Fort Heritage Precinct

Léon Moret, known locally as Leo, was born in 1851 or 1853 in Vaudens, Switzerland. He supposedly immigrated to North America at the age of fourteen by way of New Orleans, but the earliest ship records available show Moret arriving in New York City on September 8, 1880, from Le Havre, France. By 1883, he […]

Agnes (Warrior) Wiebe was born on September 12, 1894, to a working-class family in West Ham, England. Before 1915, Agnes was “in service,” likely working as a maid to a middle-class family. In 1915, she went to live with her mother’s sister Mildred, a widow, who needed help running a canvas business making tents and […]

How did de-bunking a myth about a Black settler in the Peace River District named Daniel Williams lead to discovering, or rather, re-discovering, Fort Saskatchewan’s first Black resident?    On February 18, 2022, during a Black History Month event hosted by the Fort Saskatchewan Multicultural Association, a story was told about a Black prospector and […]

While Harry and Meghan’s refuge on Vancouver Island was short-lived, they have not been the only British royals or nobility to seek out new lives and experiences in Western Canada. In the 1920s, the lure of big prairie skies, wide-open spaces, and rugged farm-life brought a number of titled Europeans to Alberta. The most notable […]

Agnes Sorrel arrived in Fort Saskatchewan from Glasgow, Scotland, in 1895. She came to Canada to marry Alexander Forbes, Fort Saskatchewan’s first Presbyterian minister, who had arrived less than a year earlier in December 1894. Rev. D.G. McQueen married the couple on Tuesday, September 24, 1895, in Edmonton. A concert was held shortly after the […]

In the early twentieth century, Fort Saskatchewan was a town on the move, brimming with possibilities and potential. The Canadian Northern Railway’s (CNoR) transcontinental line arrived in town in 1905 providing farmers with better access to markets near and far, while putting the town on a direct line for settlers moving westward. The CNoR’s president, […]

On a summer afternoon in 1929, a Lockheed Vega cabin plane circled low over downtown Fort Saskatchewan. Its pilot, the intrepid and famous flyboy, Wilfrid “Wop” May, brought the plane close to the Williamson Block on 102 Street to allow his passenger, Louis Dubuc, to drop a handwritten note on the roof of the building. […]

The Fort Heritage Precinct would like to invite Fort Saskatchewan residents of all ages to document their experiences of the COVID-19 Pandemic in written form. During these unprecedented times, it is important to document events around the world and our country on a local and individual level. Personal correspondence (e.g., letters from WWII) can provide […]

Our new City Hall Foyer mini-exhibit, installed this week, shows off the Fort Heritage Precinct’s recent acquisitions from 2017 to 2019. Since museums only display around 2 – 5% of their collections at any given time, recent acquisition exhibits are a common way to share new donations with the public without the context of a […]

On 11 July, we installed the new mini-exhibit, Photographic Memory, in the Fort Saskatchewan City Hall Foyer. The exhibit displays ten vintage cameras from the Fort Heritage Precinct’s permanent collection and several historical photographs of Fort Saskatchewan on exhibit panels. The inspiration for the exhibit came about while attending the National Council on Public History Annual Conference […]