Coal as King

This post card shows one of the ways that the coal was lifted from the banks of the North Saskatchewan River up to the flats on which the city of Edmonton was built. It is an elevated railway that took the coal up the hill at what is today 101st Street. From here it was sold to homes, businesses and to the railroad to be used to fire the boilers in their steam locomotives.

Today, there is talk in the city of Edmonton about building a funicular that goes up and down the side of the river bank. As you can see, this is not a new idea. It was thought of and executed many years ago. Of course, they were recently speaking about hauling tourists, not coal, up and down!!

Today, Edmonton, Alberta has several refineries on the outskirts of the city and in the neighbouring counties. It seems to be sitting right in the middle of the source of today’s most popular source of energy – oil. This has not always been the case – that is that oil is the most popular source of energy – at one time it was coal. Edmonton sits on top of one- to three-metre thick seams of coal that played a crucial role in the city’s formative years. Before petroleum and natural gas fuelled growth and heated homes, coal was king.

The earliest known record of coal mining in the Edmonton region dates to the 1840s, when Hudson’s Bay Company employees began random excavations. John Walter imported the first coal stove into Edmonton. Hotelier Donald Ross began pulling coal from the slope above his Edmonton Hotel in 1881 and burned it in his stove to keep guests warm. The hotel, the settlement’s first, was situated on the river flats that came to bear his name just below today’s Chateau Lacombe.

Early European settlers used coal mined from the banks of the North Saskatchewan River to heat their dwellings, and before long many commercial and public buildings did, too. Around the turn of the 20th century, mining and processing coal was one of the community’s leading industries, providing employment for hundreds of workers – mostly men.

It wasn’t hard to find, either. Seams were visible along the North Saskatchewan River valley, particularly east of today’s Shaw Conference Centre along Grierson Hill, in the river cliffs just west of Scona Road, and in the big cliff east across the river from Rundle Park.

This post card was published by the Stedman Brothers, Ltd from Brantford, Ontario in Canada. They were a very large publisher of black & white and tinted halftone view-cards of central Canada and the Great Lakes region. The brothers (George, Samuel and Ted) opened their first store in Brantford, Ontario on January 1, 1905 and they quickly spread their business across Canada. At one time they even had more stores than any other chain in Canada.

One of their biggest selling products was picture post cards of “Canadiana”. Although most of the over 8,000 different post cards were photo based, the images went under heavy retouching. Many of the images revolve around railroads. Post cards were also published about local Indians and of a patriotic nature as the First World War neared. While most of their printed cards were made in Germany; they also produced bordered cards on bromide paper that were manufactured in England.

The company existed for only a few short years: 1905 to 1918, but one can find many, many cards published by them in the archives of many universities on line.

Foreshadowing the Future

There is no train on this post card; at least, I can’t see one. But it is a picture of a gigantic celebration of an event involving a train. This is the inauguration of the first train coming into Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. This was an event worthy of celebrating. Since 1891, Edmonton’s neighbouring city to the south, Strathcona, had had its own train station and the end of the train line. The Calgary & Edmonton Railway had been stopping in Strathcona, on the south side of the North Saskatchewan River for over 10 years.

It wasn’t until 1902 that a train actually entered into Edmonton. This train was owned by the Edmonton, Yukon & Pacific. It was simply a connecting railway between the C & E Railway and the city of Edmonton. The route went down what is now the Mill Creek Ravine's walking and bicycling path and went across the Low Level Bridge into Edmonton. My last blog had some information about the train and the Low Level Bridge.

Three years later, on November 24, 1905 the Canadian Northern Railway (CNoR) entered Edmonton from the east. That is what they are celebrating on the front of this post card. The entrance of the CNoR into Edmonton.

This post card is foreshadowing the future because the call letters they are using for the Canadian Northern Railway are CNR, of which the CNoR will eventually become a part.

The CNoR eventually owned a transcontinental line between Quebec City and Vancouver via Edmonton. It began as a consolidation of several branch lines around the Canadian Pacific Railroad (CPR) in Manitoba. Two men purchased the shares of all of these lines and established the CNoR in 1899. CNoR's first step toward competing directly with CPR came at the start of the 20th century with the decision to build a line linking the Prairie Provinces with Lake Superior at the harbour in Port Arthur-Fort William (what we know today as Thunder Bay, Ontario) which would permit the shipping of western grain to European markets as well as the transport of eastern Canadian goods to the West. The last spike of the CNoR transcontinental railway was driven January 23, 1915, at Basque, British Columbia.

Unfortunately, along with several other railway lines, the CNoR came upon hard financial times. At first it was absorbed into the Canadian Government Railways (1918) and then into the railway, which is today called the Canadian National Railway in 1923.

This post card was mailed on May 22, 1907 – that makes the card over 106 years old - about a year and half after the celebration depicted on the front of the post card. It was published by the Edmonton Music Company and, like many cards of this time, it was printed in Germany. The message on the back is from a brother to his sister:
“Dear Sister, I guess you will be surprised to hear of me being up here. Will write in a day or so and give you all the news. As ever, your Loving Bro.”

The Train as a Different Sort of Hero!

