Vintage photos of Canadian prairie towns – and lots of them.
31 Replies to “Prairie Towns”
And every man wearing a hat ! 🙂
I came across this website a few weeks back and clicked on every image of my home town I could find. I was a bit surprised to find a picture of my great uncle taken in 1909.
No Vibank or Odessa Saskatchewan.
So far I’m disappointed. Oh well 🙁
Was he wearing a hat?
One of the archives in Saskatchewan has a collection of colour slides taken over several decades all over the province. The photographer, I believe was a grain agent. SCN, a provincial TV channel that is now gone put together several packages of these slides that they showed on a regular basis. They provided a remarkable portrait of rural Sask. during the late 30’s to 50’s. SCN didn’t have a lot of shows worth watching but any time I went by the channel on the dial and one of these were on I’d stop and watch.
Yes Robert. Of course he was wearing a hat. He was driving a 6 hitch – 2 wagon rig hauling goods between towns before the train tracks were laid.
I notice a lot of long, three story buildings that are “hotels” or boarding houses. Possibly a bar on the ground floor?
Thanks Kate for the great find. I enjoyed this site. The site owner did a great job.
Our local town is not represented and I know that there are some photos in the museum, so I contacted the site’s owner.
Robert, you will also notice that many men are also wearing ties and suits. In those days every railway town had a three story hotel as travelers, business and pleasure, stayed in them in their travels.
Where in hell is Fork River,Manitoba? Or Gruber,Pine River,Ethelbert,Grandview?
I protest this blatant discrimination against the most socialist(now, not when I lived there and we elected Conservatives while Saskabush elected NDP’ers)) of the Prairie Provinces. HRC complaint to follow.
They didn’t call them bars back then. Licensed Premises with separate entrances for ‘Gents’ and ‘Ladies and Escorts’.
It is all explained here: Ten Years Old and Barefoot My hometown
Thankyou!
I notice that street names no longer exist in North Battleford. They are now 102nd street, 54th Avenue, etc. I believe King Street, the main street, is now 101st Street.
Interestingly, Railway Avenue still exists though the train station doesn’t.
Does anyone know when the change was made, the reasons why and how popular was it?
I think my grandfather or great uncle was on that tractor in Cupar. My mom, born and raised there, had the same photo in an album.
I note that period architecture is much like that of that period in Ontario. False fronts were popular….
In Ontario the wooden false fronts were swept away by fierce fires….replaced by stout brick buildings featuring thick fire walls that extended well above the roof lines. Then a tangle of hydro and telephone lines appeared.
I suspect pics of mid/late 19th century Saskatchewan would not feature all the stumps.
Pictures of mid 19th century of place hereabouts do not feature trees….just big stumps. Early London Ontario (styled the “forest city”)photos show NO trees….
They clear cut everything. Except fer the stumps it would be prairie towns.
It seems tree planting became popular in the 1890’s early 20th century…..
I notice there are a gazillion small lakes North of Cupar. What are they?
Sloughs
There are no stumps because we didn’t have any trees. The prairies consisted of grass and some willow.
Or Porcupine Plain.
OR DUFRESNE MANITOBA? DON Morris
Nice observation. Looked at a couple of the towns I grew up in and they are bare in comparison to today.
Excellent. Many photos of Fort Macleod, AB I had not seen before. Right beside the Queens Hotel, where the ATB is now was once the “Vimy Ridge Cafe.” Also quite a few of the Empress Theatre (in the background) before Dan Boyle days.
Great photos. I especially appreciated the views of Saskatoon – some of its schools, and the Masonic Temple. My grandfather spent most of his working life in Saskatoon, first as a schoolteacher, then as a principal, and finally as a school inspector. He was also a Freemason, and would have known the schools and the Temple.
No bars! 🙂 (Saskatoon was dry).
Well,I could excuse them omitting Dufresne,Joe,as it’s overshadowed by it’s more famous cousins,Oak bank,Anola,and Dugald.
Say, isn’t there somebody special who came for Oak Bank? 😉
I never cared for the guy but I thought Conservatives playing the anti-American card was pretty small. But hey if the shoe was on the other foot, the Liberals would have used it in a heartbeat.
Morbid public introspection is more for disgraced sports stars than retired politicians which probably proves if he was no politician before he is certainly no politician now.
Wrong thread
Lovely to see Canada’s most politically incorrect town again.
