Foreman is a community just northeast of Prince George on the southeast side of the Fraser River in central British Columbia. The station was named after a Grand Trunk Pacific Railway (GTP) supervisor. Foreman Flats (a descriptive used as early as 1954) comprises about 20 residences inhabiting the northern and western parts of Foreman and is part of Prince George's Blackburn neighbourhood. Vehicular access to the eastern part of Foreman/Foreman Flats is via Shelley Road N.
History
Railway
Foreman, like Prince George to its southwest, and Shelley to its northeast, was an original train station (1914) on the GTP (the Canadian National Railway after nationalization). Situated at Mile 140.7, Fraser Subdivision (about Mile 230 or 231 during the line's construction), it encompassed camps for Lund-Rogers and Magoffin & Berg. George Hardie, a Foley, Welch and Stewart superintendent, had a clearing contract that included Foreman at its eastern extremity.
In 1957, a slow-moving train brushed three men walking along the tracks near Foreman, resulting in hospital stays. One year later, a Canadian National Telegraphs employee suffered a crushed leg and hip injuries when a railway speeder struck him.
Built in 1914, the standard-design Plan 100‐152 (Bohi's Type E) station building primarily accommodated the section crew. Reconfigured in 1948 to Plan 100‐318, it functioned as a freight and passenger shelter, before relocation to Shelley in 1963.
Forestry
The narrow strip of accessible spruce forest bordering the railway that stretched some east of Prince George was known as the East Line. The Lumber Workers Industrial Union targeted the railway tie camps during 1919–20. The J.W. Blain camp at Foreman, a major producer in the area, was one of the first to be unionized. The company agreed to most of the union demands, but by season end, it had failed to address the abysmal living conditions. J.W. Blain, which held the timber rights for the government reserve (northeast of the station), expected to take out 150,000 ties.
In 1922, headed by Martin Caine (1879–1978) of the Caine and Brawn partnership, the Foreman Lumber Co. built a 15,000-foot per shift capacity sawmill. One of the worst fires in the district occurred south of Shelley, where the company was logging. The creek water at Foreman being too low for fire prevention, the mill temporarily shut down. In 1924, milling commenced with two million feet of logs on hand. Children lighting a piece of fuse caused a forest fire at Foreman, one of the many raging in the district that summer. Having exhausted the available harvest in the vicinity and dismantled the mill, the company purchased Larsen Timber Co.'s six timber limits, near Miworth, in 1928. The next year, from the Foreman mill, high winds caught a settler's fire, which spread into an area burned four years earlier. That year, Caine began building a new mill on the Nechako River, at the western end of the Prince George rail yard, but postponed construction when the work was half complete.
The company's CNR tie production contracts, which were largely performed by subcontractors, were: 100,000 (plus overrun) for 1923; unspecified for 1924; 35,000 for 1926; 40,000 for 1930 (CNR having reduced tie acquisition volumes by 50% from the previous year); and 10,000 for 1939. The mill sawed the longer ties for switches, but the standard-length ones were hand hewn. Stacked high, they could occupy the full length of the siding. Caine admitted that in those early decades, the tight margins meant very few mills avoided bankruptcy. In his own case, the winter tie business subsidized the summer sawmilling.
Caine's lumber activities were dormant during the Great Depression, but thereafter, he operated a planing mill at the Nechako River site as Caine Lumber Co. Martin Caine came to the area in 1919. At different times, he served Prince George as chair of the school board (1933), a mayoral candidate (1939), president of the Board of Trade (1943–44), president of the Northern Interior Lumbermen's Association (1944–45), president of the Rotary Club (1950–51), and citizen of the year (1972).
Farming
John Porter (1860–1934) built the original cabin in the vicinity in 1909, one of the six earliest settlers to take up preemptions in the entire Fort George area. His mixed farming included potatoes.