Alberta Remembers: Recalling Our Rural Roots

Kathy E. Zimon is a fine arts librarian (emerita) at the University of
Calgary. She is the author of Alberta Society of Artists: The First 70
Years and co-editor of Art Documentation Bulletin of the Art Libraries
Society of North America.

In 1938, there were some 5,700 grain elevators dotting the prairie
landscape, “one every 8–10 miles along the railway lines.” In
2002, there were only 412. Published to coincide with Alberta’s
Centennial in 2005, it is the disappearing “prairie sentinels” that
are the subject of this book. The nearly 100-year-old Crow Rate (a
subsidy for shipping grain by rail) was cancelled in 1995. That inspired
Karen Brownlee, a native of rural southwestern Alberta, to capture the
daily life of small towns clustered around the grain elevators before
those communities were irrevocably changed. More than 100 of her
watercolours, mostly of identifiable views of grain elevators in small
towns like DeWinton, Vulcan, Nanton, and Cayley, among many others,
document the distinctive silhouettes of these structures, and the
people, traffic, and equipment around them. As Brownlee’s paintings
illustrate, for much of the 20th century, the grain elevators were the
focus of social and economic activity on the prairies.

Brownlee was introduced to the study of Chinese brush painting at the
University of Lethbridge, a technique reflected in her work. Her
watercolours are characterized by strong brush strokes, lots of white,
and vivid colours that animate her palette and convey a positive, if
nostalgic view of a rapidly vanishing past. Many of the works reproduced
here in full colour began as part of her Rural Prairie Communities
painting series that was exhibited at the Royal Museum of Alberta in
1997–98, while some images were incorporated in the grain elevator
display at the Canadian Museum of Civilization.

Historic resources consultant Ken Tingley introduces the paintings with
a brief history of the grain elevator. The complex relationships and
shifting power balances among the railway, the elevator companies, the
United Farmers of Alberta, and the Alberta Wheat Pool are detailed,
along with the economic forces that ultimately determined the fate of
these giants. Although they waxed and waned in only 100 years, they
became powerful visual icons that still define our perception of the
western prairie landscape.