A superb collection of photos!
Nice site and great Photo’s!
No Liberals on meds & crack in these photo’s, everyone has thier pants pulled up above thier ass and people are actually polite to each other.
It’s like looking at an artists redition of an alien society.
Tree planting became popular in Ontario after the great dust bowl that hit the Lake Erie region due to bad farming practices and deforestation, if I remember my local history correctly. All the farms in counties near the lake were buried under sand dunes that formed a great desert in the 1880’s and up to WWI. It styretched pretty much from the Grand River to Windsor and up Lake Huron.
They fixed it by planting pine trees to hold the sand. That’s why you see pine trees laid out in lines all over Southern Ontario. Otherwise the whole place would look like the Sahara.
It became popular out West after it was proven to work here in the East, as soil erosion didn’t really start to bite down in Sask etc. until the 20th century. Thanks to the reforestation techniques, desertification didn’t hit Canada nearly as hard as it did in the USA in the 1930’s.
Canada really is a place where vast works of destruction and recovery have been accomplished, and conservation and ecological knowledge is very important here.
Its just that these works have already been done, leaving an entire generation of econuts with ever-decreasing work to do. We currently do not have any ecological disasters going on here, so they had to invent one to keep their jobs. Glowball Warmening is their best effort at making something out of nothing.
I think the titanic Greenie-inspired corn ethanol monoculture down in the USA is going to turn out to be a huge eco-disaster, AGAIN, if the midwest continues to lose rainfall. California is already in a killing drought, it could hit the midwest as well. Given that all the signs are there, and being roundly ignored by farmers and Greenies alike, to have two Dustbowls in living memory would lead me to suspect enemy action. Like, they are -trying- to break it.
Or Calder or MacNutt. Still a wonderful group of photos.
What a bunch of city kids. I’ve never heard of Gruber, but I’ve been to every other Manitoba town mentioned. And to Calder and MacNutt, for that matter. It turns out Gruber is north of Sifton. They could have just said so.
Hell, I’ve been to Mink Creek! I’ve been to Dummy Lake! I know the most direct route from Riverside to Riverdale! Oh, blast, you’ve got me started on Manitoba again, you should never get me started on Manitoba…
And every man wearing a hat ! 🙂
I came across this website a few weeks back and clicked on every image of my home town I could find. I was a bit surprised to find a picture of my great uncle taken in 1909.
No Vibank or Odessa Saskatchewan.
So far I’m disappointed. Oh well 🙁
Was he wearing a hat?
One of the archives in Saskatchewan has a collection of colour slides taken over several decades all over the province. The photographer, I believe was a grain agent. SCN, a provincial TV channel that is now gone put together several packages of these slides that they showed on a regular basis. They provided a remarkable portrait of rural Sask. during the late 30’s to 50’s. SCN didn’t have a lot of shows worth watching but any time I went by the channel on the dial and one of these were on I’d stop and watch.
Yes Robert. Of course he was wearing a hat. He was driving a 6 hitch – 2 wagon rig hauling goods between towns before the train tracks were laid.
I notice a lot of long, three story buildings that are “hotels” or boarding houses. Possibly a bar on the ground floor?
Thanks Kate for the great find. I enjoyed this site. The site owner did a great job.
Our local town is not represented and I know that there are some photos in the museum, so I contacted the site’s owner.
Robert, you will also notice that many men are also wearing ties and suits. In those days every railway town had a three story hotel as travelers, business and pleasure, stayed in them in their travels.
Where in hell is Fork River,Manitoba? Or Gruber,Pine River,Ethelbert,Grandview?
I protest this blatant discrimination against the most socialist(now, not when I lived there and we elected Conservatives while Saskabush elected NDP’ers)) of the Prairie Provinces. HRC complaint to follow.
They didn’t call them bars back then. Licensed Premises with separate entrances for ‘Gents’ and ‘Ladies and Escorts’.
It is all explained here:
Ten Years Old and Barefoot
My hometown
Thankyou!
I notice that street names no longer exist in North Battleford. They are now 102nd street, 54th Avenue, etc. I believe King Street, the main street, is now 101st Street.
Interestingly, Railway Avenue still exists though the train station doesn’t.
Does anyone know when the change was made, the reasons why and how popular was it?
