Silvermere Lake, locally called Hullah's Lake, is located on the west side of Silverdale, a rural neighborhood of

Mission, British Columbia Mission is a city in the Lower Mainland of the province of British Columbia, Canada. It was originally incorporated as a district municipality in 1892, growing to include additional villages and rural areas over the years, adding the original To ...

, is a man made lake. It is visible from and adjacent to the

Lougheed Highway Lougheed is an Irish variant of a surname of Scottish origins, meaning ''head of the lake''. Lougheed or Loughead may refer to: Places * Lougheed, Alberta, a Canadian village * Lougheed Island, Nunavut, Canada * Lougheed Highway, part of British ...

, which follows a causeway on the lake's south side. The lake covers an inter tidal prairie with natural drainage patterns coming off of the Silverdale and Silverhill areas on the East side of the lake and joining the Stave River above the highway. BC geological survey aerial photography from the early 1950s shows this Photo # BC1782:40) The lake was created by diking both of off the highway and on the North end to Hayward road. The dikes were constructed buy dump and push methods with raw gravel mined from the North end of the island. The only native ground removal from the bottom of the lake was done by dredging was along the South end, in front of the houses, to increase depth and at the North end to create more land base for development. The North dredging created a hole that used to be up to 30 feet deep. All of this was part of a 1950s vintage real estate development by Norman William (Ned) Hullah's. He built his private estate on the naturally occurring hill along the west side of the lake. This hill now locally known as the Island, though previously it was known as Hullah's Island. The ownership of the island is split more or less equally down the middle between I.R. on the West and Private land on the East. The private portion includes the lake bottom to the Fraser 1896 high water mark in front of all of the housing along the shore. The portion South of the highway was recently subdivided out to Ducks Unlimited. The name Stave River was created by

Hudson's Bay Company The Hudson's Bay Company (HBC; french: Compagnie de la Baie d'Hudson) is a Canadian retail business group. A fur trading business for much of its existence, HBC now owns and operates retail stores in Canada. The company's namesake business di ...

employees. The native name for the river is forgotten, although modern-day natives refer to it as Skayuks ("everyone died"), also the name given to one of three villages that were located in the delta

marsh A marsh is a wetland that is dominated by herbaceous rather than woody plant species.Keddy, P.A. 2010. Wetland Ecology: Principles and Conservation (2nd edition). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. 497 p Marshes can often be found a ...

lands of the lower reaches of the river at the time of non-native settlement (1870s onwards). The name is a reference to consequences of the successive

smallpox Smallpox was an infectious disease caused by variola virus (often called smallpox virus) which belongs to the genus Orthopoxvirus. The last naturally occurring case was diagnosed in October 1977, and the World Health Organization (WHO) c ...

plagues and other disease pandemics which destroyed the populations and cultures of the

Fraser Valley The Fraser Valley is a geographical region in southwestern British Columbia, Canada and northwestern Washington State. It starts just west of Hope in a narrow valley encompassing the Fraser River and ends at the Pacific Ocean stretching from the ...

References

* Lakes of the Lower Mainland Mission, British Columbia New Westminster Land District {{BritishColumbiaCoast-geo-stub