Oozing with historical significance – even down to the way the land is designated on maps – heritage sites on the banks of the Sturgeon River have been the focus of restorative efforts by the Arts and Heritage Foundation of St. Albert since 2009.
The land itself whispers of days gone by, before the days of electricity and televisions, when families huddled close by the stove on frigid winter nights to stay warm.
Heritage Park helps tell a tale of Métis family bonds through five generations, and also contributes in to telling the broader, rich history of St. Albert.
“A lot of people come to St. Albert and see a modern suburban city. It’s actually a very historic city and this is one of the areas where we can actually show people how St. Albert started,” said Ann Ramsden, executive director of the Arts and Heritage Foundation, while showing one of the properties’ restored houses.
The opening of Grain Elevator Park marked completion of the first phase of the heritage site, and the next phase to be publicly accessible next spring will contain a Métis farm, including the restored Cunningham House and Belcourt House.
Once the expanded park is open, it will have the same operating hours as Grain Elevator Park and will accept school groups for interpretive tours.
In 2021 the park will also feature a French-Canadian farm, which will include restoration to La Maison Chevigny.
River Lot 24
While travelling by plane across the prairies it is hard to miss the grid-like structure etched into the country.
That grid-like division is a product of the Dominion Land Survey after 1872, which sent surveyors out across Canada to slice the land into neat parcels of 160-acre quarter sections.
European settlers would flood to Canada in response to posters advertising “free land” – the quarter sections carved out by the land survey – in the prairies. The young country was aiming to fill the land with food producers as quickly as possible.
Before the land survey, some communities had already subdivided the land into river lots, a French system introduced in Quebec by settlers in 1627 and brought west by French missionaries. It was a common way of dividing land in Métis settlements.
River lots were long and narrow pieces of land that gave each family access to the water. This was significant because rivers were important for travel and communication. They also encouraged stronger communities, because homes were located in close proximity to each other.
When the land survey came through St. Albert in 1882, Métis people settled on river lots along the Sturgeon River were concerned about having their settlements broken up and being displaced.
After publishing a letter about the issue in the Edmonton Bulletin in 1882, Father Leduc travelled to Ottawa with a local farmer and pleaded on behalf of the local Metis for their ability to keep their river lots.
River Lot 24 – where Heritage Park currently sits – is one of the last remnants of a 400-year-old land division system, which Leduc managed to negotiate an exemption for after two days of meetings.
New foundations, old structures
For some that will walk the site and tour the aging houses, it will serve as a visceral reminder of their family past.
That is true of Mavis Olsen, who grew up in La Maison Chevigny.
Prior to being shipped down Highway 2 to River Lot 24 in 2008, La Maison Chevigny stood as a tall and proud example of French-Canadian heritage on the Chevigny farm, which today is where St. Albert Honda is located.
Today it remains one of the oldest standing settler structures in Canada, built in the 1880s.
Olsen, who is the great granddaughter of Louis Chevigny, has lots of memories of La Maison Chevigny. She lived in it until the age of 17.
Olsen said it was a big house, compared to what most of her friends lived in. There were seven bedrooms in the house, a necessary number for the large amount of people that filled it at any given time.
Sometimes multiple families would live in the house together, and at one-point Olsen said there were four babies all under 14 months being raised in it.
La Maison Chevigny contains a lot of historical significance for the family. The Chevigny brothers, Louis and David, built the wooden home in the French style after relocating from Quebec in 1880.
Prior to their move to the prairies, the Chevigny brothers had been ship builders, and they used techniques taken from their former trade to build La Maison Chevigny.
The home was populated by Chevigny family members until the 1960s, when Olsen’s father built a new house and converted the old one into a pig barn.
“Certainly, to our family it is very significant, because of course it was built by our great grandfather who came out here in the 1800s to help Albert Lacombe,” Olsen said. “That was very significant because he was one of the first people around St. Albert to build up the community.”
The house served as one of the last unofficial roadhouses on the way to Athabasca, and Olsen said she remembered travellers wandering to their doorstep asking for water or food.
She recalled one time as a little girl serving a traveller toast smeared with freshly canned raspberries when her parents were out. Her father chastised her upon his return for not serving the weary visitor something with more protein, such as eggs.
“There are a lot of stories that go with the house. A lot of people lived in that house.”
Olsen said her family was “very happy” the Arts and Heritage Foundation agreed to take the Chevigny House and refurbish it.
Stabilization of the Chevigny House was one aspect of the Heritage Park plan that had to be bumped up, because the house was starting to deteriorate as a result of prolonged sitting.
That work included stabilizing the exterior, bracing it and beginning some interior restoration to ensure the house was preserved. While park visitors will be able to admire the house from the outside when the park opens next spring, inside restoration will not be complete until 2021.
Restoration work on the other heritage homes within the park, making up the Métis Farm area, are further along.
Cunningham House and Belcourt House have been nearly fully restored inside and out, and the Foundation is currently in the process of completing furnishing them.
The Cunningham House is unique within the heritage sites, because it was actually built on River Lot 24. While Belcourt House was moved to the site, it was also lived in at River Lot 24.
