his initiative, Hysop was promptly put in charge of forty-four gardens between Brandon and Golden. Even the surly and cynical CPR president, William Van Horne, caught the garden fever and declared “the station agent with a nice garden is the agent who has a clean station, has a flower in buttonhole, wears his coat, and has well-brushed boots.”
Uniformed staff stands in front of the restaurant at the Grand Trunk’s Allandale Station (now part of Barrie, Ontario). Thanks to Fred Cumberland, whose bust rests in a nearby park, the station garden movement began here. Photo courtesy of CNR Archives, 79095.
Although hugely unpopular for its monopolistic practices and its community insensitivity, the CPR gained many supporters for its gardens. Magazines such as the Canadian Horticulturist and the Canadian Municipal Journal praised the CPR for its work on station beautification. “The man who has a nice garden,” swooned the Municipal Journal, “is not the man who spends his time in the nearest saloon, nor the man who has to be discharged for beating his wife. [He is] a decent industrious man who will bring up his children to be the best kind of citizens.”
Station gardens were often a town’s only parkland and became the focus of the community. Those at Red Deer and Fort McLeod boasted a circular arrangement dominated by a bandshell or a fountain. Broadview, Regina, and Kenora also contained magnificent station gardens. By contrast, simpler gardens might only have the town name spelled out in whitewashed boulders.
To encourage agents to plant gardens, the railways set up nurseries, usually under the auspices of a Forestry Department to manage nurseries.
As shown in this 1920s view of the garden at Red Deer, Alberta, the CPR was moving into a less formal style of station garden. Photo courtesy of Archives of Alberta, A-6251.
Those of the CPR were at Wolseley (Saskatchewan), Springfield (Manitoba), Fort William, Kenora, Winnipeg, Moose Jaw, Calgary, Revelstoke, and Vancouver. The CNR administered nurseries in Winnipeg and Stratford, Ontario. The forestry departments also oversaw the design and the planting of the station grounds themselves. They established design criteria, circulated catalogues, and subjected the gardens to formal inspection. They also initiated a competition for the best garden, awarding $50 to the winner in each district or division.
The First World War brought with it a temporary lull in CPR’s garden beautification program. Hearkening to the federal government’s plea for more domestic food production, the CPR ploughed under many of the flower beds and replaced them with less attractive but more essential potatoes.
The end of the war, however, not only brought more gardens but also more bureaucracy. The CPR’s main competitors, the CNoR and the GTP, had just completed their lines when the war broke out. The crippling financial restrictions of the war drove them both into bankruptcy and the Canadian government set up the Canadian National Railway to assume these and other bankrupt lines. Anxious to capture some of the CPR’s business, the new CNR also set up a Forestry Department and launched a garden program of its own.
In an effort to stay ahead of the CNR and modernize its gardens, the CPR established a floral committee, and encouraged the agents to replace the earlier more formal gardens with a more current concept. The tradition-minded agents, however, largely ignored the new styles and kept to their familiar gardens, formal and usually fenced.
If the end of the First World War fostered station gardens, the end of the Second World War finished them. As cars replaced the passenger train, and modern technology reduced the community’s reliance upon its stations, the railways paid less and less attention to the gardens.
ABOVE: A modern municipal garden graces the landscape at VIA Rail’s Brantford, Ontario, station. Photo by author. BOTTOM: Canada’s best known railway hotel is arguably Toronto’s Fairmont Royal York built across Front Street, from the then-new Union Station. Photo by author.
Flower beds were replaced by lawns and surrounded by hardy and protective caragana hedges. Then, in response to the greater demand for parking, the lawns were in turn paved with asphalt. Finally, the stations themselves were demolished by the thousands — to be replaced by junkyards, modern office towers, or nothing. In other towns, small parks mark the former station gardens; some are dominated by war memorials. Meanwhile, among the many ghost towns of the prairies, the only evidence that there was ever a garden or even a station are the unkempt yet distinctive caragana hedges.
Hotels
But it was not just railway gardens and structures that typified the station landscape. Almost as inevitable as the flowers and the water tanks were the station hotels. Every town had one, sometimes more. Large or small, brick, stone, and wood, they could be found across the street and right behind the station.
Both hotel and station continue to cater to the public in Alexandria, Ontario. Photo by author.
In the smaller communities the hotels were typically wood and two or, at the most, three storeys high. Larger communities might warrant a hotel made of brick, perhaps with an elevator. Divisional towns could count on a string of hotels, for here travellers often spent the night while waiting for their connecting train. In the larger cities the railways themselves built large hotels, some of the most beautiful in the country. “Many of the early hotels reflect the tendency to show off the Chateau style in hotel building. One of the best examples of this style is the Canadian Northern Railway’s Chateau Laurier in Ottawa. Commissioned by the railway’s then president Charles Melville Hays, it was scheduled to open in June of 1912. That event was delayed when Hays went down on the Titanic while returning for the grand opening. The CPR’s Royal York Hotel (now part of the Fairmont chain) opened in 1927 with the final completion of Toronto’s Union Station and still retains its opulent early elegance in such rooms as the Imperial Room and Grand Ballroom.
In Thunder Bay, the Prince Arthur Hotel, although simpler in exterior design, lured tourists to what was then a remote corner of Ontario. Also in the chateau style, Saskatoon’s Bessborough Hotel (now Delta) was a relative latecomer being built by the Canadian National Railway in 1935. This followed the completion of the CPR’s Hotel Saskatchewan in Regina in 1927 when Saskatoon business groups lobbied for a grand hotel in their own community. Halifax’s Delta Nova Scotian Hotel, attached to its 1928 CN station (now occupied by VIA Rail) were necessitated by the devastating Halifax explosion of 1917.
The stunning Chateau Montebello was opened as a private retreat along the CPR’s Ottawa to Montreal line in 1930, and known as the Seigneury Club. Octagonal is shape it is considered to be Canada’s largest log structure. The CPR acquired the retreat in 1970 opening it to the public and renaming it the Chateau Montebello It is today part of the Fairmont chain of hotels.
A similar log hotel, the Minaki Lodge in northwestern Ontario, was destroyed by fire, in 2003. It had originally been built by the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway in 1914 in line with the growing trend of railways building resort hotels to attract more passengers. Following a fire in 1925, the new owner, Canadian National, rebuilt it as a luxury wilderness retreat. Between 1955 and 2003 the hotel had a series of owners. It remained closed from 1998 to 2003 when it reopened but within months it again closed and was abruptly destroyed by fire. It is now the site of a condo development.”
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