The rising, delerious popularity of Eldred, Saskatchewan

Periodically, I do some standard Google searches, but I distinctly recall the “Eldred, Saskachewan” search string to come up fairly dry. Maybe a few applicable search results and some data-driven gazeteers here and there. There was also that 2016 video that comes up.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1PdUbMCcFg

There was also the “Roadside Thoughts” website which appears to be a script/data-driven website with template pages and not a whole lot of special attention given to the communities they devote pages to. To their credit, while they are very thin on insightful information, at least for a time, it was something. There is another website attempting to do “Eldred Geneology“, but short on detail; an “Eldred map” with no map (not that I would expect to see one), but a applet advertising Trivago trips to Prince Albert, about 105 km away by highway.

And above, the hourly forecast for Eldred for the next 30 or so hours, provided apparently by the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation. It has a link to weather radar, presumably for Eldred, but it doesn’t succeed in giving any radar. But of course, The Weather Network has Eldred weather for the next 7 days, and it has radar if you just have to have that Eldred Weather Radar “fix”.

Also, Eldred is also given a footnote in Wikipedia, as a former town within the Regional Municipality of Spiritwood #496. It was mentioned because it was a town where the Big River branch of the CN Rail passed through.

All of this recent attention is not bad for a town that hasn’t existed since about 1959.

Visits: 86

Eldred, Saskatchewan on the map … barely

Eldred,SK_near_debden
This satellite shot of Eldred and environs pretty much all that mankind seems to know about Eldred at this point. Take note of Eldred Lake, about 5km southwest of Eldred. Eldred itself is near the top centre of the image.

I’ve written about obscure Saskatchewan communities before. Here is another community far to the north of Unity. My ancestors from France settled here.

Many of my ancestors were pioneers that broke new farming ground nearest to a community called Eldred, Saskatchewan. Eldred was about 10 km northwest of Debden along rural route 55. You need to at some point go off-road to an unnamed road to get there. My mother said that it is a community that no longer exists. Well, it appears to exist to someone operating Google Maps, since I can now find it in pretty much the place mom said it was in, so there is no mistake.

So, at this point, it appears that Eldred is not much more than two crossroads: one unnamed road ending on another unnamed road. One is accessible to RR55, and Canwood RR494 (another road); and the other is accessible to RR793. There would be a few homes huddled close together within a 500-metre distance of each other going by this aerial shot, but that’s about it.

At the highest resolution, I can count no more than a dozen or so houses near that intersection. The farms haven’t gone away; they are still there. Eldred is 103 km northwest of Prince Albert, where I went to high school.

Nearby Eldred Lake appears to be just a large slough, being fed only by rain runoff from the surrounding land. I see no river that feeds into it.

Visits: 98