End of Steel to Mile 0

We begin our tour with this aerial view of Dawson Creek taken in 1949, alongside another taken from the same angle today.
Dawson Creek was founded in 1931, which is fairly late as far as Canadian towns go. Yet it grew and matured very quickly. This historic photo was taken less than 20 years after its founding, and we can already see that Dawson Creek's downtown had filled out much of the space it occupies today. It has continued to grow and develop since that time, though most of that development has spread out to the suburbs.

For the first couple decades of the town's history, this railway station was how almost everybody and everything arrived in Dawson Creek. It was the terminus station of the Northern Alberta Railway (N.A.R.). As the end of the railway it was called End of Steel. It was actually the decision to make End of Steel at this spot that led to the establishment of Dawson Creek here, rather than the other way around.
An important aspect of Dawson Creek's history is that the railway came from Edmonton, Alberta, rather than the population centres of southern British Columbia. This meant that Dawson Creek's early cultural and economic development were heavily oriented towards neighbouring Alberta.

This 1985 photo shows Northern Alberta Railway (N.A.R.) Park with the Dawson Creek Art Gallery housed in the historic grain elevator. Unlike many agricultural towns on Canada's prairies, Dawson Creek has preserved one of the grain elevators that once dominated the town's skyline. This grain elevator is a fundamental part of Dawson Creek's heritage, and indicates the main driving force behind the early European settlement of this region and Dawson Creek's main economic engine in its early years.

In this view looking across Alaska Avenue, opposite the N.A.R. Station, we see the Dawson Hotel going up. "The Dawson" became a community landmark in those early years, and was one of several hotels that anchored the new community of Dawson Creek.
When the town was established many of its first inhabitants came from a small community now remembered as Old Dawson. In 1931 they had made the bold decision to pack up their whole village—buildings and all—and move to Dawson Creek. These people formed the nucleus of the new town.

This photo, taken in 1942 or 43 shows a busy, built-up, and muddy 10th Street. A whole range of businesses have sprung up, and the many new-looking cars and trucks and fashionably dressed men and women hint at the success of the rapidly growing town. As the N.A.R.'s End of Steel, Dawson Creek prospered as the service hub for farmers across the region.

As you walk down 10th Street, take a peek into the alley on your right. On the wall on your right side you'll find a mural showing a street scene in Dawson Creek at the outset of the building of the Alaska Highway in early 1942. You get a sense of a town on the cusp of a great transformation.
On the one hand there are signs of Dawson Creek's roots as a quiet frontier town. In front of the church a rather exasperated-looking trader makes a futile effort to get his stubborn pack horse to obey. A cheerful First Nations' couple stand outside the small square-fronted offices of the D.W. Faust Contractor & Builder. The woman's walking stick would seem to indicate they've hiked into Dawson Creek, perhaps to do some shopping and to get the latest news of the outside world. A rather rustic looking farmer beckons to the viewer, perhaps to come in and visit the Cash and Carry general store.
There are also signs of modernity. A huge sleek automobile looks distinctly out of place on the unpaved street. The First Nations man is holding a copy of the Peace River Block News with a headline blaring US & CANADA JOIN FORCES TO BUILD ALASKA HIGHWAY. Nearby a bewildered looking US soldier sits on the sidewalk with his rucksack, perhaps wondering how he ended up in remote northern Canada. He looks every bit the 'Doughboy', the common nickname for American soldiers in those days.

Here we see firefighters battling a fire that has engulfed the Dawson Creek Co-op Union. The Co-op store is one of the town's oldest businesses, having been founded at the old Dawson Creek townsite in 1921 and then moved to this spot in the new Dawson Creek a decade later. While the building didn't survive this fire, the Co-op did. Rather than rebuild here it was moved to a new location on the other side of 8th Street, near the Mile 0 roundabout. It remains there to this day.

If you cross back over the street and walk around the former Coop building, on the west wall facing the parking lot you'll find the second mural in Dawson Creek's Community Mural project. Called People of the Community, it was designed in 2001 by Calvin Kruk and painted by local art students. You may recognize Kruk's name because later on in this tour we will visit the Centre for the Performing Arts that was later named for him. He became mayor of Dawson Creek in 2005 and was a strong advocate for community arts before his untimely passing in 2008.

This jarring photo was taken looking back towards downtown Dawson Creek. It shows a scene of utter devastation, the aftermath of the greatest disaster in Dawson Creek's history. On February 13, 1943, a fire started by a dropped lamp in a barn ran out of control and ignited a nearby truck of TNT. The resulting explosion destroyed most of the downtown, killing 5 people and causing an estimated $350,000 in damages, about $6.2 million today.

