A view of Kelowna from Knox mountain from a picture taken in the 1940s. Shared by 'Old Kelowna' Facebook group.

Image Credit: Old Kelowna Facebook group.

The road to becoming the largest city in the Thompson-Okanagan was not a clear-cut route.

In the early days, Kamloops was the first big centre, starting with Fort Thompson then Fort Kamloops Hudson Bay Company forts and the arrival of the CPR in 1892. Incorporation followed in 1892.

In 1891, the CPR built a branch line to Vernon that helped propel it to the position as the largest settlement in the Okanagan. It was incorporated in 1893.

Penticton was incorporated in 1909 but got its big population boost thanks to the opening of the Kettle Valley Railway in 1915.

By the 1911 census, Penticton had crept ahead of Vernon, registering 13 more residents. But that city’s population really took off following the opening of the Kettle Valley Railway in 1915, becoming the largest city in the Okanagan by 1921.

Penticton’s population surged ahead again for the 1951 census following the opening of the Hope-Princeton highway in 1949, connecting it to the Lower Mainland and making the KVR, eventually, obsolete.

READ MORE: 70 years ago, the Hope-Princeton Highway opened, forever changing the Okanagan

The sleeper in all of this was tiny Kelowna.

“Kelowna was a very isolated little community,” Sharron Simpson, author of The Kelowna Story, told iNFOnews.ca.

She captioned an early photo of Bernard Avenue in her book as “the initially uninspiring town.”

READ MORE: How Kelowna grew to become the biggest city in the Okanagan

While Kelowna was incorporated in 1905, it essentially remained that way until the 1950s.

In 1952, Kelowna hardware store owner W.A.C. Bennett surprised everyone by becoming BC’s premier.

Six years later, the Okanagan Lake Floating Bridge opened, bringing the Lower Mainland much closer to its doorstep and the city has not looked back.

The population more than doubled for the 1976 census following the city’s amalgamation with surrounding communities like Rutland, Glenmore and Okanagan Mission in 1973.

Forty years later, it almost doubled in population again as it passed the 100,000 mark in the 2006 census. Kelowna hit 144,576 in 2021 and was the fastest growing major metropolitan area in the country during that census period.

Kamloops had its own population doubling experience in 1967 when it amalgamated with North Kamloops, actually giving it more residents in the 1976 census than Kelowna.

It lost that lead in the 1986 census and, despite the opening of the first phase of the Coquihalla Highway (Hope to Merritt) that year and the second phase (Merritt to Kamloops) the following year, it never kept pace with its Okanagan cousin.

Kamloops did, however, reach 97,902 residents in the 2021 census and, combined with surrounding communities like Logan Lake and Chase, became the BC Interior’s second Census Metropolitan Area (next to Kelowna, which includes the entire Central Okanagan).

READ MORE: Why it’s a good thing the Kamloops area now has a population of over 100,000

The first Canadian census was conducted in 1881 when only regional counts were done in the Thompson-Okanagan because many communities were not yet incorporated.

The census was conducted every ten years until 1951, after which it went to every five years, starting in 1956.

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