Butte Stands Guard: Stavely and District - Stavely, AB - There's a Book About It on Waymarking.com

View waymark gallery

Butte Stands Guard: Stavely and District - Stavely, AB

in There's a Book About It

Posted by:  T0SHEA

12U E 311166 N 5559772

Midway between the two largest burgs in Southern Alberta, Calgary, 100 kilometres north, and Lethbridge, 100 kilometres south.

The book Butte Stands Guard: Stavely and District was written about the town of Stavely and published by D.W. Friesen & Sons of Calgary, AB in 1976. In the book is a very comprehensive history of the town, from well before Europeans arrived up to its publication date, 1976. For anyone wishing to peruse the book, it can be read at the link above in the digital collection of the University of Calgary.

Stavely is a rural farming community in southern Alberta with just over 500 residents, "and growing". Situated in what residents of Stavely like to think of as Alberta's "Banana Belt", it is an ideal ranching and farming area with rolling prairies to the east and foothills to the west.

When railroads were built to criss-cross the prairies, the grain companies almost immediately began to build grain elevators along the tracks, initially placing them about seven miles apart. Communities soon arose round many, with many of these communities becoming the cities, towns, villages and hamlets that remain with us today. As farmers turned from hauling grain in horse drawn wagons to driving truckloads of grain to the elevators, the now redundant elevators between communities were decommissioned, some sold to local farmers and some simply abandoned. Eventually every town and village in the better grain growing areas had a row of elevators, "Prairie Sentinels", as they're known. At its peak Stavely had four elevators; at present one, formerly an Alberta Wheat Pool elevator build in 1982, remains standing, now owned by Husted Farms.

First settled around 1903, Stavely was named for Alexander Staveley Hill, Managing Director of the Oxley Ranching Company that was founded in 1882 by John R Craig on 100,000 acres of crown grazing rights. Incorporated as a village on October 16, 1903, Stavely officially became a town on May 25, 1912. While the railroad was built through where the town now stands in 1890-91, its depot consisted of a boxcar until construction of a real depot in 1905. It served Stavely until its dismantling in 1974. Telephone service arrived in 1907, an exchange was built in 1909 and a switchboard installed in the drugstore. By 1927 natural gas was piped into the town, followed shortly by electricity from Calgary Power. For some years prior the town had its own generator which ran during the day and was shut down at bedtime each day.

In February of 1924 Stavely suffered a major fire, as did most small communities built predominantly of wood, which took out most of the downtown business buildings. As a result most of the downtown buildings we see today were built in 1925 and later. The town hall, at the west end of 50th Street, the major business thoroughfare, must have escaped the fire as two capitals atop pilasters flanking the main entrance are embossed "19" on the left and "20" on the right, yielding its year of construction as 1920. Two stories in height and built of medium brown brick, the hipped roofed building continues to serve as the town hall, as it should as it appears to be in quite good condition as yet.

Stavely's major claim to fame is as the home of the first indoor rodeo in North America, and quite likely the first in the world.

Stavely, being in farm and ranch country, was home to many cowboys and horsemen. As a result, many stampedes and race meets had been held at various places in the community, one of the first being a stampede at the agricultural grounds in 1916, which is where the golf course is now. This was only 4 years after the first Calgary Stampede.

It was June, 1929 when Harry Streeter put on an indoor rodeo in the Stavely skating rink and Stavely laid claim to the "first indoor rodeo" in North America and maybe the world. Hence the town's motto on their Welcome to Stavely Sign located just on the outskirts of town. The tradition continued intermittently, with hiatuses in the "Dirty Thirties" and during World War II. Since then it has been an annual event which continues to this day.