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Why Is It There?
Lunnford exists because of a particular quality of light and land — the kind of thing a man riding horseback through new country in the early years of the last century might have noticed on a late-summer afternoon and filed quietly in the back of his mind. The land northwest of Edmonton in the County of Barrhead rolls and dips through a country of poplar bluffs, spruce stands, and hay meadows cut through by the bends of the Pembina River. It was good land. Mixed land. Land that could carry cattle and grain both, if you worked it right. When the government surveyors came through in 1906 and 1907 and began staking out quarters, men who had done the arithmetic — 160 acres, ten dollars, three years of your life and thirty acres under cultivation — began appearing out of the bush with their wagons and their families and their intentions.
Lunnford settled as one of those quiet local anchor points that the rural prairie always needed: a place with a post office, a school district name, a spot on the map where scattered homesteaders within riding distance could find themselves belonging to something named. It sits in the southern reaches of the County of Barrhead, in country that the early settlers called good enough for both crops and timber, which in the parlance of 1906 Alberta was high praise indeed. The Pembina River valley just to the north gave the region its defining geography — a river that was navigable enough to be useful, wild enough to be impassable in flood, and constant enough that a community built near its bends had reason to stay put.
Arriving at Edmonton by Train, 1905–06
If you had come to this country the way so many of them did — by rail, from a life somewhere else, with a family and a bedroll and a government pamphlet describing the “Last Best West” — the first thing Edmonton would have given you was noise and mud and the sense of being very far from the world you knew. The Canadian Northern Railway had arrived in 1905, the same year Alberta became a province, and the city of perhaps eight thousand souls that crouched on the North Saskatchewan bluffs had the electric, unstable atmosphere of a place growing faster than it could organize itself. Men from Britain and Ukraine and the American Midwest crowded the streets of the downtown and the corridors of the Dominion Lands office, waiting their turn to file on a quarter, waiting to be told where on the map their new life had been assigned.
The process of choosing land was more art than science. A man could file blind on a quarter he had never seen, trusting the survey description — township, range, section, quarter — to correspond to something liveable when he finally stood on it. Or he could make inquiries. He could ask the settlers who had come a year before, the ones already back in town for supplies, where the drainage was good and where the frost came early and which townships had been filed on already by the wrong sort of neighbour. Word travelled fast in the waiting rooms of the Land Titles office. A man with a decent eye for country and a cousin who had gone northwest the previous spring might arrive in Edmonton already knowing, in general terms, where he meant to go.
Northwest of Edmonton — out along the Klondike Trail, past the Paddle River, into the Pembina country — was where the Foster family eventually put down roots. It was not the easiest country, and it was not the most fashionable. But it was land, and it was theirs, and in the early years of the century that was the whole of the argument.
What It Is Now
Lunnford today is the kind of place that exists more in local memory and on old maps than in any built form. The hamlet marker and the road allowances remain. The land still farms. The community name persists in the County of Barrhead’s records and in the conversations of people whose grandparents filed on quarters in the district a hundred and twenty years ago. The Pembina River still moves through the valley to the north, indifferent as ever to the ambitions of the settlements that rose and subsided along its banks.
For the family that came here from Washington State with Hannah Foster and her boys sometime in the early 1900s, Lunnford was not a destination so much as a decision — the particular quarter-section in this particular district that happened to be available and looked good enough and close enough to a neighbour worth having. Farms in this country have a way of outlasting the people who broke them. The land the Fos
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