Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada Genealogy

Lethbridge
Lethbridge is the largest city in southern Alberta, Canada. It is also the fourth-largest city in Alberta by population (after Calgary, Edmonton and Red Deer), and the third-largest city by area (after Calgary and Edmonton). Alberta's southernmost city, Lethbridge lies 205 km southeast of Calgary and 90 km north of the United States border. It is roughly mid-way between the borders with Saskatchewan on the east and British Columbia on the west.

Lethbridge straddles the Old Man River, and its most magnificent characteristic is its coulees — a network of large rolling hills that were formed by glacial spill water over ten thousand years ago. Crossing the coulees and river is the world's largest High Level Bridge. This landmark is the longest and highest bridges of its type in the world, spanning 1.6 km (1 mi) and reaching a height of 97 metres (320 ft) - that is higher than a football field. Built between 1906 and 1908, the bridge cost $1.3 million.

Lethbridge is the commercial, financial, transportation and industrial centre of southern Alberta. The city's economy developed from drift mining for coal in the late 19th century and agriculture in the early 20th century. Half of the workforce is employed in the health, education, retail and hospitality sectors, and the top five employers are government-based.

Cultural and recreational venues in the city include performing art theatres, a symphony orchestra, museums, sports centres, a Japanese Garden, and Henderson Lake Park.

Virtual Field Trip of Lethbridge                                   Lethbridge Picture Gallery

Agriculture
Agriculture is the third pillar upon which Lethbridge was built. It evolved as the result of assistance provided to the Galts by the Canadian government for construction of the narrow gauge railway. The assistance took the form of land grants totaling 1.5 million acres south of Lethbridge. The land was to be sold by the Galts to pay for their railway.

The land given to the Galts is semi-arid, and the challenge was to make it attractive to settlers. Irrigation was the obvious answer. Elliott Galt and his brother-in-law Charles A. Magrath organized the Canadian North West Irrigation Company (CNWICo.) to carry forward their plan of irrigating the lands of southern Alberta. Magrath and Galt also turned to the leading experts on irrigation in North America – the Mormon farmers of Utah.

Mormon leader Charles Ora Card first came to southern Alberta in 1886, and in 1887 purchased land from the NWC&amp;NCo. near the St. Mary and Waterton Rivers. Settlers from Utah followed. Elliott Galt and the Mormon Church concluded an agreement in 1898 that saw church members build the main canal from the St. Mary’s River to Lethbridge, with branches to Stirling and Magrath. In return for these 95 miles of canals, the CNWICo. paid the workers half in land scrip and half in cash. Charles Ora Card ploughed the first furrow for the project on 26 August 1898, and on 4 September 1900 the main canal reached Lethbridge.

There have been five milestones in the development of irrigation in southern Alberta. First, many small projects involving no more than a few acres each were built in the years 1877 to 1895. Next came the large company projects engineered by the Galt companies, CPR and others during the period 1898 to 1915. Third, user owned and operated irrigation schemes such as the Taber and Lethbridge Northern Irrigation Districts came into existence after passage of the Irrigation Districts Act in 1915. The end of World War 2 in 1945 brought more large projects such as the St. Mary River Development project. The final milestone was the development of pivot irrigation systems that allowed irrigation of rougher land than could be irrigated before.

The history of dryland agriculture has been the struggle to find methods to combat southern Alberta’s semi-arid climate and incessant winds. Four principles have evolved: break the velocity of the wind by farming in strips; keep the soil covered by dead or living vegetation; keep bare soil lumpy or ridged; and, stop active erosion by whatever emergency means are available. The Agriculture Canada Research Station at Lethbridge had much to do with the development of these principles. The Station is the largest regional agriculture research facility in Canada.

Agriculture has become the mainstay of the regional economy. In 1996 there were 11,216 farms in southern Alberta with a capital value of 11.3 billion dollars. Over 130 businesses processed food or feed for markets here and around the world.

Attractions
Nikka Yuko Japanese Garden

Designed in the early 1960s by renowned Japanese landscape artist Dr. Tadashi Kubo, the garden stands as a monument to the Japanese Canadians who endured the government enforced relocation of British Columbia’s Japanese Canadians in 1942 from the west coast to the Lethbridge area, where they were made to work as farm labourers. The 4 acre garden opened on July 3, 1966, with the grand opening held on July 14, 1967. In attendance were Prince and Princess Takamatsu, the brother and sister-in-law of Japan’s Emperor Hirohito. A meandering path joins five traditional Japanese Garden styles, combining trees, shrubs, rocks, waterfalls, ponds and bridges to create vistas of unparalleled beauty. The sound of a thrumming waterfall invites the visitor deep into the Garden. The Pavilion, patterned after 16th century architecture, houses a number of art and cultural exhibits throughout the season. Tours of the Garden are available, lead by hostesses dressed in traditional yukatas. Standing as a symbol for amends now made, the garden's name means Japanese and Canadian friendship.

