Point Douglas -- An Unfinished History

It was agriculture that created Western Canada, and it was Point Douglas where agriculture in Western Canada was born. The first wheat west of the Great Lakes was planted in Point Douglas soil by the Selkirk settlers who arrived here in 1812. 

Going back to the early years of the Selkirk colony, Point Douglas Avenue was laid out as a road for farmers on the point to access Fort Douglas, the mill, and hayfields of the colony’s large common which stood between Henry and Euclid Avenues. It was on this road where the Canadian Pacific Railway was laid in the 1880s, on which farmers from across Western Canada shipped grain eastward to flour mills like Ogilvie’s on Higgins Avenue, or beyond Winnipeg to the ports of Lake Superior.

 By the time of Winnipeg’s incorporation in 1873, Point Douglas was considered its own village. Here, a cluster of businesses operated on the Main road, including the business ventures of prominent citizens, Edmund Barber and William Fonseca. At Main and Euclid was the general store of John Schultz, founder of the first newspaper in Western Canada, and nemesis of Louis Riel. 

 After incorporation, Point Douglas became, for a brief moment, the prototypical leafy suburb preferred by the new city’s wealthy and powerful, where businessmen like hardware magnate James Ashdown, and politicians like Premier John Norquay lived in stately brick houses.

 It would be the development of railways and the explosive growth of Winnipeg that would change the nature of Point Douglas from a semi-rural village, to the  near mythical urban neighborhood of the 20th century, teeming with immigrants who lived “mixed together just like soup.” Point Douglas became the most densely populated district in the city, and its skyline was marked by brick warehouses, the smokestacks of factories, and the onion domes of eastern churches.

For thousands of Canadians, Point Douglas was where their life in Canada began. Many of the newly-arrived that stepped out of the CP station on Higgins Avenue would put down roots within a few blocks from the station.

Local churches, synagogues, and fraternal societies welcomed and supported the newly arrived immigrants. As a young Methodist minister, J.S. Woodworth, led All People’s Mission in the early years of the 20th century. He would later represent the area in Parliament as a socialist M.P. Other politicians like Joseph Zuken, Canada’s only elected Communist, represented Point Douglas at City Hall. And it was the employees at Vulcan Iron Works on Sutherland that were the first in the city to walk off the job in the General Strike of 1919.

But Point Douglas was more than a place for socialist ideals, it was for many a place to make money. Thousands of immigrants opened up grocery stores, cafés and barber shops on Main, Higgins, or Euclid, contributing to a vibrant local economy. Sam Bronfman lived on Lily Street while he managed the Bell Hotel in the 1910s, not long before he built up Seagram’s Distilleries and the rest of the Bronfman family empire. Sir William Stephenson, who grew up on Syndicate Street, became a legendary spy, inventor and industrialist. Another Point Douglas kid, Monty Hall from Hallet Street, would find fame and fortune in show business.

Never far below the surface was the dark and seedy undercurrent of “Winnipeg the wicked,” and the classic urban narrative of sunshine and shadows cannot be ignored. The story of speak-easies and bootlegging, Main Street hotel bars, brothels on Annabella Street, and the hobo jungles of the riverbanks, where the “leisurely indigent” have camped since the 19th century, when one writer recalled a Mr. “Sacks-in-the-bush” who lived on the riverbanks during the 1890s, occasionally coming up to Main and Jarvis to beg for money.

The flood of 1950 all but covered Point Douglas, and less than a decade later, a swath of the neighbourhood was wiped away for the construction of the Disraeli Freeway. The neighbourhood became designated as “blighted” by city planners, and “slum” by the media. Economic, physical and social health declined. By the 1980s and ‘90s, instability, drug abuse, crime and decay threatened a nearly forgotten neighborhood. 

But it was with resiliency and determination that the Selkirk settlers toiled at raising crops in a harsh and isolated corner of the world, and that immigrants worked their way up from nothing in a new country. It would be this same resiliency and determination with which many people held onto their roots through the hard years, with which the neighbourhood is so successfully unslumming itself today. An active residents committee fearlessly takes on gangs, drugs, negligent landlords, and indifferent city departments.

A Point Douglas that is today unslumming itself by discovering and celebrating the best within it, is another dynamic and exciting chapter in the neighbourhood’s far from finished history. 

The Point Douglas Residents Committee is in the process of launching The Living History of Point Douglas Project, which will endeavour to explore this community's pre- and post-European contact history, in respect and consideration of our First Nations peoples.

Historic Point Douglas – Where Winnipeg Began