“Purity 99 Gas Station – early 1950’s”, photo courtesy of Marie Nylund. The Bragg Creek Shopping Centre celebrated a 40-year milestone in 2019. But long before the mall was built, this piece of land (originally granted to the CPR) had been acquired by Jake Fullerton. The original quarter section was adjacent to his homestead at…
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Canada’s First Youth Hostel It’s time to set the record straight about Canada’s and North America’s first youth hostel, here in Bragg Creek. Let’s set the stage. During the Great Depression, Calgary sisters Mary and Catherine Barclay initiated the idea — after Catherine’s trip to Europe where she discovered places hikers could engage in nature…
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Woven throughout the stories of Bragg Creek’s history, are references to Wake Siah Lodge and Ida May White. This is because the White homestead was a hub, where much of the hamlet sits now and explains why the main street is named White Avenue. About 1910, arriving from Ottawa, Harry and Ida May White first…
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Many Bridges, Many Floods Bragg Creek bears a history of many bridges, many of them lost to flooding of the Elbow River, and in a different location than today’s bridge. In the early days, most of the activity in the area was on the west side of the river, (not the east, as it is…
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One of Bragg Creek’s earliest known settlers was George Livingston. George was the eldest son of the well-known Alberta pioneer Sam Livingston, who had come from Ireland for the gold rushes (California in 1847 and the Cariboo in the 1850s). By 1874, Sam and his Metis wife Jane Howse, eventually moved to the Calgary area…
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Every now and then, the inevitable question arises: how did Bragg Creek get its name? Referencing a variety of sources to help sort through the many different answers, the Bragg Creek Historical Society goes to the source, great-grand daughter/niece, Marilyn Symons Bragg. In the autumn of 1894, two young men climbed aboard a Harvest Excursion…
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In 1871, the Canadian government instituted a land survey of the Prairie Provinces based on a unique checkerboard system covering 200 million acres. The Crown subsequently granted lands to individuals, colonization companies, the Hudson’s Bay Company and the railway, municipalities, religious groups, and later set aside land for national parks. (Control of public lands and…
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Long before the homesteading era — or before this area was even called Bragg Creek — it provided for two main populations of indigenous peoples, commonly referred to as the Stoney Nakoda and the Tsuut’ina. Stoney Nakoda means “mountain people” and descendants would later congregate on reserve lands northwest and south of Bragg Creek (Morley…
Detailspublished by Millarville, Kew, Priddis, and Bragg Creek Historical Society D.W Friesen & Sons Ltd., Manitoba, 1975.
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