Even before the railway construction crews reached Calgary, it was already a busy trading post. However, once again, to avoid high land costs, the railway located its station more than a kilometre from the fort and its settlement. Despite the howls of protest from the business community, the CPR refused to relocate its station any closer and the unhappy merchants had little choice but to move to the station.
The railway further solidified its location by placing its warehouses at the new site, forcing other warehouse owners to follow suit. Then, in 1912, railway owners built the beautiful Palliser Hotel adjacent to the station and the shape of Calgary was forever fixed.
The CPR’s magnificent château-esque station dominated Vancouver’s growing downtown. The station lasted only eighteen years. Photo courtesy of CPR Archives, A-12537.
If the CPR’s station location had influenced the shape of Calgary, that influence was even more pronounced in Vancouver. Under its original charter the CPR was to terminate at Port Moody. Van Horne, then CPR general manager, found the harbour unnavigable and pushed the rails on to a tiny and dilapidated saw mill town named Coal Harbour where he received twenty-five hundred hectares of land from the province. Here, on long wooden piers rising awkwardly from the coastal mud flats, the CPR hastily erected an unimpressive and unadorned temporary wooden station.
The next year the CPR sent in surveyor L.A. Hamilton to lay out the usual town plan with its grid street pattern. Here, the CPR built a new station and added offices, freight facilities, and the first Hotel Vancouver. Until it was demolished in 1914, the grand chateau-esque station, which had replaced the original, visually dominated the main shopping street, Granville, as if to reaffirm that the railway was in control of the city’s destiny.
For two decades the CPR’s dominance of the West Coast remained unchallenged. Then, in 1905, a new rival, the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, proposed a brand new town for its own western terminus. On the fog-bound Pacific coast, seven hundred kilometres north of Vancouver, the British Columbia government granted the GTP ten thousand acres of land for a station and townsite. The Boston planning firm of Brett and Hall devised a model city of curving, tree-lined streets, which the railway christened “Prince Rupert.” To attract buyers the GTP widely announced that the new city would have no restrictions on the use of those lots.
In 1909 the lots went on sale. Frenzied selling and reselling pushed prices beyond $10,000 per lot. But despite the orgy of bidding, the new town remained largely empty. Most of the bidding had been by speculators, buyers who had never intended to even visit the place. When the port of Vancouver proved to be far superior for importing commercial goods, the expected freight traffic never materialized and speculators were left with worthless land.
While the CPR located and designed the townsites across the prairies, the job of selling them fell to a private consortium of British and Canadian investors known as the Canada North West Land Company. Nominally independent, the company was in effect an extension of the CPR’s land department and, in 1908, was formally taken over by the railway.
The CPR was not the only railway company in the land business. They all were. The hugely lucrative land sales were the fastest way the railways could recover their enormous construction expenditures and the most convincing argument they could place before their shareholders whenever it was time to again expand.
Unlike the CPR, William Mackenzie and Donald Mann, the precocious builders of the Canadian Northern Railways, assembled their land holdings not from the government but by purchasing existing railway charters — charters with land grants included. In less than ten years they could lay claim to more than 4.1 million acres of land, most of it prime prairie black soil. By 1906, the duo had created more than 132 villages through Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta.
The latecomer was the Grand Trunk Pacific. Although it was the darling of the Laurier Liberals, who built most of the line, it received no aid. But by building through virtually virgin territory, the GTP was able to assemble eighty-six townsites at bargain prices. Each town plan was identical. In 1909 one newspaper headline read, “Towns made to order.”
“We will put a town here,” said the engineer in charge, “there was no ceremony, no one to applaud … These towns-to-be would grow up straight and orderly according to a formula, the parks labelled, the marketplace determined. The main street always runs down to the railway station, 80 inches wide and no building costing less the [sic] $1000 can be erected upon it.”
Before the town was developed, the station presented a forlorn appearance on the bare prairies. As W.W. Withrow noted in his classic Our Own Country (1888), “In some places the station house is the only building in sight. At one such place a couple of tourists came out onto the platform as the train came to a stop. ‘Which side is the town on anyhow?’ said one to the other. ‘The same side as the timber of course,’ replied the other. The point of the joke is that not a solitary tree was to be seen on either side.”
By controlling the disposition of the land in the town, the railways could control its appearance. Anxious to show to the world the commercial boom that they brought to the prairies, the railways ensured that the lots most visible from the station, along the main street that led to the station and those that paralleled the track, were all sold for commercial uses. They even endeavoured to ensure that large hotels were located conveniently just across the road from the station.
As the prairie towns grew, wooden false-fronted stores lined the wide main street that unrolled from the rear door of the station’s waiting room. The design was far from accidental. By dominating the main street, the stations would remind the residents daily of the railway company’s pre-eminence. Conversely, an arriving passenger’s first view was of a commercially prosperous main street, a deliberate orchestration by the railway companies to reinforce their own importance in the development and economy of Canada’s towns and villages. The tactic certainly impressed W.W. Withrow: “The railway stations through the province of Manitoba gave evidence of life and energy. At many of them are 2, 3 or even 4 capacious steam elevators representing rural wheat purchasing companies and frequently a number of mills … stations succeed each other at intervals of 5 or 8 miles and many of them are surrounded by bright and busy towns.”
In eastern Canada, station planners had to contend with towns that already existed. Changes to the landscape, however, were often no less spectacular than they were upon the undeveloped prairies. Factories and warehouses appeared by the track while hotels, stores, and even flower gardens clustered behind the station. More than any other building, railway stations shaped the appearance and the destiny of eastern Canada’s small towns.
An aerial view of the town of Temagami shows how the village grew around the ONR station. Photo by author.
Until 1853, when the Great Western Railway constructed a new suspension bridge across the Niagara River, the village of Elgin consisted of only a handful of cabins. The instant access provided by the bridge brought 280 town lots onto the market, ranging in price from $150 to $300. In just three years Elgin had boomed into “an enterprising, brisk and lively town with upwards of 100 inhabitants, 14 or 15 grocery stores and 20 saloons and hotels.” In 1879, the original wooden station was replaced with “a large brick structure of Victorian gingerbread and ornamental woodwork [whose] massive wood parallel entrance doors made it the envy of the frontier.” That little “frontier” village today goes by the name of Niagara Falls, and the station still stands.
The preserved station and grain elevator in Unionville, Ontario, represent a typical station landscape. Photo by author.
Not far away, a similar story was unfolding.