Qualicum Beach Flowers
Qualicum Beach is a town in the Regional District of Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada. As of the 2006 census, the town had 8,502 people. On the Strait of Georgia on the north-eastern coast of Vancouver Island in the shadow of Mount Arrowsmith, the community has been a popular tourist destination for residents of Victoria and Vancouver as well as a retirement community.
It is served by the Island Highway (the main northwest-southeast highway on the island) and by a daily train. The community is dotted with rental cottages along the coast. It has the oldest average population in Canada. Qualicum Beach is frequently, although informally, grouped as a twin city with the neighbouring city of Parksville.
Qualicum Beach, an attractive seaside town on the east coast of Vancouver Island, began as a lumbering, summer resort and retirement area.
The community is sometimes called "Qualicum" for short. The name "Qualicum" comes from a Coast Salish term that means "where the dog salmon run." In May 1856, Hudson's Bay Company explorer Adam Grant Horne, with a group of aboriginal guides, found a land route across Vancouver Island from the Qualicum River to the Alberni Inlet. He also discovered the Haida massacre of local Salish natives. Horne Lake is named after him. In 1864, the botanist and explorer Dr. Robert Brown led a group which explored the area. He found the area deserted as a result of the small pox epidemic of 1862.
A road was built from Nanaimo to Parksville in 1886 and extended to Qualicum in 1894. The E and N Railway reached Parksville in 1910 and Qualicum in 1914. H.E. Beasley, a railway official, sponsored the creation of The Merchants Trust and Trading Company which organized the original layout of the town and built the golf links and a hotel in 1913. A private boys' residential school, the Qualicum College, was established in 1935 by Robert Ivan Knight.
The school grew through the 1960s, but attendance diminished, and it closed in 1970. The structure remains, and though operated as a hotel for many years, it is vacant and proposed for re-development. Its playing fields have been turned into a housing subdivision. Doukhobor settlers established a communal colony in the adjoining Hilliers farming district from 1946 to 1952. Qualicum Beach was officially incorporated as a village on May 5, 1942, and was changed to town status on January 7, 1983.
The area is growing quickly with new housing subdivisions and a major new highway. It is a favoured retirement and golfing community. HMS Qualicum was a ship in the Royal Navy named for the community.
