The Yale Wagon Road, now more commonly known as the Old Yale Wagon Road to avoid confusion with the Yale Road which supplanted it, provided the first land route between New Westminster and Yale in the Fraser Canyon. It linked the newly created farming settlements and villages along the southern side of the Fraser River.
Starting at Brownsville in Surrey it ran to Langley, Aldergrove, Chilliwack, Hope and Yale. Here the Fraser Canyon route travellers into the Interior of British Columbia.
With the start of the Cariboo Gold Rush of 1858 most people used the extensive water networks of the Fraser and Harrison rivers. However, as European settlement grew in the Fraser Valley the importance of a land route became a true concern. Until the Yale Wagon Road was created in 1875 steamboats plied the Lower Fraser River which is why a look at a map today shows many places referred to as 'landings' along its shores.
This combination of the Yale Road and riverboats continued being the only transport networks until the 1880s when the Canadian Pacific Railway was built on the north shore of the Fraser. When the Canadian Northern (today called Canadian National) and the BC Electric Railway were built in the 1900s/1910s riverboat transport declined rapidly and the Yale Wagon Road only really began serving from railway stations to local communities and farms.
In the 1930s the Yale Wagon Road was either bypassed or built over by the new Fraser Highway, a concrete thoroughfare capable of handling automobiles.
This section of the Yale Wagon Road was bypassed early when the BCER was completed in 1910 and had further fallen into decline when the farming roads were created out of the reclaimed Sumas Lake in the 1920s.
Today the City of Chilliwack has set aside this 700 metre long section of the original road as the base of Vedder Mountain allowing people to walk or bike on an amazing bit of history.