New chapter begins: Saskatoon to relocate city archives

It’s a new chapter for the City Archives of Saskatoon.

Jeff O’Brien, Saskatoon’s city archivist, said the city had been looking for a permanent facility for the archives to call home for many years. The archives are now set to relocate the entire collection to the old Post Office Building downtown, right across from City Hall and the Saskatoon Public Library.

The current location near the Saskatoon Airport has been in use since 2010, but has also reached its maximum capacity, O’Brien explained. He said the collection is almost twice as large today as it was 14 years ago.

According to the city, the archives contain 450,000 photographs, 4,000 feet of shelves and 3,000 linear feet of records, along with thousands of maps and blueprints dating back to the early 1900s. About 3,500 boxes of material will be moved this week.

The City Archives will relocate around 3,500 boxes of Saskatchewan history to the new location across City Hall. (Mia Holowaychuk/650 CKOM)

“The goal will be to make sure we don’t lose anything, but to also do some organization up front,” O’Brien said.

“You want to keep the stuff that tells the story (with) the most summary, but at the same time the most substantial way possible.”

The largest collection the archives holds is the negative photo collection from the Star Phoenix newspaper dating from the 1940s to 1999.

One of its first photos was taken the day members of the Saskatoon Light Infantry returned home to their families after the Second World War in 1945. The photo captures 21st Street as crowds gathered by the railway station where the current Midtown Mall sits to welcome the soldiers back to the city.

Saskatoon’s 21st Street in October of 1945, decorated for the return of the Saskatoon Light Infantry. (City of Saskatoon Archives – S-SP-B-001/Submitted)

O’Brien said some of the oldest records date back to 1902, including the first council minutes for what was then the Village of Saskatoon.

He said the archives also hold copies of papers from the Temperance Colonization Society from the 1880s.

Many of the records, such as fire insurance maps from the 1920s to 1950s, are used frequently today for environmental assessments.

“Before you’re building a new building, you really want to know if there was ever a gas station there,” O’Brien said.

The block-by-block colour-coded maps of the city were hand drawn, with information indicating the construction of each building. The maps were then sold to insurance companies to set fire insurance rates.

Fire insurance maps dating back to the 1920s are frequently used for environmental assessments today. (Mia Holowaychuk/650 CKOM)

The archive is also home to the rich personal history of real Saskatchewan families throughout the years.

O’Brien pointed out a collection of family papers he calls the mothers collection, which chronicle three generations of mothers that homesteaded just north of Sutherland in the 1880s.

“They’re just like any other Saskatchewan early 20th-century farm family,” he said. “The difference is that they kept all of their records, all their letters, all their photographs (and) diaries.”

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Some of those letters were written with love from a 17 year old girl to her fiancé, who was a farmhand in 1933.

“She wrote beautiful letters,” O’Brien said.

The move is expected to be completed by May 6.