Ken and Christena Aasen remember when Colfax and Lewvan were booming prairie villages in southeastern Saskatchewan, with grain elevators, machinery dealerships, hotels and more than enough people to keep them busy.
Over the years, they’ve seen the villages lose family after family, business after business, until now there’s little left to mark the once-bustling communities.
Three years ago, the villages suffered what appeared to be the final blow: their names were stripped from the provincial map.
“It is really, really sad,” said Christena, whose family farms about seven kilometres from what used to be Lewvan, Sask. Now there’s only a couple of people where dozens once lived.
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“It’s a shame.”
But in a reversal of Saskatchewan placenames being steadily dropped off the map, Saskatchewan is reviving the names of some of its oldest and smallest communities, giving them life again.
Lewvan, Colfax and Corinne are three villages that will be reintroduced in the 1999-2000 provincial highway map. Tourism representatives say the names will never be dumped again, even if the villages eventually have no human population at all.
“We would like to be as inclusive as possible,” said Neil Sawatzky of Tourism Saskatchewan, the provincial agency responsible for the road map.
“We don’t want to keep dropping names off the map.”
Names used to get dropped when they ceased to represent anything that could be called a community. It happened last when the map was redrawn in 1995-96.
The recent trend toward relisting placenames emerged when mapmakers identified new priorities and new purposes for the provincial map.
The provincial highways department used to be responsible. Department officials thought the map should offer useful information for motorists. Keeping names on the map after communities ceased to exist could mislead drivers into thinking they could get gas or other services in these places.
But when the tourism branch took control of the map, it took a different approach. Many people go to rural areas, or come back to Saskatchewan, to visit the places their ancestors came from.
Whether or not anyone still lives there, people want to know how to get there, said Sawatzky.
“Maybe the elevators are gone and the post office is gone, but the cemetery’s still there.”
“We want to make sure people are able to find that on the map.”
Maintain history
Sawatzky thinks the ghost town names will become more important in the next few years as the province nears its centennial in 2005.
“A lot of those names get lost, and we want to maintain them,” he said.
For the Aasens, the inexorable decline and disappearance of their local villages has been a melancholy reality.
Nonetheless, they’re pleased the names will survive on the map.
“To keep that little bit of history is great,” said Christena.