98 years ago the North Saskatchewan River rose to 12 meters above the banks of its normal level. It began in June of 1915 and peaked on June 29th. On this day the river’s flow increased to 4,640 cubic meters per second (average is about 250 cubic meters per second). This flood is considered by many to be the worst flood of the river in the 20th century. The flood of July, 1986 came in at second place. The flow of the river that year was at 3,990 cubic meters per second. I was attending the University of Notre Dame in Indiana and the flood made news all the over there. I can only imagine what happened in 1915.

The people living in the communities of Cloverdale, Riverdale, Rossdale and Walterdale all had their streets turned into flowing tributaries of the river and eventually into a flood plain.



The bridge that brought the first train into Edmonton, the Low Level Bridge, was being threatened by the strength of the river surge and by the weight of the debris (including houses) in the river. To help stabilize the bridge the Canadian Northern Railway parked a loaded coal train on top of the bridge.

This post card is a reprint of a picture that was taken during that flood. It is from the publisher: The City of Edmonton

Still Around Today

The title on the upper left part of this post card is “C. G. R. Express ‘Ocean Limited’ ” Its first run from Montreal, Quebec to Halifax, Nova Scotia (1345 kilometers) was on July 3, 1904. It is said to be the longest running train service in Canada. The C. G. R. stands for the Canadian Government Railways. This was the legal name used when the federal government owned several railways that the government rescued because they were getting too close to becoming bankrupt. It was a short lived name, taken over by the now familiar Canadian National Railway which was incorporated on June 3, 1919. The Canadian Government Railways only lasted from 1915 to 1919. This is a great way to be able to date the card to having been printed between 1915 and 1919.

The back of the card tells us that this was a product of Valentine and Sons. It was printed by the Canadian office for Valentine’s of Dundee, Scotland. They published souvenir books, greeting cards and view-cards of Canadian scenery in sets numbered with a three digit prefix and a three digit suffix. You can see these on the front of the card in bottom right hand quadrant. These tinted halftone and collotype cards were printed in Great Britain. Valentine sold their Canadian branch in 1923.

It was published by the Canadian Railway News Co. That is their logo in upper right hand corner, where the stamp goes. When I first read that it was the Canadian Railway News Co., I thought immediately of the American conglomerate. The American News Company (founded in 1864) owned several subsidiaries like the Union News Company, the Colorado News Company, the St. Louis News Company, and many others. I presumed that the Canadian Railway News Company was the American News Company’s intrusion into Canada. My research told me otherwise.

In 1883, the Phelan family of Toronto began the Canada Railway News Co. to sell newspapers, magazines and confectionary to the travelling public (very similar to the American News Company). This post card was one of the items they sold.

Those of us who live in Canada are familiar with several restaurants: Swiss Chalet, and Second Cup to name two of them. This entire chain of restaurants is owned by the same company: CARA. The name Cara was derived from the first two letters of each of the words "Canada Railway”. It was this company that published this post card.

In the 1930s, Cara began offering catering services to the airlines.
By 1951 it was serving about 1,500 meals a day.
In 1961 the company changed its name to Cara Operations Limited.
Cara was owned solely by the Phelan family from its inception in 1883 until it went public in 1968.
The Phelan family has since bought back CARA’s public stock (in 2004) and, once again, made it a private company. Today it is a food service giant with $1.1-billion in annual sales and the owner of such restaurant brands as Harvey's, Second Cup, Swiss Chalet, Kelsey's and Montana's — as well as the in-flight caterer to Air Canada.

In honour of my father in law

This blog post is a tribute to my father-in-law who died on May 13th of this year. While he was in his last week of life, I picked up his famous birch bark moose caller. I had never touched a moose caller before, let alone used one. I made a sound in it not very similar to the ones I had heard him make. I said to him, “That is a sick moose!” He responded, “I have been there, you know.” To which I replied, “I have a post card with the Sicamous hotel and a train on the front.” I was going to bring it to him, but his condition didn’t lend itself to a private viewing of the post card.

The top picture is the post card of the Sicamous Hotel in Sicamous, British Columbia (BC) to which I was referring. It served as both the local hotel (75 rooms and a large dance hall) and the local train station (Craigellachie, where the last spike on the transcontinental was driven is only 22km east). The first train station (according to the back of the bottom post card) was built in 1890 and burned down in 1900. A new one – the one on this post card – was built, modernized in 1908, and torn down in the 1960s.

If you ask me, that hotel looks pretty modern, so I would place the card as being printed and mailed after 1908. The stamp on the back carries the picture of King Edward VII. He was king of England from 1901 to 1910. This stamp was in use in Canada from 1903 to 1908. The cancellation marking shows August 5 but the year is not clear.

The top post card was printed in England by Valentine and Sons. The Canadian office for Valentine’s of Dundee, Scotland. They published souvenir books, greeting cards and view-cards of Canadian scenery in sets numbered with a three digit prefix and a three digit suffix. Valentine sold their Canadian branch in 1923.

The bottom post card is a black and white reprint of the top card. It was printed by Wayside Press in Vernon, BC for Pioneer Postcards in Kelowna, BC. Wayside Press still exists: It was begun in 1921 in Vernon, British Columbia and for over 90-years, Wayside has been a trusted business partner to some of the best known and most successful businesses in the area. Over the years They have morphed from an ink on paper commercial printer to an integrated print and e-Marketing solutions company and they owe their success and longevity to always exceeding the expectations of their customers and doing their best day in and day out to deliver the highest possible quality and service.