Go West, Young Man!
A 101-year-old Albertan recounts the stories of a one-time prairie boom town in its heyday
by Duncan Kinney
Alberta pioneer Charlie Toogood arrived on the Lusitania in 1912 and made a life for himself in Alberta
The search for Chancellor began when a crisp photograph of an aged memorial hall landed on my lap in June. The picture showed layers of white paint peeling off the building’s exterior and an awkward lightning rod tipped precariously above the green and yellow prairie. In the days when pilgrims rode the Canadian Pacific Railway in search of golden crops, places like the highly photogenic Chancellor Memorial Hall served as dance central, and a site for weddings and wakes.
Chancellor is a dot on the map between Standard and Hussar, which are dwarfs between the Prairie towns of Drumheller and Strathmore. Though Chancellor once boasted a two-storey hotel with a “beer parlour,” the town seemed to have since disappeared. I couldn’t find a single barber, café owner or bartender in the phone book who might tell me about the memorial hall and the people who once danced there.
A Hail Mary call to Pat’s Barber Shop on the south side of Drumheller proved fruitless, when Pat said, “No, I’ve never heard of Chancellor before.” Flabbergasted, I told him that Chancellor was only 60 kilometres south of his shop. “Can’t help you,” he said, “never heard of it.”
I dialled the Standard Hotel – a 24-kilometre drive from Chancellor – all morning, until a woman’s voice finally answered. With yet more disappointing news, she said, “No, Chancellor isn’t anywhere close to here. You’re way off.” I insisted the hamlet was 24 kilometres from where she stood and I heard a voice over her shoulder agree, so she quickly corrected herself and said, “Yeah, actually, you’re right. But I don’t know anybody there.” Hard-pressed but not crushed, I scoured the county officials living around Hussar for someone, anyone, who could connect me with a name and a phone number in Chancellor.
In the end, I found Chancellor – a one-time boom town – had only six houses and the memorial hall left to it. Six houses translates to a total population of less than 15, but I managed to connect with longtime resident Margaret Schmidt. She told me all about the town’s once thriving economy which included five grain elevators and a stockyard. Those were Chancellor’s days of promise, before the drought of 1929 and a fire in the ’50s which destroyed half of main street. Chancellor shrunk from an up-and-coming town into a hamlet forgotten by its neighbours up Township Road 250.
When my interest in Chancellor’s ramshackle memorial hall became known, word spread through each of the six houses like a prairie fire, and I was soon fielding calls from Chancellor and area. One call from Ed Christiensen caught my attention. Christiensen told me, “My uncle Charlie is 101 years old and he lives in Edmonton, but he used to work at that hall when it was a grocery store. Do you want to talk to him?”
Charlie Toogood is sharp. At 101 years, he still remembers assembling Ford Model Ts and Model As at Phillips Store and automotive garage in Chancellor. He was 19 years old when he left the town and moved to Calgary in 1929. But with notable excitement in his voice, he can still walk a person through Chancellor as it once was – a growing town with a fine dance hall – up and down main street where a two-storey hotel once stood between rival general stores.
Toogood sailed from England to Canada in 1912 with his parents and older siblings aboard the Lusitania just one month before the Titanic’s fated voyage. His father was an English butler who had been working in New York City and bought the Canadian Pacific Railway’s promises for a better life on the Prairie hook, nail and sinker. “He fell for it,” Toogood laughs. So the family headed for the fertile soil of Alberta aboard the Lusitania in 1912, which sank three years later after being torpedoed by a German U-boat. The family landed in New York before heading to Montreal for their train west. The last stop was Standard, and the family needed to hire a horse and cart to take their possessions south to their new home.
Though Toogood recalls very little development in the area when his family first settled there, the CPR’s Empress Line opened a stop in Chancellor in 1913 and the town started to grow. The Sunnyrange School, which was at one point several miles away – a long walk, Toogood recalls – moved to town. The government established 25 model farms for First World War veterans south of Chancellor. Eventually, Toogood says, there were five grain elevators, an Imperial Oil warehouse, a Ford agency and stockyards. Filled with optimism, the place showed promise.
But Chancellor’s fortunes began to wane in 1929, the year of an awful drought that saw young guns like Toogood leave for the brighter lights of Calgary. He spent six years fighting in the Second World War, but visited Chancellor after the Allied victory in 1945. Already in a state of decline, Toogood says Chancellor’s fortunes evaporated further when a fire started in the hotel and spread up and down main street, torching the town’s original memorial hall among other buildings. The general store was spared, and later bought by a co-operative of farmers who rebranded it as the Chancellor Memorial Hall. While Chancellor continued to fade through the late 20th century, residents say the hall still played host to lively dances until 2000.
The hall – which celebrated its 100th birthday in 2008 – is no longer in use. The paint is peeling and the foundation is cracked – the lone remaining feature of what was once Chancellor as Charlie Toogood knew it is on its last legs.
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