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Entire Web Site © 2003 Town Of Norquay |
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"Where Prairie Meets Pine"
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Many have contributed to make Norquay and this area of Saskatchewan what it is today. For hundreds of years the Indian people lived, traveled and traded here, later to be followed by independent explorers, and fur traders, then by the posts of the X.Y. and NorthWest Fur Trading Companies and the Hudson's Bay Company, whose two forts at the great bend of the Assiniboine River made this area an important factor in the developing Western economy of the 1800's, long before farmers began to turn the first sods of raw land. Great changes came about in the late Nineteenth Century and into the early years of the Twentieth, with the arrival of ranchers, homesteaders, workers in the forests, and experienced farmers, who were followed by people who provided services needed, store and livery barn keepers, hotel operators, teachers, lawyers and doctors, to name but a few. Few at first, their numbers increased following the building of a line of the Canadian Pacific Railway through Yorkton in the 1890's, and the construction of the Canadian Northern Railway into Swan River in 1898, to Kamsack around 1905, and Norquay in 1911. Many peoples of many nationalities have come to this area, some from other parts of Canada, especially Ontario, and the British Isles in the earlier years, then from the United States and Europe and from Asiatic countries. Doukhobor people tracked from the railway at Yorkton to reach this part of Saskatchewan, Scandinavians from the United States and Northern Europe came in numbers around 1906 and 1908, while Ukrainian people from various Central and Eastern countries of Europe, arrived in large numbers prior to the First World War and again in the 1920's. The "Dirty Thirties" saw a considerable migration of people from the dried-out, wind-swept Prairies to areas, such as ParrView, North of Norquay. Throughout the years the schools, mostly one-room rural schools, because the language of instruction was English, the predominant language of North America, did much to enable these diverse peoples to communicate with each other, and to weld them into citizens, proud to be a part of Saskatchewan and of Canada. Norquay and its surrounding countryside has so much going for it, located as it is in this pleasant parkland of East-Central Saskatchewan with its forests, lakes and parks, and favored by a climate which rarely sees the destructive winter and summer storms which sometimes rage in more Southern Prairie areas, and blessed with good soil, good farmers and good people. |
 
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