Abbotsford
British Columbia, Canada
Home of the Gur Sikh Temple, opened in 1911 — the oldest surviving gurdwara in North America, and the only one outside India and Pakistan designated a National Historic Site.
Sikh settlers reached the Fraser Valley from about 1905, working in farming and the sawmills. In 1908 the community secured land on a hillside above Abbotsford and carried the lumber up from the mills themselves. The Gur Sikh Temple opened on 26 February 1911.1,2,3
It is not the first gurdwara built in Canada — one was raised at Golden in 1905 and another in Vancouver’s Kitsilano in 1908 — but both of those are gone, which makes the Abbotsford building the oldest standing gurdwara in North America. In 2002 it was designated a National Historic Site of Canada, the only gurdwara outside India and Pakistan to hold that status. A Sikh Heritage Museum now occupies the ground floor.2,3
The building went up during the years of the Continuous Journey regulation, the rule designed to make Indian migration to Canada practically impossible and the same rule that would turn back the Komagata Maru and its 376 passengers at Vancouver in 1914. That is the context in which the community was carrying lumber up a hill.2,3
Canada now has the largest Sikh population outside India — 771,790 at the 2021 census, about 2.1 per cent of the country, with 290,870 of them in British Columbia.4
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