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A Lime Kiln on the Slave River

A Lime Kiln on the Slave River

Jared

Written by: Patrick Carroll, Cultural Resource Management Advisor, Southwest NWT Field Unit, Parks Canada

About 50 km upriver on the Slave River from Fitzgerald, Alberta, among a small cluster of islands named Stony Islands, you will find the remains of a stone lime kiln. Archaeologist Marc Stevenson documented the kiln (IjOu-5) and a nearby quarry (IjOu-6) during a survey of the Slave River in 1980. He described the kiln as a, “large semicircular limestone feature 4m in height.” The quarry is an exposed face of limestone just upriver from the kiln. All that we know about the history of the kiln is based on notes from a conversation Stevenson had with a Brother Seaurault. According to Stevenson, “The feature, according to an elderly informant, is the limestone furnace used by residents of Fort Chipewyan in the 1910’s and 1920’s to make whitewash for their log homes in the latter settlement.” It appears, therefore, to have been here for at least a century and is now showing the degradations of time, seasonal flooding and ice scouring.

The kiln is built into a natural alcove in the limestone exposure, set on a rocky shelf at a height to protect it from the impacts of seasonal high water and ice scouring on the Slave River. It consists of a semi-circular convex stone wall extending from the bedrock which, together, create the chimney. The height of the wall extends to the height of the top of the bedrock. A stoke hole on the bottom of the wall faces toward the river. An interesting feature of this kiln is that one side of the wall of the kiln does not abut directly against the limestone outcrop. The collapsing wall on the down-river side appears to have been built mostly flush to the bedrock face. The wall on the up-river side, though, remains in its original condition showing it was built with a 30-60 cm gap between the edge of the stone wall and the bedrock face. It is not known what purpose this gap might have provided for the operation of the kiln, although, it is easily wide enough to allow for a person to enter the cavity of the chimney.

Source: Stoney Middleton Heritage Centre Community Group.
Source: National Stone Centre.
Source: Rhoda Allanic.
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Who and where was John Ware?

Who and where was John Ware?

Jared

Written by: Sam Judson and Lindsay Amundsen-Meyer, Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Calgary.

Alberta’s cowboy culture is embraced by many and celebrated through events and conventions like the Calgary Stampede, K-Days or Calgary’s ‘White Hat’ tradition. This culture is largely represented in the history books by white, European settlers, although Alberta’s past is much more multiethnic and multicultural than many realize.

John Ware was one of Alberta’s early Black setters. Ware’s name is recognizable today to many Albertans, who refer to him as Alberta’s first Black cowboy, and the longevity of his legend is fascinating. Despite this, few know his story and very little is known about the true nature of his life.

John Ware, rancher, with wife Mildred and children Robert and Nettie in southern Alberta, [ca. 1896], (CU1107289) by Unknown. Source: Glenbow Library and Archives Collection, Libraries and Cultural Resources Digital Collections, University of Calgary.
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Public archaeology in Nose Hill Park

Jared

Written by: Sam Judson and Lindsay Amundsen-Meyer, Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Calgary.

Calgary was incorporated as a Canadian city in 1884 and, since then, has grown to be a city of more than 1.5 million people. Although the City of Calgary is less than 150 years old, people have lived in this area, called this place home, and taken care of these lands for thousands of years. This long history is told through the numerous archaeological sites within and beyond Calgary’s city limits. Examples such as the Hawkwood site, Everblue Springs site and Mona Lisa Site demonstrate that this part of Alberta has been inhabited for approximately 8,000 years.

Nose Hill is a testament to Alberta’s long-standing Indigenous history. More than 40 recorded Precontact Indigenous archaeological sites are known within this City of Calgary park space, most first recorded by archaeologists in 1978 ahead of the creation of the park. The majority of these are camp sites made up of one or many stone circles, but kill sites and lithic scatters are also present. Not only was Nose Hill utilized frequently by Indigenous groups before contact, but it was also extensively used by citizens in the early days of Calgary’s existence as a settler municipality. Animals grazed on Nose Hill, northern areas of the hill were cultivated for crops, and a gravel pit was active on Nose Hill for several years. Despite these modern activities, Nose Hill Park remains one of the largest undisturbed grasslands in the Calgary area. As a result, the archaeological sites of Nose Hill are remarkably well preserved and tell a story of thousands of years of human occupation and connection with this prominent landform.

University of Calgary Staff and Students at Nose Hill Park, Calgary. Source: Lindsay Amundsen-Meyer.
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Bringing Buddhism to southern Alberta

Bringing Buddhism to southern Alberta

Jared

Editor’s note: This article was originally published on the RAM Blog, the official blog of the Royal Alberta Museum.

