Bon Accord was located around what are now the foundations of the Port Mann Bridge, where since the 1860's there was a rough landing for steamboats to take on cordwood for the journey upriver to Fort Langley and Yale (the end of navigable waters on the Fraser). The small pioneer community, located on the deeper south shore of the Fraser near the confluence of two rivers and a salmon-bearing creek, would become a post office and later have a small station on the New Westminster Southern Railway. In 1882, before the railway came, Bon Accord was the site of the first hatchery in Canada to raise Pacific salmon. A sternwheeler by the name of Bon Accord plied the waters of the Fraser until 1898, when she burned during the Great Fire of New Westminster.


In 1911, Bon Accord changed its name to Port Mann for Sir Donald Mann, originally an aspirant to the ministry, but who later became the co-builder with Sir William MacKenzie of the Canadian Northern Railway. (Invergarry Park was named for the home of Mann’s parents in Scotland). As the CNR moved west, Mann and MacKenzie planned to establish Port Mann as the Pacific terminus.
Speculation went wild; hordes of Vancouver real estate agents established themselves as Port Mann specialists, claiming that the coming completion of the Panama Canal and Port Mann’s potential two and a half miles of deep draught moorage would make it the centre of transport and commerce on the Pacific coast, rapidly surpassing Vancouver in size. The sale of lots began in March 1912; four million dollars worth of land was sold in Port Mann before a single site was cleared for building. Grain elevators, steel mills, glass companies, and rail car builders all considered, promised, or were rumored to be building factories, and suddenly little Port Mann was set to become..

Agents sent elaborate maps of the proposed new city to potential clients, ads were placed in newspapers all across North America billing it as “the city made in a laboratory” with completely rational and scientific planning methods. Borrowing from mid-nineteenth century notions of Baron Haussmann’s Paris, Port Mann was laid out with streets radiating from a central circus in the residential section. The business sector was to cluster around a large open square. Parts of the radial street pattern can still be seen today.

Unfortunately, the grandiose plans failed to materialize. The Canadian Northern Railway did establish extensive rail yards, shops and warehouses at Port Mann. However, they bought running rights on the old New Westminster Southern Railway as far as the Fraser River Rail Bridge, crossed on the Great Northern tracks and continued, to terminate in Vancouver.
The Flood of 1940!



As a community, Port Mann faded away into the 60's, and in the 70's much of the town centre area was eaten up by a large expansion of the rail yards.
Most of the text is not original work and was taken from the City of Surrey, and, Neil Roughley. Images harvested from the web.