A city's roots are in its farms

When Norbert L'Hirondelle first came to Riverlot G on the shores of Big Lake in 1875 with his family, all he would have seen were trees.

"All this was all timber," says his grandson, Bill L'Hirondelle, 86, at his home on that same land 141 years later. The government had opened this whole area for homesteaders, and the L'Hirondelles had come here from Lac Ste. Anne drawn by the promise of free farmland.

His grandfather would have helped his family clear the many trees from this land in preparation for farming – work that was still ongoing when Bill came on the scene decades later.

"It was a lot of work," he says.

You had to chop down the trees that were wide as a barrel and dig up the thick roots. After that, you had to break the land with a disc or a plow and a team of horses, harrow it, seed it, and wait.

"If you got an early frost, your grain was no good," L'Hirondelle notes. Hail could also ruin your day – and these were the days before crop insurance.

The L'Hirondelles have a long history in the St. Albert region, having lived on their land just west of St. Albert for more than a century. L'Hirondelle's current home is just across the road from where his grandfather's was, and is surrounded by land that's still farmed to this day.

Seeds of settlement

Farms were an integral part of the settlement of the West and the creation of Canada.

While much of the farmland here in St. Albert has been paved over, you can still find historical interpreters re-enacting the techniques used by those early agriculturalists over at Fort Edmonton Park.

Fort Edmonton was one of the first major agricultural sites in the Edmonton region, explains park interpreter Brianna Nadin. First Nations tribes in the area were nomadic and didn't stick around in one spot to grow crops. Staff at the fort wanted to supplement their meat-heavy diets, so they created gardens where they could grow corn, potatoes and other root vegetables they could easily store over the winter.

Nadin says agriculture was a major goal of missionaries in places like St. Albert, as missionaries wanted to convert aboriginals to European ways.

"They really wanted them to settle down and farm."

Once Canada was established in 1867, the federal government wanted people to come out west to farm so they could secure the country's borders and produce food for the east, Nadin says.

Farming was a major reason why Father Albert Lacombe decided to move his mission to St. Albert, says The Black Robe's Vision. While Lac Ste. Anne had plenty of fish and wood, it was too woody and swampy to farm. The buffalo were also in decline, threatening a major food source. If Lacombe wanted to create a self-sufficient, permanent parish, he needed farms.

Having previously visited the area, Lacombe knew the Big Lake region had good soil, a mix of clear and forested land, and proximity to Fort Edmonton. It also had transportation links in the form of the Sturgeon and the Lac Ste. Anne Trail (much of which is where Meadowview Drive is today), and an existing Métis settlement, notes Joanne White, curator of the Musée Héritage Museum.

Lacombe arrived in St. Albert on April 8, 1861, bringing with him four assistants, some horses and oxen, a plow and a few other tools, reports The Black Robe's Vision. Working for 10 days, they felled trees and sawed wood to construct a chapel, and also cut about a thousand fence posts to enclose the mission's fields. Lacombe had crews plow day and night so they could get the first crop seeded on time. Supplemented by gardens, St. Albert's first farmers eventually feasted on onions, carrots, beets, potatoes, cabbages and turnips.

Drought and the short growing season made for many failed harvests in St. Albert's first decade, The Black Robe's Vision reports. Winter came too soon for wheat to mature, and the residents, often Métis settlers with wooden tools and little experience with farming, were poorly equipped to harvest crops.

This land is MY land

St. Albert nonetheless drew more settlers and farmers, each of whom wanted their own patch of turf.

No doubt influenced their francophone roots, Lacombe and Bishop Alexandre Taché decided to divide St. Albert up using the seigneurial or riverlot system from New France (what is now Quebec). Under it, each settler got a strip of land stretching back from the Sturgeon on which to live and farm. While some lots (such as L'Hirondelle's) were assigned letters, most of the ones in St. Albert proper got numbers.

The riverlot system had a number of advantages over the township system used to settle the rest of Canada, Nadin and White say. The township method divided land up into grid squares of 160-acre quarter sections. Hopeful settlers would plunk down their $10 and claim a square sight unseen, not knowing if it had any decent soil, trees or water on it.

With the riverlot method, any settler who got a lot knew they would have good soil (due to the enriching properties of rivers), water and transportation. The strips also put neighbours close together, enhancing safety and community.

Trouble started in the 1870s when, due to property disputes, St. Albert residents requested a formal land survey of this region, The Black Robe's Vision reports. Residents were furious when it appeared that the federal government would draw property lines based on the township system, which would have robbed many of their riverfront access.

Despite one call to take up arms in protest, St. Albert, Edmonton and Fort Saskatchewan residents chipped in $600 to send Father Hippolyte Leduc and farmer Daniel Maloney (after whom St. Albert's RCMP headquarters is named) to Ottawa to lobby the government. They were successful, and, after the official 1883 survey was complete, St. Albert became one of only three places in Canada to keep the riverlot system, reports the Gazette's Bev Rudolfsen in St. Albert: Our Story.

The modern farmer

Albertans farmed mostly to feed themselves prior to the 1900s, Nadin says. After that, the arrival of faster-growing crops, professional farming immigrants, and technologies such as tractors made commercial-scale farming possible.

L'Hirondelle says his father, Joe, was the first person to own a threshing machine in his neighbourhood, and would take it around to all the local farms for people to use. (The Black Robe's Vision suggests William Cust was one of the first to have one in St. Albert proper, as Cust had a thresher, a treadmill and many other farm mechanisms by 1881.) By the 1930s, his family was making regular use of Model T vehicles and steel-wheeled Fordson tractors alongside horse-drawn buggies and equipment.

Farmers in St. Albert gradually sold their lands for use as subdivisions over the following decades. Little now remains of the riverlot system, save for a portion of Riverlots 23 and 24 (Grain Elevator Park) and most of Riverlot 56 (now a natural area), White says.

But farming itself is still very active in the city. You'll see hay bales in undeveloped regions, vegetables in community gardens, and crops aplenty at the downtown farmers' market.

While he no longer farms himself, L'Hirondelle says his son raises buffalo just across the road on the north half of the riverlot, while Victoor Seed Farms raises crops on the rest.

"The only thing I do here as far as you call farming is cutting grass in my yard!" he says, with a laugh.