John Tom Oakley was in the line-up file for one of the first homesteads in the valley. With his wife, son and daughter, they lived on a farm two miles east of McBride. He was the first to use power machines, and broke his land with a steam engine. A 1936 newspaper report states that “flooding of the Fraser obliterated Horseshoe Lake and flooded Oakley Island. A hay stack and a granary building at Oakley’s floated away.”

His son Harold was president of the McBride Farmers’ Institute in 1935.