Every spring, Coquitlam’s Maillardville neighbourhood plays host to the Festival du Bois, a celebration of all things Francophone.

The festival just wrapped up its 35th year Sunday after the annual event, which features musical acts, arts, crafts, culture, and food.

The event is not a small neighbourhood celebration; Francophones from all over the Lower Mainland join in for the annual celebration of French Canadian, Acadian, and Metis culture, and organizers say it is the biggest Francophone festival west of the Rockies.

The weekend always starts with a dance on Friday night, followed by two full days of performances and activities. According to Joanne Dumas, executive director of the Sociéte francophone de Maillardville (SFM), professional musicians share the stage with any members of the community who want to join in.

“There’s an opportunity also, if you do play an instrument and you want to bring it up — unless it’s a piano,” she laughed.

“If you want to bring your fiddle, your guitar, whatever, your flute, well come on and participate in our jamming tent and meet other musicians. It’s all about a celebration of everything musical.”

It is also a celebration of all things food, with tortiere, poutine, crepes, pea soup, and maple taffy featured heavily.

Dumas says the event brings out thousands of people.

“We are getting anywhere between 10 to 12,000 people on a yearly basis, which is respectable and we’re quite pleased with that, in consideration that we are an event in a suburb,” she said.

Attendance has remained consistent, she says, with numbers the same as they were even prior to the pandemic — although in 2021, the festival was held virtually.

The location was not chosen randomly. Maillardville was formed over 100 years ago after Fraser Mills, at that time a new “state-of-the-art” lumber mill on the banks of the Fraser River, turned to logging communities in Quebec to find workers, promising them “access to land for their families to settle, wood for building a house, and the freedom to preserve their language,” according to the SFM. This led to dozens of French Canadians leaving their homes in Ontario and Quebec to set up a new life in B.C.. says The City of Coquitlam on its Heritage & History page online. Within a few years, they had settled in to the small town, by then consisting of several houses, a store, a hospital, a barber shop, and even a pool hall.

The area became the largest Francophone enclave west of Saint Boniface, Manitoba. Today, it remains a notable part of Coquitlam’s history, and honours its heritage with French street names, the Place des Arts culture centre, and the annual festival. But while the demographics have changed — and Francophones make up a much smaller percentage of the area’s population — Dumas says enthusiasm for the Festival du Bois remains strong.

“We used to have an event that was mainly Francophones that would come have their tortiere, maple taffy on the snow and so forth and so on. It was nostalgia that brought them over,” she said.

“And then we started changing demographics…but I think it’s new communities that want to know more about the Francophone culture of Canada, and also when you take into consideration new immigrants to the country, for them, they know they’ve immigrated to a bilingual country, so it’s their way of kind of getting a feel of it.”

The Festival du Bois takes place every March in Maillardville’s Mackin Park.