A Few Notes on Old Deloraine

by William Harold Bell

Manitoba Pageant, Winter 1972, Volume 17, Number 2

This article was published originally in Manitoba Pageant by the Manitoba Historical Society on the above date. We make this online version available as a free, public service. As an historical document, the article may contain language and views that are no longer in common use and may be culturally sensitive in nature.

Please direct inquiries to webmaster@mhs.mb.ca.

Help us keep
history alive!

George Bell, father of William Harold Bell, came west in 1885. Ten years later he purchased section 30-2-22, on the old Deloraine town site, where a third generation of the family now occupy the farm. Thanks also to Mrs. J. H. Renton and Mrs. W. H. Bell, Deloraine.

A number of families from Hamilton, Ontario settled between Turtle Mountain and Whitewater Lake in 1880, but when they learned that the Canadian Pacific Railway was going to run a line between these places, they chose a townsite on section 30-2-22, and named it Deloraine, after the home of the postmaster in Scotland.

A store, livery barn, hotel, bank, blacksmith shop, and a few houses were built, but when the CPR bypassed this site, most of the buildings were moved to the present site of Deloraine. One structure, a bank vault, built of native fieldstone by George Rickard, was left behind, and today it still stands on its original site, but the environs have changed, for it is now in my cattleyard.

A fieldstone bank vault at the site of Old Deloraine is probably the only one of its kind
still standing in Canada.
Source: Gordon Goldsborough (August 2007)