Landscape – Great Idea! X-LArch III - Department für Raum ...

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The irrigation farmer has greater community advantages.
[…] The settlement is confined to certain
definite areas, instead of scattered over the country.
Consequently, there are neighbors close at hand;
schools, churches, telephones, mail deliveries, and
all community organizations flourish as is not possible
under other conditions. (CPR 1921: 1-4)
Fig.1
Fig.2
bated a perceived cultural threat posed by an influx of
Slavic immigrants at the turn of the century. The targeting
of British settlers was reflected in aesthetics of the readymade
farms, which strove to realize a British ideal of rural
development.
The planned 80-acre farms were close to the average
63-acre British farm (Dewey 1989: 7-8), but half the
size of standard farms in the Canadian Northwest. The
American township pattern of 160 acre farms had been
generally adopted throughout the Canadian Northwest for
its familiarity and ease of marketing to ‘emigrant classes’
worldwide (Rueck 2004: 16); the proposal for significantly
denser development carried different justifications. From
the Company’s viewpoint, the ready-made farm colonies
were initially conceived as exemplars for the most profitable
settlement on irrigated lands. “I take the position
that the whole irrigation project is designed to secure
the highest possible amount of traffic. This involves the
densest possible settlement,” reasoned C.W. Peterson,
manager of the CPR-affiliated Canadian Pacific Irrigation
Colonization Company. “I like the improved farm program
and think it would be the means to that end. In this way
we can settle families on eighty acre tracts and make
sure that this land is not being bought merely for speculative
purposes” (Hedges 1939: 223). In public, the railway
company explained that 80 acres would suffice to sustain
an irrigated farm, with its propensity for higher-yielding
crops compared to non-irrigated lands.
Moreover, the denser development may have alleviated a
fear of isolated homesteading on vast prairie lands which
evoked the Burkean sublime [4], particularly for British
settlers either from urban environments or accustomed
to tighter rural development on parklands with varied topography.
As a 1921 CPR brochure on irrigation farming
explained,
On a practical level, building standardized houses and
barns in close proximity to each other led to economies
associated with mass construction – an important
consideration for the efficiency-oriented railway [5].
These practicalities, along with the community rhetoric
associated with grouped settlements, eventually took
precedence over the imperative to settle irrigation lands
per se. This was apparent when a shortage of contiguous
irrigated lands in 1910 led to the decision to situate the
Sedgewick colony on non-irrigated lands, rather than in
smaller, isolated groupings [6].
Special Farms on Virgin Soil
The image of social, civilized ready-made farm colonies
is also apparent in a 1912 promotional poster, depicting
an idyllic farm scene [Fig 2]. A well-dressed farmer and
his wife face each other in conversation by the house,
in mid-ground a young male is mounted on a horse, and
in the foreground, a young woman holds a pail, perhaps
to fetch milk; chickens peck by her feet. The corner of
a fenced-in garden can be seen in front, and the broad
expanse of a wheat field behind the house, whose
chimney is topped with a wisp of smoke, an essential
element for a scene in the picturesque tradition. The
group constitutes a working family unit, the ideal settlers
sought by CPR recruitment campaigns. The text points
to a broader network of social connections: the farm
is close to the railway, and to schools, markets, and
churches. At the same time, harking back to the land as
a ‘fertile wilderness,’ the unexploited potential of the land
itself is emphasized on the poster – these are not farms
on established agricultural land, but are rather ‘special
farms on virgin soil’ – the units that through hard work
and social cooperation were together comprising a new,
ideal settlement. As such, the depiction reinforces the
Dominion’s reputation as a new society, uniquely blending
British respectability and American egalitarianism
[7]. In contrast to self-made sod-houses or the plain,
box-like pre-fabricated houses otherwise available at
the time, the ready-made farmhouses offered a measure
of detail that mitigated the vast, unchanging uniformity
of the prairie landscapes. “They had found the greatest
possibly difficulty in persuading men living in the environment
of the beautiful ivy-covered cottage, surrounded
by neighbours among whom they had grown up, to pull
up the roots and to go out to a new country as pioneers,”
explained a January 17, 1913 London Times article on
the CPR’s work, idealizing the settlers’ origins as much
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