The 172 acres originally comprising River Lot 24 was acquired by Louis Chastelaine in lieu of a $25 per year pension from the Hudson’s Bay Company after retiring in 1878. At the time, the property was valued at $1,000.
Chastelaine and his wife Genevieve only had one child, Sophie. She later married John Rowland, who was living on the neighbouring river lot.
For five generations, Chastelaine descendants would farm and live on River Lot 24, which was gradually diminished by a variety of social and economic factors over the course of more than a century. The arrival of the railroad, tax enforcement, family inheritance and expropriation would eventually cut the land into increasingly smaller divisions.
The first big split came when in 1928 Sophie legally divided the land amongs her children, Adolphus, Amelia and Louisa.
Cunningham House was built by Amelia and her husband, Alfred Cunningham, on Amelia’s portion of River Lot 24 as a winter home. The Cunninghams were an influential Métis family in the area who lived on and farmed River Lot 1. Alfred’s brother Henry was one of St. Albert’s first councillors.
By 1912 Alfred and Amelia were concerned about the schooling of their children. They were farming at River Lot 1, and it was a four kilometre walk to the nearest country school.
As a solution, the family decided to spend each winter on River Lot 24, which would be much closer to a brand-new school in St. Albert. Amelia gave birth to her daughter Rose in the house with the help of her mother Sophie, shortly after the family completed construction of the yellow Cunningham House.
Alfred was a freighter for the Hudson’s Bay Company and would be gone for weeks at a time. Louisa, Amelia’s sister, also lived on River Lot 24 with her children, and the two women would share child-rearing duties while their husbands were away working.
Pregnant women from the area would often come to River Lot 24 seeking assistance from Louisa, who was a community midwife. She had a small knife used for cutting umbilical cords that family members say was given to her by Bishop Grandin, and she would weigh children by hanging them on a hook scale by their clothing.
The Belcourt House sits on Louisa (Rowland) Belcourt’s seven-acre portion of River Lot 24 she inherited from her mother. It was moved there in 1956 by Louisa’s son Albert and his wife Exerine. Michael Hogan, St. Albert councillor at the time, originally built Belcourt House, at the present-day junction of Mission Avenue and St. Albert Trail.
Restoration on Belcourt House began in 2010 and has included pouring a new foundation for the house to sit solidly on. Currently the Foundation is continuing to search for vintage wallpaper that matches the original from the 1940s.
Future of Heritage Park
The heritage site has been in the works since 2009 and was kicked off with the opening of Grain Elevator Park in 2011, featuring two fully restored Alberta Wheat Pool Elevators from 1906 and 1929.
Kelly Jerrott, St. Albert's director of community services, said the plan is divided into three interpretive elements, the grain elevators, Métis and French-Canadian sites.
“Part of that overall plan is to develop that as a longer-term park area and destination area to help tell the story of the community and celebrate the story of the community and the heritage of St. Albert,” she said.
The original plan was split into five phases, which the city and the Foundation have gradually been working through in chunks.
However, Jerrott said the plan is currently being re-costed, and the Heritage Park Functional Plan is undergoing a “reset.”
“We’re essentially doing a little bit of a reset with the functional plan,” she said. “We were dealing with numbers from 2009 then estimating them based on best practices.”
Jerrott said the pace of work on Heritage Park has been slow, because the amount of work they are able to complete depends on how many dollars city council allots for the project during annual budget deliberations.
City council decided not to set money aside for Heritage Park last year, and Jerrott said not receiving that funding actually allowed completion of the Métis Farm site to take place.
“We are getting caught up, so we are able to kind of finish that, then we’ll be ready when we have the plan rephased to move forward,” Jerrott said.
St. Albert’s 10-year unfunded municipal growth capital plan has $1.2 million ear-marked in 2020 for the French-Canadian farm phase of Heritage Park.
In addition, the unfunded capital plan lays out plans to eventually expand the Musée Heritage Museum at Heritage Park.
One important piece of the Heritage Park puzzle has been missing for years, however, but city council has made movement this year to obtain it.
Long term plans for Heritage Park include River Lot 23, but a significant parcel of that lot is currently privately owned. Attempts by the city to buy the land have proved to be fruitless. Administrative reports from the time show negotiations with the landowner began in 2010, but the city’s offer was not accepted.
In July, city council directed administration to take necessary steps to expropriate the eight lots adjacent to Grain Elevator Park, which are within River Lot 23.
Jerrott said that piece of land is “really crucial” for future development of the park.
“One of the reasons we’ve been working on the park the way we have is we did not have that, and have had to work around it,” she said. “It will enable us to move forward with the next phase in the development, because that’s right in the middle of the site.”
Coun. Ken MacKay said Heritage Park is a “great vision” for St. Albert and he looks forward to its completion.
“That’s what makes St. Albert great, our history. I think having a park that represents our history and allows people to experience it, and to actually walk and see and touch and feel it is important.”
“To actually physically see our history is important.”
With files from St. Albert Arts and Heritage Foundation and “A contextual structural and material history of the Hogan and Cunningham Houses, St. Albert”
