While the Town of Beaverlodge has been a mainstay in the Peace Country for more than a century, did you know the municipality itself moved from its original location? If you didn’t, you’re not alone, and you’re exactly the type of listener podcaster Craig Baird would like to bring on board.
Baird, the host of Canadian History EHX, has recently been digging deep into the past of small towns across Alberta and Saskatchewan and hopes a recent episode focused on Beaverlodge allows listeners to hear about life under the shadow of the worlds biggest beaver statue. Baird says one of the biggest, and perhaps overlooked, portions of the history of the town comes from Saskatoon Hill.
“For a time, it was a provincial park, and the government kind of decided this was a good spot, we’re going to take this over, and turned it into the Albertan radar system that watched for nukes coming from the Soviet Union. For about 30 some years, this was a military base, a radar site, and people couldn’t access the provincial park, but in the 1980s, they decided to move away from it and it went back to being a provincial park.”
Baird says the work done by Euphemia McNaught is also something that is deserving of more attention. While the McNaught Homestead museum is located in the municipality, the history in her artwork is something that garnered world wild attention at the time.
“She was hired by Prime Minister MacKenzie King to document the Alaska Highway through her paintings. Her work has been shown all over Canada and all over the world just out of a little shack which is just outside of Beaverlodge.”
The episode, which was sponsored by the town, is available wherever podcasts are downloaded.