User:Helperzoom/Mill Woods

History

The Beaver Hills area was occupied from earliest times by indigenous peoples, hunting bison. By the nineteenth century, the Plains Cree and their allies came to predominate. In the 1850s the Papaschase band moved into the Edmonton area from Slave Lake and entered into Treaty 6 in 1877. The area of Mill Woods was assigned as their reserve, and was surveyed in 1879-80. The presence of a reserve so close to Edmonton was bitterly opposed by the editor of the Edmonton Bulletin, Frank Oliver, who campaigned for them to be removed. Agricultural activity in the reserve failed to prosper, and the membership of the band dwindled through reassignment by the settler authorities and acceptance by members of the band (including Chief Papaschase) of Meti scrip, which took those members out of the treaty and removed their right to live on the reserve. The reserve was annulled in 1891 and the land surrendered to the federal government, which made it available for agricultural settlement.

Much of the land was then purchased by German-speaking Moravian Brethren arriving from Volhynia. Arriving in 1894, the majority homesteaded at Bruderheim east of Fort Saskatchewan, while the rest preferred to purchase land outright in the northern section of the former Papaschase reserve, which they called Bruderfeld. They ran it as a communal farm. The settlement was initially prosperous but suffered from drought in the 1920s and from the Great Depression in the 1930s.

The area of Mill Woods remained in agricultural use until the 1960s, lying outside the growing city of Edmonton in Strathcona County. With a housing shortage and rising costs of new lots, and with plans to build the Mill Creek Freeway and the Whitemud Freeway to link the south-western suburbs to downtown, the city looked to annex the south-eastern area that became Mill Woods. Planning for the new suburb was done by a small team in the city's planning department, using an innovative approach unlike any previous development in Edmonton. It was based on the New towns movement. The intention was to foster community by designing each neighbourhood around a focus, generally a school and park; and linking neighbourhoods to form eight communities, joined by a ring road (Mill Woods Road), grouped around a central service area which became Mill Woods Town Centre. The street grid which dominated elsewhere in Edmonton was replaced by crescents and culs-de-sac. The planning process moved very rapidly in order to make the first lots available for purchase before the end of 1971. The team was criticized for using a narrow, geographical definition of communities; the planners defended this choice on the grounds that a more innovative approach would have led to resistance by other units of city government and therefore to delays.

 The City of Edmonton began assembling land in this area in 1970 as a means of mitigating the rising cost of serviced land in the vicinity of Edmonton, while the City of Edmonton began preparing a plan to develop the area. The Mill Woods Development Concept was approved in March 1971, consisting of eight communities and a town centre community. It was originally anticipated to have a population of approximately 120,000 people at full build-out.

Eastern Mill Woods suffered heavy damage from the Edmonton tornado in 1987.

The designation of the original Papaschase reserve as abandoned was disputed by the descendants of the Papaschase band, who brought a lawsuit for compensation against the government of Canada in 2001. The claim was dismissed by the Supreme Court of Canada in 2008 on the grounds that the statute of limitations had expired.

Naming

Mill Woods was named for the Mill Creek, which bisects the northeast portion of the area, as well as the wooded nature of the area. The aboriginal heritage of the area is reflected in the names of numerous neighbourhoods in Mill Woods. For example, the Satoo neighbourhood is named for Chief Satoo of the Cree people.