Written by: Chihiro Iwamoto, Administrative Assistant, Royal Alberta Museum

When Canada declared war on Japan in 1941, people of Japanese ancestry were met with intense discrimination. The Canadian government ordered the removal of Japanese Canadians from the West Coast of British Columbia in 1942, and within two months, approximately 22,000 Japanese Canadians, about three-quarters of whom were born in Canada, were forced to leave their homes and their properties were confiscated.

Most male Japanese Canadians were sent to labour camps to work on road construction, while their families were sent to internment camps in interior British Columbia. 

Around this time, Alberta’s sugar beet industry struggled to secure labour due to the heavy, harsh, labour-intensive nature of sugar beet cultivation. A group of 560 Japanese families agreed to move to Southern Alberta by 1943, where they signed a labour contract to work in the sugar beet fields because it allowed the families to stay together. One of the communities they were relocated to was the small town of Picture Butte, about 27 km north of Lethbridge.

Black and white portrait photographs of a woman and man, Nobuichi Takayasu and his wife Shizuyo
Nobuichi Takeyasu and his wife Shizuyo.
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Coal Mining History and Heritage Conservation at the Bellevue Mine

Jared

Written by: Fraser Shaw, Heritage Conservation Advisor and Allan Rowe, Historic Places Research Officer

The Crowsnest Pass is a landscape of remarkable history and exceptional natural beauty in southwest Alberta. Highway 3 winds through the mountain corridor past the former site of the West Canadian Collieries Mine, where an enormous tipple once straddled rail spurs on what is now the highway. The tipple and above-ground operations were dismantled after the mine’s closure in 1961 but the distinctive concrete portals remain and are clearly visible from the road. Now a historic site, the Crowsnest Pass Ecomuseum Trust Society owns and operates an interpretive facility and maintains a portion of the main tunnel where public tours and thousands of visitors experience an underground mine that historically extended for kilometres along the coal seams.

The Bellevue Mine in June 2024 retains its distinctive paired portals with the name and construction date cast into the concrete facade. The portals and tipple walkway, a remnant of which survives beside the portal today (arrows), both appear in a 1951 photograph in the Provincial Archives of Alberta looking south from the escarpment (above right). Above left, an image of West Canadian Collieries from the collection of the Crowsnest Archives looks north to Bellevue, with stairs ascending the steep slope from the tipple and portal complex (not visible) to the wash house on the ridge above. Source: Historic Resources Management Branch.

Designated as a Provincial Historic Resource in 2011, the former mine exemplifies the early mining history of the Crowsnest Pass and represents industrial practices and technologies at one of Alberta’s most significant underground mining operations in this important historic coal-producing region.

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Love and Marriage at the Provincial Archives of Alberta

Love and Marriage at the Provincial Archives of Alberta

Jared

Editor’s note: The banner image above is from the wedding of Sandy and Diane Weir, November 1974. Photo courtesy of the Provincial Archives of Alberta.

Written by: Heather Northcott, Government Records Archivist, Provincial Archives of Alberta

Showcasing a variety of archival records and images, the Provincial Archives of Alberta (PAA) is pleased to present its latest exhibit “Love and Marriage.”

The exhibit was inspired by the often joyful and sometimes sad stories that fill the archival vaults waiting for discovery. Visitors to the exhibit will first encounter images and letters about love blossoming before exploring narratives of engagement and marriage. The arc of romance and marriage leads naturally to anniversaries, divorce and death. The exhibit would not be complete without addressing who is missing – the groups or communities not well represented by the archival documents – and putting a call out for records donations.

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How fossils form

How fossils form

Jared

Written by: Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology staff

There are more than two million fossils in the Royal Tyrrell Museum’s Collections—and that number is growing. Every year, staff excavate and collect new fossils that are found through fieldwork, public finds and industry reports.

Although the Collection includes amazing fossils spanning roughly 3.5 billion years of Earth’s history, fossils are incredibly rare. Only a small fraction of the ancient organisms that ever lived become fossilized. Of those, only a small portion are discovered and collected.

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Art-chaeology: visualizing the past through illustration

Art-chaeology: visualizing the past through illustration

Jared

Written by: Jared Majeski, Historic Resources Management Branch

Look hard enough, and you can find artistic expression in many different occupations. The stone mason cutting and preparing a stone feature; a researcher distilling their raw data into a visually appealing infographic; or in the case of archaeologist Amanda J.M. Dow (B.A. Archaeology, University of Calgary), using pencils to represent archaeological research through illustrations. Whether you categorize it as art or archaeology, Dow’s illustrations help to put faces to names and context to places.

