Rails Across the Prairies. Ron Brown
elevators, nearly every rail line can count dozens of ghost towns, or hamlets that resemble them, with overgrown streets, vacant false-fronted stores, and sagging houses. Few prairie ghost towns retain any component of their railway roots. However, lurking within a few of these ghostly remnants — places in Saskatchewan like Alvena, Jedburgh, and Parkerview — are grain elevators and stations. Mowbray in Manitoba and Manyberries, Heinsburg, and Rowley in Alberta are ghost towns, or partially so, and they retain their stations in their original locations. In Saskatchewan, grain elevators still stand silently in ghost towns like Fusilier, Sovereign, Bents, and Peterson; in Alberta, Rowley and Dorothy; and Brandenwarden in Manitoba.
Heritage Towns
All across the Prairies, a number of railway towns are becoming heritage attractions on their own, communities like Radville, Vilna, Strathcona, Ogema, and Empress. In Alberta more than two dozen communities have undertaken main street upgrades under that province’s Main Street program. Manitoba’s Hometown Main Street Enhancements program helps fund streetscape improvements in communities across that province. In April 2011, the province of Saskatchewan announced a similar program. Although such improvements may not necessarily incorporate rail heritage features, nearly all main streets in the Prairies owed their origins to the railways and the stations that stood at the foot of those streets. Some of the more exciting heritage communities are listed here.
Empress, Alberta
Located in the Badlands of Alberta, Empress began as a CPR divisional town on what became known as the “Empress” line, named in honour of the late Queen Victoria, who had been the empress of India. With its small but distinctive station and divisional facilities, the town developed into a busy community. But the station closed in 1972, and the tracks were lifted a few years later. The town was on the verge of becoming a ghost town.
Then, it was “discovered.” A number of artists have located their studios here or nearby. Sagebrush Studios has moved three historic churches onto its property to serve as additional studios. Another, the Knarls and Knots studio, features handmade furniture. The most active of the new businesses is “That’s Empressive” — a tea room and gift shop situated in the former Bank of Commerce, which was built in 1919 and remained in business until the CPR closed its divisional point operations; for a time it served as a boarding house. The TD moved into the building, which remained a bank until 1997, when a jeweller bought it for his studio. The building was then purchased by Pat and Ross Donaldson to sell artwork. Since then it has become the focus of the community, with its tea room and gift items, as well as being the town’s only convenience store.[5]
Radville’s main street contains a heritage bank and a heritage hotel, as well as the preserved station at the end of the street.
Vilna, Alberta
Shortly after taking over the CNo and the GTP, the newly formed CNR began to expand into the area northeast of Edmonton to help open the area to settlement, especially for soldiers returning from the First World War. At the site of today’s Vilna, the CNR established a station and a community quickly grew. The main street contained a hardware store, bank, hotel, post office, and a pool hall, among other businesses.
Despite the removal of the railway line, Vilna’s main street has remained largely intact. In fact, so much so that the Alberta Main Street Program has helped fund the street’s revitalization. More than twenty main street buildings have been improved or fully restored, many dating back to the village’s boom years in the 1920s to the early ’30s.
But the best known of the main street buildings is the pool hall and barbershop. Built in 1921 by Steve Pawluk, it remained in use as a pool hall and barber shop until 1996. In that year, it was purchased by the Friends of the Vilna Pool Hall and Barbershop Historical Society, who succeeded in having it declared a provincial heritage property. The interior still retains its barber shop and pool hall fixtures, making it Alberta’s oldest pool hall. Although no railway structures have survived, the railway right of way forms part of the popular Iron Horse rail trail. Vilna’s heritage main street attracts many day-use visitors from places like Edmonton. It goes to show that heritage, when preserved, can be an economical benefit — a notion too many prairie communities don’t seem to get.
Old Strathcona, Alberta
The Old Strathcona heritage district of Edmonton owes its origins to the 1891 refusal of the CPR to build its Calgary and Edmonton line over the South Saskatchewan River. As a result, the town grew up around the CPR station and its yards. The CNo acquired the charter of the Edmonton, Yukon and Pacific Railway and built the “low level” bridge over the river, finally connecting tracks on both sides. With the opening of the High Level bridge in 1913, the CPR itself crossed the mighty valley and built its own station in Edmonton, and Strathcona became part of the city.
Many of the early buildings have survived, and today five city blocks have been designated as a heritage district, with a number of buildings along Whyte Avenue dating from the railway’s heyday. Nearly two dozen individual buildings are designated as well, including the Gainers Block, the Princess Theatre, the old post office, and the Douglas Block.
Two of the more prominent structures are the Strathcona Hotel, built in 1891 as the Edmonton House, and the massive CPR station itself, built in 1909. With its polygonal tower above the operator’s bay, it was one of only five like it across the Prairies. A replica of the first C&E station is now a museum on 86th Avenue NW and contains a working telegraph, just as was used when the original station was in operation. Similarly, Okotoks has revitalized its “Old Town” and has incorporated a gallery and tourism office into its unusual CPR station, located on North Railway Street.
Ogema, Saskatchewan
This community began around 1912, when the CPR laid its tracks through the area and planned the site for a town. Since it was the end of the tracks at that time, the inhabitants decided on Omega as a name, as that is the last letter in the Greek alphabet. However, a post office already had that name, and so, with a minor shift in letters, it became Ogema, which is also the Cree word for “big chief.”
Ogema is a town that actively celebrates its roots. In addition to a CPR station, which has been relocated from a farm back to the end of the main street, many heritage buildings line the main street, including a rare example of a brick firewall halfway along. This was built following a devastating fire in 1915 in order to prevent future fires from spreading so rapidly. Opposite is a brick fire station, erected in part for the same reason. One of the more unusual structures, another rare building, is a 1925 BA “filling” station, now a municipal heritage property. The 1923 butcher store is now the C & C Supermarket. The station will become the boarding point for Saskatchewan’s newest tour train on the Southern Prairie Railway.
Radville, Saskatchewan
Here in southern Saskatchewan lies yet another heritage treasure: Radville, with historic buildings lining a main street that ends, as it should, at the back of the CNo station. In 1909 the CNo, which was busily building yet another of its branch lines, chose Radville as a divisional point. It erected a water tower, roundhouse, and a standard class-2 divisional-point station. (The railways classified their stations by the importance of their functions. A class 2 was a larger “divisional” station with sorting yards and maintenance facilities, as well as the usual waiting rooms.)
In choosing Radville, the CNo bypassed another community, Brooking, which had hoped to attract the divisional functions. Today, that community is a vanished ghost town. While the Radville station has become a museum, a number of other heritage buildings stand as well. Most prominent among them is the Canadian Bank of Commerce, now the CIBC. It was prefabricated in British Columbia and assembled in Radville in 1911. Across the street, the Empire Hotel, now the Long Creek Saloon, dates to the same year. The Radville Senior Citizens club occupies what was the Province Theatre, built in 1925, which lost its second floor as a result of a fire in 1943. The tourism office on the main street has prepared a walking tour of this historic railway town.
Rouleau, Saskatchewan
While Rouleau still retains a grain elevator, it is not the