“Village of Meyronne and Hanna farm, ca.
1927"
I grew up
on the farm that my grandparents, Abe and Addie Hanna, homesteaded in 1909 and
in the farm house that they built in stages between 1917 and 1926. The village
of Meyronne, Saskatchewan, only a quarter-mile south of the farmhouse, was
carved out of the southwest corner of the farm when the Canadian Pacific
Railway (CPR) came through in 1913.
Where is
Meyronne? you ask.
The village
– what is left of it – is situated on Highway 13 in southwestern Saskatchewan.
The highway is officially known as the Redcoat Trail but it might be more
correctly called the Ghost Town Trail. Drive along it and you are hard pressed
to see many of the towns that used to exist. Now that almost every grain
elevator is gone, what is left seems to disappear into the landscape. A few
houses and trees. Possibly a church. Maybe an abandoned school or garage. Maybe
a falling-in rink. Perhaps a gas station alongside the highway. Nothing more.
A hundred
years ago, it was very different. Thanks to the Canadian government’s
propaganda, everyone wanted a piece of Saskatchewan where all you had to do was
throw the seed on the ground and sit back and wait for the bumper crop to put
itself into the bins. Or so the brochures implied. The reality was somewhat
different as the homesteaders soon discovered.
The place
was booming. Farmsteads consisting of a house, barn, and granaries existed on
almost every quarter-section. Towns were strung along the rail line like beads
on a necklace, six to seven miles apart. Each town had elevators, churches,
schools, town halls, hotels, banks and businesses, and upwards of 100 to 300
inhabitants, plus the surrounding farm population.
So many
people settled in Saskatchewan in the early years of the 20th
century that some optimistic soul predicted the province’s population would
soon reach 20 million!
Boy, was he
wrong!
Today, Saskatchewan's
population hovers just above 1 million. Most people live in cities. The
surviving towns and villages are mere shadows of what they once were. They were
emptied out as younger generations moved into cities where better education and
job opportunities awaited.
I was one
of those who left.
Meyronne
has pretty much dried up and blown away. Only a few families still live there.
Almost all lots are vacant.
“Meyronne Main Street, 1913"
It wasn’t
always thus. At its height, in the late 1920s, about 350 people lived there.
The village boasted three grocery stores, two hardware stores, a butcher shop,
a druggist, three cafes (run by Chinese), a laundry (also run by Chinese), a
shoe repair shop, a boarding house, two livery stables, three lumber yards, a
post office, a pool hall, the Bank of Toronto, a blacksmith shop, three garages
that sold either Chevrolet or Ford cars or Massey Harris farm equipment, a
three-storey hotel complete with café and beer parlour, a lawyer, a doctor, the
Royal North West Mount Police barracks, the CPR station, a confectionary (ice
cream, anyone?), Knox Presbyterian (later United) Church, Our Lady of Lourdes
Catholic Church, the public school, the separate (Catholic) school, the
Memorial Rink with both skating ice and two curling sheets, a post office, a
telephone office, five grain elevators, and a nursing home/hospital. To the east was the sports ground, the
cenotaph, and the cemeteries – one for the Presbyterians and one for the
Catholics, well-separated by a fence.
Village and
district gossip, as well as news from elsewhere, was disseminated via The Meyronne Independent, run by R.
“Bobby” Johnson.
CPR Station, Meyronne, ca. 1920”
It was the
junction of two CPR lines – one from Moose Jaw to Shaunavon, the other from
Swift Current to Meyronne. The station master was busy with shipping and
receiving freight, sending and receiving telegrams, and selling passenger
tickets. The CPR section manager lived there; he monitored the rail lines and
ensured the water tower and coal shed were full for the steam engines that
passed through twice daily. Highway 13 ran through the centre of town.
It was a
happening place.
Then came
1929. A combination of the depression and drought – the “Dirty Thirties” –
hit southwestern Saskatchewan
particularly hard. It was essentially the end of Meyronne and many other
villages in the area. The decline was slow but steady. By the 1950s, when I was
growing up, the village was only a shadow of what it had been. It declined even
more after Highway 13 was re-routed a half-mile north and when the CPR stopped,
first, passenger service and eventually freight service. Today, only a few
houses, the Catholic church and the cemetery remain.
