Researchers are digging into past of industrial shanty town
Team trying to recreate life in ravine for residents and meatpacking workers
A team of researchers is hoping unearthed remnants from a meatpacking plant in Mill Creek ravine will give them a better understanding of what life was like for workers in early 20th-century Edmonton.
Last year, Haeden Stewart, a PhD candidate from the University of Chicago, spent the summer excavating and analyzing artifacts from a shanty town that sprang up at Ross Acreage in the early 1900s to understand what home life was like for the impoverished, working-class families living in about 50 dwellings.
This summer, Stewart’s attention shifted from those early homes of tents and structures, built from salvaged material and leftover industrialized detritus, to a neighbouring area that was the site of Vogel’s meatpacking plant. By focusing on the collection of bone fragments from the abattoir, as well as bricks, glass and concrete from the old building, Stewart is piecing together what life was like for ravine residents, as well as understanding how industries connected to the creek supported the city’s growth and development.
“We are trying to get a sense of how the whole thing was laid out,” Stewart said Tuesday.
“Just by peeling back a few of these layers, we can get a sense of what people were doing and where they were doing it.”
Archival research shows conditions were dire throughout most of the first half of the 1900s, with residents living next to a creek that often flooded and was filled with a toxic concoction of abattoir wastewater, stormwater runoff and human waste, Stewart said.
It was so bad medical officials were concerned the shanty towns could be a vector for a typhoid outbreak in the late 1920s.
“The creek was pretty nasty and they were living right down there on the banks of it,” Stewart said.
The research is also helping eight MacEwan University anthropology students put skills learned in the classroom into action on the ground, said Katie Biitner, from the university’s anthropology department. “It doesn’t look like much, but all of these little fragments are quite remarkable,” Biitner said. “We are trying to take all this little fragments and piece them together in some sort of coherent narrative of the lived experience of the past.”
Work at the site is expected to continue until mid-August. The artifacts will be taken to MacEwan University for further analysis before finding a permanent home at the Royal Alberta Museum.