History
I hope these notes about the park's history enhance your next visit. You'll be able to point out where the graveyard is and where the lake was. Those faint marks you see here and there in the grass won't be a mystery any more. Do you know where the wading pool was? Read on and you'll know that and more.
1950's
After talks with all parties involved, Surrey purchased the 40 acre reserve in 1954 for $40,000 from the Kwantlen First Nation . The municipality used a 10 acre strip on the east side to give the school board a new school site. By 1956 K.B. Woodward Elementary was ready to go and thousands of students have traveled down it's hallways since then. The student population grew fast and they added the first of a few additions in 1959, newly finished in this photo. Check out how, at that time, 106th Ave. was gravel and the park trees were so much closer to the school.
The opening of West Whalley Junior Secondary followed in 1957 which helped relieve some of the overcrowding at Queen Elizabeth Junior-Senior High School. It also had a number of additions over the years. Compare this 1959 photo with how it looked in later years. K.B. Woodward is still going strong, the school just got a new siding job late 2007. Teenagers must be harder on a school, though. West Whalley had to be demolished in 2002 and was replaced by Kwantlen Park Secondary in the same year.
Surrey needed a new fire hall to protect the growing Whalley area. A two acre site on Hjorth Road, just west of West Whalley High, was chosen. Hjorth road is now called 104th Ave. It got it's orginal name from Hans Christian Hjorth, a Norwegian fisherman, when he moved here in 1885. He returned to Norway 15 years later but his name stuck until Surrey changed to a numbered street system in the late 1950's. Surrey Fire Hall #2 opened in October, 1959 with living quarters for the fire chief and his family. The firemen were a mix of paid staff and volunteers. Up until the mid 1980's, if you were in Whalley, you would occasionally hear the old air-raid type siren screaming it's call for the local volunters to report for duty. In 1999 the old hall was demolished and was replaced by the one you see there now.
By the late 1950's Whalley's residents were feeling the lack of recreational facilities and park areas. Approxamately 28,000 people lived in the area. The two new schools, K.B. Woodward and West Whalley High already had more than a thousand students. There were no sports fields or pools nearby. The North Surrey Athletic Association, along with others, decided to get the municipality to fix that. After much planning, hard work and repeated requests, in 1959 Surrey decided to use the remaining portion of the former Kwantlen Reserve to create a park for Whalley.
randy@kwantlenpark.ca
Updated Feb. 28, 2009 Copyright 2009