Landscape – Great Idea! X-LArch III - Department für Raum ...
Landscape – Great Idea! X-LArch III - Department für Raum ...
Landscape – Great Idea! X-LArch III - Department für Raum ...
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32<br />
A Fertile Wilderness: The CPR’s<br />
Ready-Made Farms, 1909-1919<br />
Elsa Lam<br />
Columbia University, Graduate School of Architecture,<br />
Planning and Preservation, 2960 Broadway, New York,<br />
NY, 10027 USA (e-mail: ehl2106@columbia.edu)<br />
Abstract<br />
This paper examines the Canadian Pacific Railway’s<br />
ready-made farm program, a key component in the<br />
creation of a new landscape image for the Canadian<br />
Prairie West. From 1909 to 1919, the program built<br />
and sold full, turn-key farms to novice British settlers.<br />
These farms set into place standardized structures<br />
and land allocations, comprising barns, houses,<br />
sheds, fences, and even ploughed fields. Depicted<br />
as emblematic of the Prairie landscape, completed<br />
farms became part of CPR promotional imagery and<br />
literature for audiences of potential immigrants. This<br />
paper traces the active construction and promotion<br />
of a series of utopian rural communities, rooted in<br />
nineteenth-century landscape and agrarian ideals.<br />
Keywords<br />
Colonial settlements, transportation landscapes,<br />
historical landscapes, landscape meanings, landscape<br />
utopias<br />
Introduction<br />
Over the course of the nineteenth century, the received<br />
view of the Canadian Prairies <strong>–</strong> the grasslands of present-day<br />
Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba <strong>–</strong> underwent<br />
a dramatic shift. At the beginning of the century, the<br />
Prairies were viewed as a deserted, terrifying wasteland.<br />
By the end of the century, a romantic view of the Canadian<br />
West was popularized that saw the same landscapes<br />
as an untouched, ‘fertile wilderness’ for both agricultural<br />
production and social renewal. This paper explores one<br />
manifestation of this dramatic shift in the perception and<br />
development of a landscape - the ready-made farm colonies<br />
created by the nation’s first transcontinental railway.<br />
As described by explorers, surveyors, and fur-traders<br />
from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, Western<br />
Canada was a hostile wilderness <strong>–</strong> to the North, a furtrading<br />
hinterland, to the South, a barren and windswept<br />
waste. This tone shifted when Canada annexed the<br />
Hudson’s Bay territories in 1869. As both the federal government<br />
and railway sought to make the region a centre<br />
of growth in the 1880s, official geographical and scientific<br />
reports were adjusted to meet expectations for its agricultural<br />
potential [1]. <strong>Landscape</strong>s beyond the treeline, once<br />
viewed as a “sterile, dreary waste” would before the end<br />
of the century be described in leading scientific accounts<br />
as presenting a rich soil, which with “a mere scratching<br />
[would] supply a household with food” (Keating 1823:<br />
238; Macoun 1882: 263-4).<br />
The construction of a transcontinental railway became<br />
a key imperative and symbol for the settlement of the<br />
newly promising Prairie landscapes. Although driven<br />
by profits rather than patriotism, the Canadian Pacific<br />
Railway Company, contracted to the task, became a<br />
touchstone of nation-building <strong>–</strong> a notion encapsulated in<br />
the company’s 1919 motto: “Ask the Canadian Pacific<br />
about Canada.” This position was reinforced by the<br />
railway’s dissemination of images and information on the<br />
Northwest, a principal aim of which was securing bone<br />
fide settlers to generate rail traffic. Beyond sponsoring<br />
artists, commissioning photographers, and publishing a<br />
wide variety of marketing materials, the railway company<br />
actively developed landscapes across the Prairies to this<br />
end. The Development <strong>Department</strong>’s initiatives <strong>–</strong> which<br />
included building demonstration farms and constructing<br />
irrigation infrastructure - culminated in the ready-made<br />
farm colonies.<br />
The colonies were comprised of anywhere from 5 to<br />
122 pre-built farms, each equipped with a house, barn,<br />
implement shed, and fencing, as well as fifty acres of<br />
ready-ploughed and sowed land, to be paid off over ten<br />
to twenty years [2]. Although commercial colonization<br />
companies had earlier offered pre-built tenant farms, the<br />
CPR’s program surpassed its short-lived predecessors in<br />
ambition and scale. Rather than producing patchwork development<br />
on conventional agricultural land, it aimed to<br />
establish stable, high-density farming communities in the<br />
Alberta dry belt, initially aiming to establish thousands of<br />
hand-selected farmers on ready-made farms in irrigated<br />
lands (Mills 1991: 56).<br />
Reserved for British Settlers<br />
The first notable feature of the ready-made colonies was<br />
their intended audience: married British settlers, with a<br />
moderate amount of capital and, preferably, previous<br />
agricultural experience [3]. In 1909, the CPR launched<br />
its 24-farm Nightingale Colony with an aggressive<br />
advertising campaign in British newspapers. “In order to<br />
save the settler the inconvenience of having to build his<br />
house, fence, and prepare his land in his first year while<br />
he would rather be attending to his crops, the Canadian<br />
Pacific Railway has prepared a number of Ready-Made<br />
Farms,” proclaimed a 1910 ad in the Manchester Guardian,<br />
noting in bold type, “They are reserved for British<br />
Settlers” [Fig. 1]. This was consonant with a longstanding<br />
Eastern Canadian vision of the West as an extension of<br />
the Empire (cf. Owram 1980, Berger 1970) and com-