These unique alley murals survived the September 2012 fire that claimed the historic Alaska Hotel. If you look carefully you will notice evidence of the blaze on some of the murals, which are paintings of actual buildings as they appeared in 1946. The artists, Shelly Mowat and Holly Squires, sought to create a unique snapshot of Dawson Creek right at the end of the war.

This photo from early 1943 was taken at the height of the Alaska Highway building boom. As you can see from the blown out windows in the G. Kittson Drug Store, it was taken in the immediate aftermath of the great explosion that destroyed much of downtown. It shows several American soldiers, amongst them two from the black engineering battalions that helped build the Alaska Highway. These men were subjected to blatant racial discrimination and kept confined to army camps outside of town until their help was desperately needed in disaster relief efforts. This photo likely marks the first occasion these men were allowed into Dawson Creek itself.¹
Standing on this corner today, you can turn to the left and see the Mile 0 marker in the middle of the intersection. While the marker wasn't put there until 1946, it remains a permanent reminder of why the soldiers were here.
After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, the Americans realized that Alaska was virtually defenseless and easily cut off by sea. They needed a land connection to the far north so they could send troops and supplies to fend off Japanese invasion. As Dawson Creek was the end of the rail way, it was the natural starting point for this highway. Thus it became Mile 0. In an atmosphere of wartime urgency, a titanic construction effort began and Dawson Creek was at its heart.

The Mile 0 Post the year after its unveiling on Christmas Day 1946. Technically this isn't the spot that surveyors officially designated as Mile 0. That is at the roundabout at 8th Street and Alaska Highway, where the Surveyor Statue is now.
The official Mile 0 was initially marked by a non-descript four foot tall marker. But when it was run over and destroyed by a car in 1946, Dawson Creek's Jaycees, the Junior Chamber of Commerce, had an idea. They thought they could capitalize on tourist interest in the highway by making a more photogenic mile post and moving it to a more lucrative location.

On this spot you can see the Lawrence Meat Market, a Dawson Creek institution. Glover Lawrence first founded it in nearby Rolla in 1931. Realizing that the railway was not about to be extended to Rolla, he saw which way the wind was blowing and moved to Dawson Creek in 1940. The family-owned butcher has remained here ever since. Though the retail outlet you see in front of you today is called the Butcher Block, it's still the same Lawrence Meats.

People line 102 Ave to watch a parade pass by the Toronto Dominion Bank building, which today has expanded to encompass a larger section of the block. For the young town of Dawson Creek, the late 1950s and early 1960s were a remarkable period of rapid population growth, economic prosperity, and infectious optimism.

This is where the Windsor Hotel once stood. Built in 1951 at an eye-popping cost of $250,000 (nearly $3 million today), the Windsor came to represent Dawson Creek's postwar prosperity. It advertised itself as the "Northland's Finest Accommodation."¹ This was the age of mass car tourism, and this image is from a postcard which would have been sold to those first car-borne tourists. The Windsor was a popular spot for them to get a good night's sleep in a comfy bed before beginning their long journey along the Alaska Highway.

We see here the Carlsonia Theatre in the winter of 1942. It went by several names over its brief life: the Opera House and, after a change of ownership in 1946, the Northland. It was the town's first, and, for a time, only movie theatre.
Keen-eyed observers, like the future historian Dorthea Calverley, hailed the opening of the 450-seat Carlsonia in 1936. Amidst the doldrums of the Great Depression, she saw it as symbolic of the town's rapid development and growing self-confidence in the five years since its founding.¹
The theatre was heavily damaged in a fire in 1948 and finally demolished in 1951. Other theatres like the Vogue in 1949, the Crest in 1956, and the Ranch Drive-In Theatre in 1959, all stepped into the gap to fulfill people's insatiable demand for Hollywood blockbusters.²

The police station was located in the building you see in this historic photo, on the corner of 10th Street. Dawson Creek had a small police force at the time this photo was taken. In 1948, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police detachment took over policing and moved into a new station, at the Joe Dill location. Later on, in 1961, the RCMP along with the fire department, moved into the city hall block just a few blocks to the west off Alaska Avenue.

A Woolworth's Department Store once stood here, built just after the Second World War. Just the next block over, the Hudson's Bay Company also opened a large department store around the same time. These were yet another indicator of the growing prosperity of Dawson Creek in the post-war boom years.

Here we see the second Harper's General Store. It was named after its proprietor W.O. (Wes) Harper. Wes, along with his father and four brothers, were some of the first homesteaders in the district, moving here from Vancouver in 1914. Wes, who went off to fight in the First World War, began managing the general store at Dawson Creek's old townsite. Soon after he purchased the store outright, renaming it W.O. Harper General Merchant. In 1931 he had it moved on skids to this location. He sold this lot in 1942 and moved a block south, running his store there until he sold it to the Hudson's Bay Company in 1952.
At the Walter Wright Pioneer Park there is a replica of Harper's General Store as it would have appeared at the old townsite. Carefully recreated from old photographs from the time, it is a remarkable time capsule of life in Dawson Creek's first days.¹

The Hudson’s Bay Company bought the Harper’s General Store of the 1940s and rebuilt it. The store was a downtown mainstay for years before changing to Zeller’s in the early 1990s. The building has since been remodeled and is home to several unique Dawson Creek businesses.

