People have lived in and around Edmonton for millennia, but it didn’t become the city it is today until the railway finally arrived.
“Once the train arrived in the early 1890s, Edmonton exploded,” said Laura Nichol, the community outreach and volunteer coordinator for Fort Edmonton Park. “The city boomed like crazy, so much so that about a fifth of the population was actually living in tents because they couldn’t build houses fast enough.”
Before the train arrived in 1891, the population of Edmonton numbered a mere 400, but by the time the First World War broke out, it leaped to 73,000.
“Edmonton has never seen that kind of boom since; it was such an exciting time,” said Nichol. “The train was critical to Edmonton’s success and to bringing new populations in to support the diversity of our city and to allow it to grow.”
To learn more about the wave of immigration that fueled that population boom and the railway’s role in it, people are invited to visit a special colonist car exhibit that will be on display at the Legislative Assembly Visitor Centre Nov. 13-18 as part of a national tour.
Entitled Journey of a Lifetime, presented by BMO Financial Group, the original idea for the touring exhibit was to transport a vintage colonist car owned by Calgary’s Heritage Park Historical Village from coast to coast so Canadians could see how many of their ancestors travelled when they first came to this country.
“It’s been part of Heritage Park for over 50 years, but once you start looking into the story of how it was used to transport thousands of immigrants across Canada, there are a lot of stories that come out of that. As a Canada 150 initiative, we wanted to look at ways of bringing those stories to life,” said Heritage Park Historical Village interpretation manager Susan Reckseidler.
“We couldn’t take a 112-year-old wooden train car across the country, but we wanted to share that story of the settlement of western Canada with all Canadians because it really is a Canadian story,” added Heritage Park Historical Village communications specialist Barb Munro. “That is why we created this tour that would go across Canada.”
The tour features a re-creation of the colonist car in the park’s collection that was built for Canadian Pacific Railway in 1905, the same year Alberta joined Canada, and is one of only two that have survived of the more than 1,000 originally built. As many as 60 to 70 immigrants would have crammed into these railway cars for the week-long journey while sleeping on wooden benches, having only two shared toilets and a single stove to cook the food that they brought with them.
The population boom of the late 19th and early 20th century was part of a strategy by the federal government to develop western Canada, fueled by the promise of free 160-acre plots of land. To improve the odds of success, Ottawa encouraged newcomers with farming skills to come, which is why so many Ukrainians, Romanians and Hungarians settled there.
Travelling with the exhibit will be a theatre troupe performing a play written by Alberta playwright Winn Bray, focusing on a cross-section of new Canadians who settled the west. The play will also highlight the story of the Bank of Montreal’s role in the growth of western Canada.
“The Bank of Montreal financed the Canadian Pacific Railway to open the west for settlement and they helped a lot of the settlers coming out where with land purchases. They are also celebrating their 200th anniversary this year,” added Munro.
The play will be performed at the historic Capitol Theatre in Fort Edmonton Park with a show in French on Nov. 14 at 12:30 p.m. and English shows on Nov. 15 at 12:30 p.m. and Nov. 17 at 8 p.m.
“At Fort Edmonton Park, our mission is to connect generations to Edmonton’s dynamic history through fun and immersive experiences. And we can’t think of a better way to do that than to come down to see some of those historic places, then to go into a historic theatre and meet characters who were on that journey themselves,” said Nichol.
The exhibit and the play ran this summer at Heritage Park Historical Village in Calgary and has since had stops at the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 in Halifax, the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, the Waterloo Region Museum in Kitchener and the Manitoba Museum in Winnipeg. It’s been a hit everywhere it has stopped.
“We had 6,000 people visit on Canada Day and we actually had to turn some of them away. People were lined up to get in and the venue was not huge. We have never had to turn people away from a performance before,” said Heritage Park Historical Village’s Munro.
While the exhibit mostly focuses on the European immigrant experience, it also features the stories of Asian newcomers who made journeys via rail to the prairies from western ports, and the challenges that Black settlers from the United States faced. It also examines the impact these mass immigrations had on Canada’s original First Nations inhabitants.
Visitors to the exhibit will also be invited to record their own immigrant experiences or those of their ancestors who might have travelled in a colonist car. Munro says they selected some powerful stories from visitors at each of the exhibit’s stops for people to watch.
“We captured a wide range of immigration stories, including one dating back to 1792,” she said. “We had children; we had senior citizens; we had lots of millennials all of whom were really excited to be able to share their stories,”
“We think it’s timely because immigration is such a hot topic right now,” said Munro. “This is the story of the hopes and dreams and hardships of immigration, then and now. And it’s a tangible reminder of those who migrated across the vast landscapes of a newly connected country, and the challenges they faced in both getting here and settling the western frontier. This was the largest wave of immigration in Canada’s history and we hope it will be an eye-opening experience for visitors.”
After the show leaves Edmonton, it will wrap up its cross-Canada tour in mid-December at the Museum of Vancouver.