Settlement The first residents of the area are the
Stó:lō Nation. The Upper Sumas 6
Indian reserve of the
Sumas First Nation is located at Kilgard within Abbotsford city limits. European settlement began when the
Royal Engineers surveyed the area in response to the
gold rush along the
Fraser River in 1858. This led to the building of Yale Road (today
Old Yale Road), the first transportation route to link the
Fraser Valley. The settlement grew and the production of butter, milk and tobacco began by the late 1860s. In 1889, former Royal Engineer John Cunningham Maclure applied for a Crown grant to obtain the that would become Abbotsford. The Gur Sikh Temple, located on 33089 South Fraser Way, is the oldest Sikh temple in North America. Built in 1908 and opened in 1911, it is now over 110 years old, outlasting the now demolished 2nd Avenue temple in Vancouver (opened in 1908), and the
Golden temple (opened in 1905) which was destroyed by fire. The most commonly cited origin is that Maclure named the land "Abbotsford" after family friend Henry Braithwaite Abbott, the western superintendent of the
Canadian Pacific Railway. Maclure's sons later stated that the property had actually been named for
Sir Walter Scott's home,
Abbotsford House, and pronounced it with the accent on
ford, In his later years Maclure himself claimed that the naming had been "a combination of two ideas".
Contemporary period The title passed hands to Robert Ward, who filed a townsite subdivision on July 9, 1891. Also in 1891, the CPR built a railway line through the area that connected
Mission with the
Seattle, Lake Shore and Eastern Railway at
Sumas, Washington. This route was the only rail connection between
Vancouver and
Seattle until 1904. The Village of Abbotsford was incorporated in 1892. At that time Robert Ward sold many of the lots to private investors, but also sold off a significant portion to the
Great Northern Railway's subsidiary company the
Vancouver, Victoria and Eastern Railway. The
British Columbia Electric Railway (BCER) arrived in 1910. The Interurban, as the BCER tram linking Abbotsford with Vancouver and
Chilliwack was called, was discontinued in 1950, but BCER's successor
BC Hydro retains the right to re-introduce passenger rail service. Service to Vancouver runs from neighbouring Mission by way of the
West Coast Express. The most notable natural disaster to hit Abbotsford was
a major flood of the
Fraser River in 1948. In September 1984,
Pope John Paul II held an open-air Mass for over 200,000 people at
Abbotsford International Airport. The amalgamation of the Village of Abbotsford and the
District of Sumas into the District of Abbotsford occurred in 1972. The District of Abbotsford amalgamated with the
District of Matsqui in 1995 to become the City of Abbotsford, raising the population significantly. In June 2013, the City of Abbotsford spread chicken manure on a homeless camp located in the city. Abbotsford Mayor
Bruce Banman publicly apologized for the incident. The city of Abbotsford has a long and ongoing history of gang-related crime, particularly that of violence and the illegal sale of controlled substances. On November 16, 2021, Abbotsford residents living in the
Sumas Prairie were given an evacuation order, given the
flooding in British Columbia at the time, the city calling the situation "catastrophic". December 2025, four years after the 2021 flood, the community flooded again from atmospheric river with many from the sumas flats evacuated from their homes. ==Government==