Oliver BC 

This website is updated frequently – March  2008

Information on Oliver BC, the new Wine Village and data on business and industrial  activity in the South Okanagan

Some 22 kilometers from the Falls, the 3A/97 rolls into the Town of Oliver (304m). Named for John Oliver, the Liberal premier of B.C. from 1918 to 1927, the Town was the child of a union between irrigation and the Railway and, like Okanagan Falls, used to be an agricultural settlement of seasonal fruit-pickers and chilled track-side warehouses. Oliver today still makes much money from fruit growing, but the fruit doesn’t come into Town except on its way to local tables. Progress has moved the storage facilities out into the orchards. From there refrigerated trucks whisk the produce to market, leaving Oliver’s remaining few old warehouses to make water filtration systems, travel trailers and specialized orchardry equipment.

In the centre of Town, on 356th Avenue, the Oliver Museum occupies the house raised in 1924 to quarter the Provincial Police detachment. There one can see the old Fairview jail house and learn that 30 years before there was anything at all at Oliver besides desert scrub and dusty cattle, Fairview was a going concern, the biggest settlement by far in the southern Okanagan.