I think my grandfather or great uncle was on that tractor in Cupar. My mom, born and raised there, had the same photo in an album.
I note that period architecture is much like that of that period in Ontario. False fronts were popular….
In Ontario the wooden false fronts were swept away by fierce fires….replaced by stout brick buildings featuring thick fire walls that extended well above the roof lines. Then a tangle of hydro and telephone lines appeared.
I suspect pics of mid/late 19th century Saskatchewan would not feature all the stumps.
Pictures of mid 19th century of place hereabouts do not feature trees….just big stumps. Early London Ontario (styled the “forest city”)photos show NO trees….
They clear cut everything. Except fer the stumps it would be prairie towns.
It seems tree planting became popular in the 1890’s early 20th century…..
I notice there are a gazillion small lakes North of Cupar. What are they?
Sloughs
There are no stumps because we didn’t have any trees. The prairies consisted of grass and some willow.
Or Porcupine Plain.
OR DUFRESNE MANITOBA? DON Morris
Nice observation. Looked at a couple of the towns I grew up in and they are bare in comparison to today.
Excellent. Many photos of Fort Macleod, AB I had not seen before. Right beside the Queens Hotel, where the ATB is now was once the “Vimy Ridge Cafe.” Also quite a few of the Empress Theatre (in the background) before Dan Boyle days.
Great photos. I especially appreciated the views of Saskatoon – some of its schools, and the Masonic Temple. My grandfather spent most of his working life in Saskatoon, first as a schoolteacher, then as a principal, and finally as a school inspector. He was also a Freemason, and would have known the schools and the Temple.
No bars! 🙂 (Saskatoon was dry).
Well,I could excuse them omitting Dufresne,Joe,as it’s overshadowed by it’s more famous cousins,Oak bank,Anola,and Dugald.
Say, isn’t there somebody special who came for Oak Bank? 😉
I never cared for the guy but I thought Conservatives playing the anti-American card was pretty small. But hey if the shoe was on the other foot, the Liberals would have used it in a heartbeat.
Morbid public introspection is more for disgraced sports stars than retired politicians which probably proves if he was no politician before he is certainly no politician now.
Wrong thread
Lovely to see Canada’s most politically incorrect town again.
A superb collection of photos!
Nice site and great Photo’s!
No Liberals on meds & crack in these photo’s, everyone has thier pants pulled up above thier ass and people are actually polite to each other.
It’s like looking at an artists redition of an alien society.
Tree planting became popular in Ontario after the great dust bowl that hit the Lake Erie region due to bad farming practices and deforestation, if I remember my local history correctly. All the farms in counties near the lake were buried under sand dunes that formed a great desert in the 1880’s and up to WWI. It styretched pretty much from the Grand River to Windsor and up Lake Huron.
They fixed it by planting pine trees to hold the sand. That’s why you see pine trees laid out in lines all over Southern Ontario. Otherwise the whole place would look like the Sahara.
It became popular out West after it was proven to work here in the East, as soil erosion didn’t really start to bite down in Sask etc. until the 20th century. Thanks to the reforestation techniques, desertification didn’t hit Canada nearly as hard as it did in the USA in the 1930’s.
Canada really is a place where vast works of destruction and recovery have been accomplished, and conservation and ecological knowledge is very important here.
Its just that these works have already been done, leaving an entire generation of econuts with ever-decreasing work to do. We currently do not have any ecological disasters going on here, so they had to invent one to keep their jobs. Glowball Warmening is their best effort at making something out of nothing.
I think the titanic Greenie-inspired corn ethanol monoculture down in the USA is going to turn out to be a huge eco-disaster, AGAIN, if the midwest continues to lose rainfall. California is already in a killing drought, it could hit the midwest as well. Given that all the signs are there, and being roundly ignored by farmers and Greenies alike, to have two Dustbowls in living memory would lead me to suspect enemy action. Like, they are -trying- to break it.
Or Calder or MacNutt. Still a wonderful group of photos.
What a bunch of city kids. I’ve never heard of Gruber, but I’ve been to every other Manitoba town mentioned. And to Calder and MacNutt, for that matter. It turns out Gruber is north of Sifton. They could have just said so.
Hell, I’ve been to Mink Creek! I’ve been to Dummy Lake! I know the most direct route from Riverside to Riverdale! Oh, blast, you’ve got me started on Manitoba again, you should never get me started on Manitoba…