Cemeteries
Lethbridge Cemeteries

Church Records, Historical
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1912-1948

Knox Presbyterian Church, 1886-1908

Knox United Church of Canada, 1928-1941

Saint Patrick Roman Catholic Church, 1874-1911

Southminster United Church of Canada, 1938-1952

Wesley Methodist Church, 1896-1919

Wesley United Church of Canada, 1928-1941

These are all available on film through the Family History Library

Climate
Lethbridge is known as a windy city — in fact it is the second most windy city in Canada. It is dry and sunny, and receives the second most sun of any city in Canada.

Lethbridge enjoys an unique phenomenon known as the Chinook winds. Characterized by a highly visible "Chinook Arch" in the western sky, warm Pacific winds flow over the Canadian Rocky Mountains onto the Alberta prairies. These winds can raise the temperature from freezing to melting in a matter of hours, providing welcome relief from the rigors of the Canadian winter.

Coal
Coal outcrops were so frequent in the vicinity of what is now Lethbridge that the Blackfoot gave the region the name “Sik-okotoks”, or Place of Black Rocks. By the late 1860s the traders were also aware of the abundance of coal here. American adventurer and entrepreneur Nicholas Sheran began to mine a coal seam on the west side of the Belly (Oldman) River, about 460 meters north of the present Whoop-Up Drive. Sheran sold his coal to traders from Fort Benton, Montana and to the newly arrived NWMP.

In 1879 Elliott Torrance Galt visited Nicholas Sheran at his mine. Galt lost no time in advising his father, Sir Alexander Tilloch Galt, of the potential of a mining operation. The elder Galt was interested in the idea because he knew that a trans-continental railway was to be built on a route across the southern prairies. The railway and the settlers it would bring would make a profitable market for coal. Sir Alexander Galt hired William Stafford and Captain Nicholas Bryant to examine five possible sites for a large coal mining operation. The site they all chose was across the river from Sheran’s mine. On 13 October 1882 Stafford and a group of Nova Scotia miners opened the first drift mine of the North Western Coal &amp; Navigation Company. Sir Alexander Galt created the company with the participation of English investors. The NWC &amp; NCo. was capitalized at $250,000 and the biggest shareholder, publisher William Lethbridge, became its first president. Once coal was being mined, the next problem was transporting it to the Canadian Pacific Railway main line at Dunmore Junction, east of Medicine Hat. The railway wanted 3,000 tons per month from the NWC&amp;NCo. In 1883-1884 riverboats were tried as a means of hauling coal to market. The boats – Alberta, Baroness and Minnow – were plagued by low water and strong currents to the point that they were discarded in favour of construction of a narrow gauge railway. Sir Alexander Galt received government help to build the narrow gauge line from Lethbridge to Dunmore Junction, and it was officially opened by the Governor General on 24 September 1885.

Coal was lifted up to the narrow gauge railway from the drift mines by means of an inclined railway. However, shaft mines were soon started at prairie level. By 1900 about 150 men were employed and they mined about 300 tons of coal daily. Coal production peaked during World War 1, when 2,000 miners in 10 large mines extracted 1,000,000 tons of coal a year. The coal industry gradually declined after 1919 with the development of oil and natural gas resources. The last mine at Lethbridge, Galt No. 8, closed in 1957 and the entire industry collapsed when the mine at Shaugnessy closed in 1965.

The end of mining doesn’t mean that there isn’t any coal left in southern Alberta. All the mines in the region extracted only a fraction of the available coal. The seam still lies about 300 feet deep over an area of about 400 square miles. Estimates are that about 800 million tons of coal is still there to be mined.

Educational Institutions
University of Lethbridge

Lethbridge Community College

Reeves College, Lethbridge Campus

First Nations
The Lethbridge region formed part of the homeland of the Blackfoot Confederacy, who resisted European penetration of their territory until the 1860s. The Blackfoot Confederacy comprised three nations: “Sik-si-kah” or Blackfoot, “Kai’nah” or Many Chiefs and now call the Bloods, and “Pi-ku’ni” or Scabby Robes and now called the Piegans. Collectively, they were known a “Sow-ki’tapi” or Prairie People. European fur traders along the North Saskatchewan River first came into contact with the Blackfoot, and applied their name to the entire Confederacy.

