7 Dec 2008
Curbside History: A Small Footnote
One of the small towns that I’m using to describe Curbside is in fact Cannington
Manor. I’m not going into too much detail but this might give out some idea of the
year and circumstance of the early days of Curbside.
“Didsbury was nothing at all like the small, wood-frame or sod houses
used by homesteaders trying to eke a living from a new land. But the
Becktons were not typical homesteaders. They were descendants of two of
the wealthiest families in northern England. And they were here not
merely to homestead, but to participate in an ambitious effort to
establish a Victorian English agricultural colony in Canada’s sparsely
populated Northwest.”
http://www.virtualsk.com/current_issue/prairie_gentry.html
“The Becktons’ paternal grandfather earned a fortune in textiles, the
same industry in which their maternal grandfather, Matthew Curtis,
became rich as an inventor and founder of one of the largest textile
mills in Britain. Curtis, who also served three terms as lord mayor of
Manchester, left his 18-, 19- and 20-year old grandsons a great deal of
money when he died in 1887. The young men used a portion of their
inheritance to buy 2,600 acres of land and to build Didsbury in a
colony called Cannington Manor.
Pierce co-founded the Moose Mountain Trading Company and used it as
an industrial development tool to assemble many of the commercial and
service enterprises required for a successful community. He also
launched an agricultural college to train wealthy young English
bachelors who came to Cannington to learn farming. Ernest and Billy
Beckton were drawn to the college after a short stay at an aristocratic
community in Le Mars, Iowa. Their youngest brother Bertie (Herbert)
joined them later.
By the mid 1890s, more than 200 people lived at Cannington Manor.
They fell into three main groups: homesteaders and tradesmen,
upper-class families and a group of young bachelors. The village
provided them and neighbouring settlers with carpentry and blacksmith
services, a hotel, general store, a dairy, a school/town hall, two
cheese factories, a pork packing plant, a land titles office and a
flour mill whose product earned the community a gold medal at the 1893
world’s fair in Chicago. But it was the cultural and recreational life
of its inhabitants that set Cannington Manor apart from the other
utopian, religious and ethnic communities that sprung up on the
Canadian prairies in the latter 19th and early 20th centuries.”
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I think this pretty much explains what the town was like. A small town with very
imaginitive and healthy people. The only geographic difference is that there is a
swift and deep stream running through town. I got this idea from either St Paul or
Minneapolis when I went there a few years ago. In reality Cannington Manor
collapsed when the train came in. Curbside has the water and will also be getting
a train, like my real city and then it will get a bullet train that will be nicknamed the
RE Train or Ridiculously Expensive Train for short.
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Jan. 29th 2012
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