The following interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. All images and illustrations below are courtesy of Amanda Dow.

Where do science and art meet and is there ever an uncomfortable junction?

Dow: There is always a strange dance between art and science.  It can be awkward and challenging but for the dance to work, there has to be a reciprocal understanding from both disciplines. I like to use the word “illustration” to help lend my artwork scientific credibility. I use the results of archaeology and research to make the art academic. But in the end, the illustration is just one person’s interpretation of an event.  What lends it credence is what informs the interpretation.  And if that information is scientific, then that weird dance can work.



Archaeologists tend to communicate in dry and what feels like uninteresting ways because that’s what they’re trained to do. What do you think of traditional archaeological reports, articles and books? Does this make you try to depict the past in more interesting ways?

Dow: There are different ways results of archaeological study are communicated.  In Alberta, the vast majority of archaeological study are presented as technical reports. That’s my day job, as a consulting archaeologist and I contribute to this type of “grey” literature presenting data without excessive interpretation. Technical reports are defined by budget, schedule and scope. It’s always a challenge to present data within those limitations without being too boring.

The opportunity to share more interpretation and provide people with more elaboration comes from other forms of communication.  This is where archaeologists have an opportunity to collect from the technical literature all the glamorous bits and create an interpretation the science supports.  This is where articles and books, presentations and alternative media are serving a greater public role.  And this is where I try to make artistic contributions.

What’s the most satisfying part of your job as an illustrator?

Being able to share a concept that makes someone pause for a moment to appreciate the genius of our ancestors.  I like taking an archaeological or historical record and putting a face on it. I like tweaking imaginations.

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Making sense of the Victoria Settlement census

Making sense of the Victoria Settlement census

Jared

Editor’s note: The banner image above is of the school children of Pakan in 1910, the year before the 1911 census. Image donated by Rev. Metro Ponich.

Written by: Sarah Mann, Master’s student in Anthropology, University of Alberta

The Canadian census is something most Canadian adults have experienced. While the survey is often looked as tedious, it can hold a myriad of information and questions. My work around Victoria Settlement Provincial Historic Site was done as part of a Community Service Learning (CSL) internship with the Heritage Division of the Government of Alberta. This work involved looking at what information and further research plans can be drawn from the Victoria Settlement censuses using supplemental materials from community history books from around Alberta. From the census data, I created two spreadsheets tracing the changes and differences in the various censuses done in Victoria Settlement. Comparisons of the 1881, 1891 and 1901 censuses show several inconsistencies and allow us to ask many questions about life in the area.

Victoria Settlement, northeast of Edmonton along the North Saskatchewan River, was settled in 1862 when George McDougall founded the Methodist mission on the site of a traditional Indigenous camping ground. Then in 1887, the area became known as Pakan after the name of the local post office, which in turn was named for Cree Chief Pakan (James Seenum). The settlement was abandoned in 1922 when the railroad bypassed the community, instead being built through the town of Smoky Lake, approximately 15 km to the north. The eras examined in the censuses are the periods of 1881-1911, as there is a national census every 10 years. In between the years of 1891 and 1901 a large Ukrainian population settled in the area, but my study focused on the Métis elements of the community.

1891 census. Source: Library and Archives Canada.
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Nominations open for 2024 Heritage Awards

Nominations open for 2024 Heritage Awards

Jared

Previous recipients from the Heritage Awards are a testament to the varied range of individuals and groups who work to preserve and celebrate our province’s heritage. Alberta’s history is unique and diverse; the Heritage Awards are just one way to recognize and commend those who write about, research, advocate and celebrate Alberta history.

The Heritage Awards, presented by the Alberta government, help to honour the work of Alberta citizens, groups and communities helping to share protect, preserve and promote our province’s history. The awards recognize individuals, non-profit organizations, corporations, municipalities, First Nations and Métis settlements.

This year, the awards are broken down into three categories: Heritage Conservation, Heritage Awareness and Outstanding Achievement. Learn more about these categories and the nomination process.

Recipients will be recognized at an awards ceremony in September. Further details will come out during the next few months.

To nominate an individual or group, fill out a nomination form and drop off, mail, courier or email your nomination package to:

Heritage Awards Program
Old St. Stephen’s College Building
8820 112 Street
Edmonton, Alberta  T6G 2P8
Email: acsw.heritageawards@gov.ab.ca