From the earliest times, settlements and civilizations have grown up around and upon the various local trade routes that were available to them.
Goods and services must have ways to move safely and freely, and the early days of Calgary, Chestermere and Rocky View County's history were no different, according local historian Eileen McElroy of the Chestermere Historical Foundation.
McElroy is offering a free presentation entitled “Trails, Roads and Rails to Chestermere” on Aug. 1 at the Chestermere Recreation Centre to help mark Historic Calgary Week.
“In the early days, of course, there were only trails all over Alberta,” she told the Rocky View Weekly. “These were primarily established initially by the First Nations peoples.”
Locally, the most important trail in the Calgary region's history was the 'Blackfoot Trail,’ which McElroy quickly points out should not to be confused with the present-day Blackfoot Trail freeway in Calgary.
“This trail ran diagonally from Blackfoot Crossing, which is south of Cluny, and then into Calgary at the confluence of the Bow and Elbow Rivers,” she explained.
The Blackfoot Trail was key to First Nations trading and movement prior to European settlement years, and the groups who used it attached a tremendous cultural and spiritual significance to several key sites along it, much like pilgrims along famous pilgrimage trails did during that same time period in Europe.
With such a well-established trail in operation for many years by First Nations peoples, McElroy said it was natural when the first settlers came west in the late 19th century that they would use it too. That’s when the first recorded Chestermere-specific connection to the Blackfoot Trail came into the history books, according to McElroy.
“In 1888, it was actually the route was formalized by the Dominion Land Survey,” she explained “They were following, we think, the traditional trail with some alterations close to Calgary. This trail actually passed along the southern edge of what’s now Chestermere Lake, which of course didn’t yet exist at that time.”
Only very few sections of the original Blackfoot Trail are still visible in the Alberta landscape today, McElroy added – but one happens to be on a private acreage on the south end of Chestermere Lake.
“It’s just kind of neat that it still exists,” she stated. “We know it was a very important route for the settlers in the Chestermere district, Langdon area, and Shepard. They would use that road to get into Calgary to sell their products, and to buy supplies. It was ‘the’ route.”
Going forward a few years in time, said McElroy, when Chestermere Lake was first established and filled with water to serve as a local irrigation reservoir in 1906, another part of the presentation will deal with the establishment of one of only two Canadian Northern Railway (CNoR) stations in southern Alberta at around that time.
The station was built in Chestermere in 1914 on what was the Calgary to Munson coal line.
“In Chestermere, we had a station on the CNoR line at the end of the lake,” McElroy said. “It was a CNoR station, and we think it was built in 1914 or 1915. It was a one-and-a-half-storey structure. It had a couple of waiting rooms and a ticket hall, office, a baggage room, and two bedrooms upstairs.”
While it was built on what was known as a coal line, the station was not constructed to serve the coal industry, McElroy said. Instead, it actually represented an attempt to capitalize on Chestermere Lake’s emerging importance as a local recreation destination for boaters and swimmers.
“The reason the station was put there because it was thought in the pre-war era that Chestermere would be a big recreational location for Calgary because we were the only large body of water sort of close by Calgary,” she said. “They promoted it, but the local information we have regarding the Chestermere station is it wasn’t used very much. And it was certainly closed by 1922, and it burned down in the 1930s.”
According to McElroy, the short-lived dream of building a new recreation destination in Chestermere coincided with a time when the Calgary region was experiencing an extraordinary boom in population, and was rife with wild real estate speculation.
“There was a huge land boom on Calgary before the First World War, and Calgary grew about three-and-a-half times between 1906 and 1911,” she explained. “It outstripped any other boom we have ever had in Calgary – which is saying something, because we have had some big booms.”
As reported by McElroy, one major local land speculator and landowner in Chestermere, James McCullough, went in big on this dream. When his attempts to persuade the City of Calgary to extend its street car service out to Chestermere Lake failed, McCullough gathered support for another ambitious electric rail endeavour called the Chestermere and Calgary Surburban Railway Company. It was incorporated by the provincial government in 1910.
“He became a driving force to build a line between east Calgary and the lake,” McElroy said. “A portion of the grade was eventually constructed, and some of those elevations could still be seen into the 1970s. There were many ads in Calgary newspapers at the time for the line, and properties for sale along the proposed line. It was always, ‘Coming soon, Buy Now.”
However, as history often teaches us, said McElroy, what goes boom eventually goes bust.
“It’s the rail story that never was,” she explained. “It never was finished. And being that this local real estate boom started to go bust in 1913, and then in 1914 with the war breaking out, that was the coup de gras.”
The dream of a direct transit connection between the City of Calgary and Chestermere would eventually be realized, but not until 2021, when Calgary Transit agreed to implement daily service between the two cities.
For more stories from McElroy’s “Trails, Roads and Rails to Chestermere” those interested in this local history are asked to pre-register for the event on the Chestermere Historical Foundation’s website at chestermerehistoricalfoundation.org. Historic Calgary Week goes from July 28 until Aug. 7.
For more information on the 82 free presentations and events taking place in the region, download the Historic Calgary Week brochure at chinookhistory.ca.
