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.