In 1869 the American Army outlawed trade in alcohol with Native people in Montana. American traders looked to Canada for new opportunities. John J. Healy and Alfred B. Hamilton took advantage of the newly created North West Territories, and in December 1869 finished Fort Hamilton near the junction of the St. Mary and Belly (now Oldman) Rivers. Native people burned the fort, but Hamilton and Healy rebuilt it and renamed it Fort Whoop-Up. The fort was one of a series of posts established on the southern prairies. The chief trade article of these posts was ‘whiskey’, usually made of pure alcohol adulterated with ingredients such as river water, chewing tobacco and lye. The whiskey trade did great harm to Native people and their culture, which flourished for 10,000 years before the arrival of the whiskey traders.

The excesses of the whiskey trade peaked with the 1873 massacre of Assiniboine Indians by Americans in the Cypress Hills. The Canadian government resolved to stop the trade. Prime Minister Sir John A, Macdonald formed the North West Mounted Police in 1874, and sent them west to establish order. The NWMP arrived at Fort Whoop-Up on 9 October 1874, and soon after ended the whiskey trade.

In September 1877 the Blackfoot Confederacy signed Treaty No. 7. Fifty thousand square miles of Blackfoot territory passed to the Dominion of Canada. In 1883 the Blood people chose the region between the St. Mary and Belly Rivers as their reserve.

Genealogy Sources
Alberta Family Histories Society

Alberta Genealogical Society

Lethbridge &amp; District Branch AGS

Alberta GenWeb

Galt Museum &amp; Archives

Lethbridge FamilySearch Center 1912 - 10th Avenue S. (south door basement) 403-328-0206

General History
Lethbridge had its beginnings with the notorious whiskey trade followed by the development of a coal mining industry. Fort Whoop-Up which was located along the Oldman River was a whiskey trading outpost operating from 1869 to 1874 when the North-West Mounted Police arrived on the scene. Indian Battle Park is the site of the last battle between the Cree and Blackfoot tribes.

With the growth of coal mining in the city, the population of Lethbridge continued to grow. As the city grew and developed, businesses sprang up throughout what is now downtown Lethbridge. Saloons, hotels, general stores were the beginnings of many buildings, still standing in downtown Lethbridge. Fire Hall No.1, the Post Office, Chinatown, the Galt Hospital (now the museum) and the train station are all architectural reminders of our past. The city has expanded with the development of the agricultural service sector from a small coal mining town to a growing city of almost 85,000 residents.

Fort Whoop-Up National Historic Site

Sir Alexander Galt Museum &amp; Archives

Library
Lethbridge Public Library 810 - 5 Avenue S. Lethbridge AB T1J 4C4 403-380-7311

Military History
Lethbridge made important contributions in both World Wars, and the Korean Conflict. About 2,600 men signed up for military service in World War 1; 261 died. The city had the highest percentage enlistment of any community in Canada.

World War 2 saw 1,750 enlist in the armed forces. 122 never returned. The city’s airport, Kenyon Field, was transformed into stations of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan: No 5 Elementary Flying Training School (1940-1941) and No. 8 Bombing &amp; Gunnery School (1941-1944).

German prisoners of war were interned at Camp 133 in north Lethbridge from 1942 to 1946. The 12,500 POWs nearly equaled the population of the city at the time.

Municipal History
When the community was founded in October 1882, it was called “The Coal Banks” or “Coalbanks” after the original Blackfoot name. The Post Office assigned the name Coalhurst, however, the settlement’s residents who were already calling the place Lethbridge after NWC&amp;NCo. President William Lethbridge. The Post Office resisted, as there was already a town in Ontario called Lethbridge. In the end, the citizens prevailed and the community was officially renamed Lethbridge on 15 October 1885.

In 1890 the NWT legislature passed Ordinance No. 24 that provided for the incorporation of Lethbridge as a town. Lieutenant Governor Joseph Royal signed the proclamation on 15 January 1891. The town’s first Mayor, by acclamation, was Charles Alexander Magrath.

City status for Lethbridge came with an Act of the Legislature of Alberta on 9 May 1906. Mayor George Rogers presided over the first meeting of Lethbridge City Council on 26 May 1906.

Newspapers
The Lethbridge Herald

Recreation
Henderson Park — The Heart of Recreation in Lethbridge

Henderson Park is a 47 hectare (117 acre) blend of relaxed leisure and active recreation opportunities concentrated around a 24 hectare (60 acre) man-made lake. Walking trails border Henderson Lake, along with playgrounds, rest areas and picnic sites. Henderson Park has been a focus of civic pride for more than 85 years. Originally developed for the 7th International Dry-Farming Congress in 1912, it continues to be an attraction for special event celebrations. William Henderson, the Mayor of Lethbridge during the early preparations for the Farming Congress, was instrumental in initiating the concept of Henderson Lake and a surrounding park.