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The County Seat and How It Got There
Barrhead became the county seat because of a bridge — a particular bridge over the Pembina River that placed the railway where the railway went, and the railway where it went placed Barrhead where it is: the commercial and administrative centre of a county that stretches north and west of Edmonton through some of the most productive mixed farmland in Alberta.
The town itself began in 1906, when the Klondike Trail brought the first serious wave of settlers through the district. James McGuire, one of the first to arrive, named the post office after his hometown in Barrhead, Scotland, and the name stuck. In those early years the community was modest: a trading post or two, a sawmill on the north bank of the Pembina, scattered homesteads spreading out from the trail as the surveys moved ahead of the settlers and the settlers moved ahead of the surveys. Highway 33, which follows the old Klondike Trail today and is known locally as the Grizzly Trail, was the artery through which the first generation of Barrhead people travelled — Klondikers heading north for gold, settlers heading north for land, supply wagons going both ways.
The real change came in 1927, when the Pembina Valley Railway arrived. The decision to route the line through Barrhead rather than through Manola, the rival townsite to the southeast, settled the competition that had been quietly ongoing since both communities began. The railway brought a post office of real consequence, a proper main street, a grain elevator, a hospital, and eventually the municipal status — incorporated as a village in November 1927 — that made Barrhead the acknowledged centre of the district. Manola, which had hoped the railway might confirm its own ambitions, found itself on a secondary branch instead.
Barrhead Today
The County of Barrhead has a population of around 6,000 in the broader municipal district, with the town itself accounting for roughly 5,000 of those. The grain elevators have mostly come down and been replaced by modern concrete facilities. The Grizzly Trail still runs through town on its way north. The Barrhead and District Museum houses, among other things, the third largest collection of African artifacts in Canada — a legacy of a missionary family whose work brought unexpected things to an unlikely place, which is perhaps the most Alberta thing possible about Barrhead. The Great Blue Heron, often seen along the shores of the local lakes, is the town's official mascot, and miniature herons adorn the street poles on the main street like an avian honour guard.
The bridge across the Pembina is still there. It has been rebuilt more than once, improved and widened and made suitable for the larger equipment that modern farming requires. It still does what bridges do: it connects the two sides of something, and it decides, simply by existing where it exists, which community gets to call itself the centre.
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