At 667 Main Street in Winnipeg there is a stone bank front, built in 1905 for the banking house of Alloway and Champion, recognized as a heritage site on 28 July 1986 and listed on the Canadian Register of Historic Places on 8 May 2007. A village in southern Alberta carries the second partner’s name. In 1910 that village hauled every building it had across open prairie to sit beside a new Canadian Pacific Railway line, the stores and the houses dragged on skids behind horses. The bank in Winnipeg has a designation date. The village has its own street grid, which is a stranger record and a better one.
Before 1910 the place was called Cleverville. Martin Clever came in 1905 and homesteaded the quarter section, 160 acres, and he let people put up businesses on his ground for nothing. Three general stores opened. So did a drug store, a butcher shop, a blacksmith, a livery stable, a millinery shop and a restaurant. A town grew on one man’s homestead because he did not charge for the privilege.
Key facts
- Martin Clever homesteaded a quarter section of 160 acres at the settlement site in 1905 and allowed businesses the free use of that land, according to the Location and History Profile for the Village of Champion published by Alberta Municipal Affairs on 14 October 2016.
- The Canadian Pacific Railway reached the district in 1910 and the rails did not run past Cleverville, after which the townspeople moved every building to a new site closer to the line using horses, skids and wagons, per the same Alberta Municipal Affairs profile.
- Henry Thomson Champion, born 28 November 1847 and died 27 June 1916, formed the Winnipeg banking house of Alloway and Champion with William F. Alloway in 1879, according to the Manitoba Historical Society biographical record.
- The first grain elevator at Champion was built in 1912, seven elevators stood by the middle of the 1920s, and the last elevator was torn down in 2004, per the Alberta Municipal Affairs profile.
- Statistics Canada counted 351 residents in the Village of Champion in the 2021 Census of Population, a figure the village publishes on its own website.
Why the town moved when the railway missed it
The Canadian Pacific Railway reached the district in 1910 and the rails did not run past Cleverville. That was the whole of it. A prairie town in that decade lived or died on whether it had steel and a siding, because wheat that must travel by wagon to reach a loading point loses money on every mile, and a settlement without a siding watches its grain and its freight and eventually its people go somewhere else. Cleverville was five years old. It had no standing and no time.
There was nowhere to appeal. Railways set their own alignments, and a village of a few hundred sitting on ground that still belonged to a homesteader had nothing to bring to a hearing even if a hearing had been on offer. So the town went to the steel rather than asking the steel to come to it.
Who decided to drag an entire settlement
The record gives that decision to the townspeople, which is a very plain phrase for something fairly remarkable. Every store and every house came off its footings and went onto skids and wagons, and horses pulled the settlement across to its new position beside the line. There was no hearing. A few dozen people looked at where a surveyor had put the rails, agreed among themselves, and moved.
The sequence is worth holding onto. The move happened in 1910. The Village of Champion received its charter on 27 May 1911 and held its first council meeting that June. The town relocated itself first and acquired its legal existence afterwards, in the new spot, under a new name. That ordering is our reading of the two dates rather than a claim the record makes on its own, but the dates do not leave much room for another one.
The name itself came from Winnipeg. It is attributed to Henry Thomson Champion, born in November 1847 and dead by June 1916, the banker who had gone into partnership with William F. Alloway in 1879. The attribution is exactly that, an attribution, and the municipal record carries it with a hedge attached. The man the village is named for is documented down to the month. The people who did the pulling are documented as a plural noun.
Then came the grain. The first elevator went up in 1912 and by the middle of the 1920s there were seven of them standing over the new townsite. In 1915 the place was moving enough wheat to call itself the Million Bushel Town, a figure the community claimed for itself and one we could not match against an independent shipping record, so take it as the name a place gave itself in a very good year.
What is left in Champion to mark any of it
The last elevator came down in 2004. Statistics Canada counted 351 residents in the 2021 census. The village sits on Highway 23 between Calgary and Lethbridge, about 35 kilometres from Little Bow Provincial Park, and a driver going through at highway speed has no reason to slow down.
The neglect is not that anyone forgot. It is that a physical act carried out by ordinary people gets filed as a local curiosity, something mentioned at the community hall and left there, while the banker who never had to leave Main Street in Winnipeg has a stone front, a designation date and an entry on a national register. For the haul itself, we could find no marker in any register we searched.
That is the part worth arguing about. We are used to treating heritage as a thing that happens to a building, a plaque screwed to a wall by somebody with the authority to screw it there. Champion is the other kind. It is a decision made by people with no authority at all, executed with horses over open ground, and left standing in the form of a town that is sitting exactly where they put it.
Drive in on Highway 23 and the marker is already under the wheels. The streets run where a few dozen people decided they should run, on a line a railway surveyor drew and a village accepted without argument. The elevators are gone. The rails carry what they carry. The town is still standing precisely where it was dragged.
