old commercial core and the connection of the town life to the waterfront. As Yale was handy for travel to and from New Westminster and Gastown (soon after named Vancouver) on Burrard Inlet, it became the headquarters and residence of the American railway contractor Andrew Onderdonk, who supervised its construction. The town boomed with population and new businesses because of railway spending and employment. Yale and nearby Emory City, in the vicinity of Hill's Bar, where the gold rush had begun, as well as all the major Fraser Canyon towns to Ashcroft, thronged with temporary residents and business of various kinds and legitimacy. Three-times daily rail service to Vancouver - begun in the early 1880s before construction in the Canyon was finished in 1885 - made Yale a popular excursion run. With construction ended, however, the population dropped dramatically in Yale by 1890, and continued to decline afterwards. Daily return service remained in effect until World War I. When Onderdonk moved on in 1886, he donated his estate for a girls' school, All Hallows. This was ranked as one of the main society schools in the colony and continued to operate for decades, into the 1920s. Construction of the railway destroyed parts of the Cariboo Wagon Road, which was severed between Yale and Boston Bar and between Lytton and Spences Bridge. A new highway north from Yale was not built until the Cariboo Highway in 1922, partly built using surviving roadgrades of the original waggon road and since upgraded to the Trans-Canada Highway. For a long time, this was the main route between the Interior Plateau and the Lower Mainland. After major reconstruction of the Cariboo Highway in the 1950s, involving the construction of several major tunnels, the difficult old canyon stretch of the route achieved highway quality (instead of in name only), and towns such as Yale boomed once again. With the opening of the faster Coquihalla Highway in the 1980s, Yale's economy and population fell off as traffic bypassed it. Demographics In the 2021 Canadian census conducted by Statistics Canada, Yale had a population of 162 living in 86 of its 118 total private dwellings, a change of from its 2016 population of 143. With a land area of , it had a population density of in 2021. The average age of Yale residents is 56.8 giving a median age of 62.4. This is older than British Columbia