Princeton is a town in the Similkameen region of southern British Columbia, Canada. It lies just east of the Cascade Mountains, which continue south into Washington, Oregon and California. The Tulameen and Similkameen Rivers converge here. At the 2016 census, the population was 2,828.Princeton centers on seven blocks of businesses along Bridge Street and five blocks on Vermilion Avenue; there are also businesses along British Columbia Highway 3.Historically, the area's main industry has been mining—copper, gold, coal, and some platinum—but today the town's biggest employer is a sawmill owned by Weyerhaeuser, along with a few smaller timber companies, such as Princeton Wood Preservers and Princeton Post and Rail.HistoryBefore European contact, the land around today's Princeton was known among First Nations people as a source of red ochre. Beginning no later than 1846, fur traders, settlers, and miners established trails connecting what was then known as Vermilion Forks to the Pacific Coast of British Columbia. John Fall Allison became, in 1858, the first permanent settler of European ancestry. To this day, the site of his home functions locally like a kilometre zero, with creeks east of Princeton having names like "Five Mile" based on their distance from that location. The town he founded was renamed "Prince Town" (later corrupted to "Princeton") to honor an 1860 visit to eastern Canada by Prince Edward (later King Edward VII).