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The Winnipeg neighbourhood of Wolseley, situated just to the west of the opulent enclave of Armstrong's Point was Winnipeg's classic suburb. Houses and apartments began to appear in this area in the last decades of the nineteenth century, and by 1910 it was an established and growing neighbourhood. The houses built there were not so opulent as those in Crescentwood, but they were situated on wider, deeper lots with a broader avenue than those in Fort Rouge. Interspersed with the houses were large number of rooming houses and small apartment buildings.
This variability in the nature of the housing reflected not so much differences in social position of the residents as the differences in their incomes. Many of the residents of the suburb were of what would be described as the professional and middle class. They were doctors, lawyers, nurses, commercial salesman and small business owners.
Several of these professions did not enjoy a standard of living that matched the social status that they conferred. This is especially true of women's professions like teaching, nursing and journalism. Few single women had the means to keep a house, and to meet their needs, the Wolseley area was dotted with apartment buildings and respectable rooming houses.
The greater part of Wolseley's residents were of British or Ontario origin with an increasing number having come from farming communities in Manitoba as children began to leave the farm for the city in the first decades of the twentieth century.
The residents of Wolsely were united by a social life of clubs, professional organizations and charities. Indeed it is the political activism associated with British-Canadian Protestantism that the Wolseley area is often associated. Wolseley is often seen as a centre of Social Gospel Methodism and of the temperance and suffrage movements. Membership lists of organizations like the Women's Christian Temperance Union and the Political Equality League show a very large proportion of Wolseley area addresses.
TimeLinks Characters: Mary McRae is a from Scotland and lives in the Wolseley area.
Page revised: 29 August 2009
