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Why Is It There?
Manola exists on the south side of the Pembina River valley because someone — specifically two brothers named Chester and Orlando Tharpe — looked at the lay of the land in the early years of the twentieth century and decided that this was where a town ought to be. They platted the townsite themselves, surveying and subdividing the ground with the optimistic precision of men who believed, as most townsite promoters of that era believed, that the future was going to need the lots they were laying out. It was not an unreasonable calculation. The country north and west of Edmonton was filling up fast in the years after 1905, when Alberta became a province and the Dominion Lands Act turned the prairie into a vast lottery of 160-acre parcels available for the price of a ten-dollar filing fee and three years of your life. Manola sat in good agricultural country, with the Pembina River valley close enough to provide timber and water and a natural corridor for settlement.
The hamlet is located about 65 kilometres northwest of St. Albert, well within the territory that the first wave of homesteaders reached when they spread out from Edmonton in the years between 1905 and the First World War. It attracted settlers from Britain and the United States and central Europe, the usual mix that the Canadian prairie assembled in those years, people drawn by the promise of free land and the particular loneliness of starting over somewhere that had no memory of you yet. The Tharpe brothers' townsite gave these people a named centre — a place where a post office could be established, a school district organized, a community assembled from the scattered farms that surrounded it.
A Pioneer's Point of View, 1905–06
To arrive at Manola in those early years, you first had to survive Edmonton. The city in 1905 and 1906 was a place of extraordinary noise and improvisation — a muddy, energetic, overextended town on the edge of becoming something much larger, full of men who had come from somewhere else and were trying to figure out where the railroad was going and what the land was worth and whether they had come far enough or needed to go further. The Dominion Lands office handled hundreds of filings a month. Men pored over survey maps trying to make sense of townships and ranges and sections and quarters, trying to imagine what the numbers on a government form would look like when they stood on the actual ground.
The journey out from Edmonton was its own education. Northwest of the city, the country opened into rolling mixed-wood prairie — the parkland belt, where the boreal forest and the open grassland met and compromised, producing a landscape of bluffs and sloughs and hay meadows and arable ground that good farmers could read like a book once they knew the language. A man heading for the Pembina River district would have followed the Klondike Trail, the rough track that had seen Klondike gold rush traffic in 1898 and had been improving slowly ever since, and found himself, after a day or two of travel, in country that was still largely unbroken — forested ridges, beaver meadows, the sound of the river heard before it was seen. It was country that asked something of you. The families who stayed and built something there were the ones who had something to give.
The Train Bridge and the Lost Future
Manola's story is inseparable from the story it almost became. When the Pembina Valley Railway was being planned in the early 1920s — the Northern Alberta Railways extension that would eventually link this part of the province to Edmonton and the south — Manola might reasonably have expected to be the natural terminus, the supply town, the place that the railway made into the county seat. It sat in approximately the right location. The Tharpe brothers' townsite was already established. There was a community there, with the infrastructure that a generation of homesteaders had assembled.
The railway crossed the Pembina River elsewhere. The bridge that would have confirmed Manola's position went instead to Barrhead, and with the bridge went the commercial advantage, the post office prestige, the slow accumulation of municipal gravity that turns a townsite into a town. By the time the Pembina Valley Railway reached the area in 1927, Barrhead was already the centre of the county in every practical sense. Manola found itself on the secondary route, a quiet hamlet in good farming country, its early ambitions still visible in the Tharpe brothers' original street plan but its trajectory permanently deflected by the decision of a railway engineer about where to put a bridge.
It is a familiar story in the Canadian prairie West. Towns rose and fell on the strength of survey decisions and railway contracts. The country is full of the ghosts of townsites that platted hopefully and found themselves bypassed. Manola survived. It persists, small and solid, in its valley country, carrying its original name and its original plan and the memory of what the Tharpes thought it was going to be.
Manola Today
The population of Manola has never been large, and it isn't large now. The hamlet recorded twenty-nine people in the 1991 census. The surrounding farmland is still productive. The County of Barrhead, of which Manola forms a quiet corner, administers the district from its seat in Barrhead — the town that won the argument the railway settled in 1927. For the families who have farmed this ground for four or five generations, the distinction between Manola and Barrhead is one of address rather than allegiance. The country belongs to the people who work it. The railway made its choice a long time ago.
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