the creek at the modern site of Alvin. Cleanup of an industrial garbage dump near the river's banks became an issue of concern to sport fishermen, as the Pitt is a river noted for

steelhead Steelhead, or occasionally steelhead trout, is the common name of the anadromous form of the coastal rainbow trout or redband trout (O. m. gairdneri). Steelhead are native to cold-water tributaries of the Pacific basin in Northeast Asia and N ...

fishing. The issue came to a head in 2005 when the Pitt River shifted course and began eroding the dump, sending debris downstream. Eventually, 25 000 tonnes of waste and contaminated soil were removed from the area.{{cite web, title=Pitt River Landfill Cleanup, url=http://www.swanabc.org/lounge/technical-library/doc_download/37-pitt-river-landfill-clean-up, work=SWANA Northwest Regional Symposium 2006, publisher=Sperling Hansen Associates, accessdate=8 November 2011, date=6 April 2006, archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120425150514/http://www.swanabc.org/lounge/technical-library/doc_download/37-pitt-river-landfill-clean-up, archive-date=2012-04-25, url-status=dead

References

Unincorporated settlements in British Columbia Populated places in the Fraser Valley Regional District