This was the Our Lady of Perpetual Help, the first catholic church in Dawson Creek built in 1931. It was demolished in 1965 and the congregation moved to the Notre Dame Parish church just half a block to the west on 104 Ave.

Looking back across the intersection we see what was once the federal government's administrative building in Dawson Creek. Today it is the Calvin Kruk Centre for the Arts, named for Dawson Creek's community-minded mayor from 2005 to 2008.

In 1968, the Notre Dame School went up in flames. As you can see, it then rose from the ashes. Founded as a catholic school during the Second World War, the Notre Dame school has been a key educational institution in the heart of Dawson Creek ever since.

1958 saw the Royal Bank commence business in Dawson Creek. After two temporary sites, the bank chose this site for its permanent home, which had previously been Joe Dill’s Funeral Home.
Joe Dill was the town's undertaker for much of its early history. Dill had been an early arrival, starting out as a furniture salesman at the old townsite in the late 1920s. Moving to the new townsite in 1931, his funeral home prepared those who had passed to be interred at one of Dawson Creek's two cemeteries: the Dawson Creek Cemetery located to the northwest by Pioneer Park, or the Brookside Cemetery, located a short distance to the southeast of downtown alongside the river.

Built in 1949, Bill’s News had low ceilings, wooden floors that always creaked, and friendly staff. Here we see it around the 1950s. Back then it sold many of the same things it still sells today: newspapers, magazines, candy bars, ice cream, Players cigarettes.
As you can see, the small creaky building was replaced in 1970 with a new one that continues to this day. Today they have enhanced their offerings with toys and clothing, making it popular with the town's teenagers.

This playfully colourful building was the Alaska Hotel, and for decades it was the best known landmark in Dawson Creek--well, after the Mile Post. The hotel was first built in 1931 and known as the Dew Drop Inn. With the arrival of American troops to build the Alaska Highway, the hotel was greatly expanded and given its famous name. At that time it was the only pub in town, and as such became the chief social hub for American soldiers stationed here.

On this corner in the centre of town we find another Dawson Creek institution, the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC), as you can see they have modernized their building in the 80 years since this historic photo was taken. The bank was established in Dawson Creek very early on, in 1929 at the old townsite. Two years later they--like everyone else--moved to the new location that the Northern Alberta Railway had picked for the town. As Dawson Creek's first bank, they have maintained not only this prime piece of real estate in the centre of town, but the loyalty of many who have called Dawson Creek home.

These three panels depict scenes of the formidable terrain faced by the engineers and their machines during construction of the Alaska Highway. The panels were painted in 2003 by Shannon Tilley and Terri LeGear. They were working off of photographs featured in the popular 1979 book The Trail of '42: A Pictorial History of the Alaska Highway by Stan Cohen.
You can learn more about the grueling conditions these men endured in On This Spot's accompanying tour: Driving through Peace Country: Dawson Creek to Kiskatinaw Bridge.

This is one of the oldest hotels in Dawson Creek. Its first name was The Red Apple. Over the years, it's had many other names: Maple Leaf, Shangri-La, Spanish Grill and then in 1945, the Blue Bird Hotel & Café.
The Red Apple used to have a distinctive sign with certain negative connotations that shocked Dorthea Calverley when she first came to Dawson Creek in 1936--so much so that she almost left the town forever. It's a good thing she didn't as she would later become Dawson Creek's most prolific chronicler and without her we'd have precious few archival records to go off of in creating this tour.

Here is Dawson Creek's iconic radio station CJDC, which can be found on your dial at 890 AM. CJDC has been keeping the people of the Peace River Country informed and entertained ever since it first began transmitting in December 1947. The new radio station was greatly welcomed by the town's residents since up to that point the only signal they could get was a faltering and staticky broadcast from Grand Prairie's CFGP—some 110 km distant.

In 1942, next to the site of the original Peace River Block News, the army set up a Quonset hut for its military headquarters. Huts like these were easy to manufacture and build and used by the thousands by the US Army during the construction of the Alaska Highway.

A crowd gathers outside the offices of the Peace River Block News in the mid-1930s. The Peace River Block News went by several names over the course of its life, and served as the paper of record for the Peace Country from the founding of Dawson Creek in 1931 to the paper's closure in October 2023.

Returning to the town's central intersection of 10th Street and 102nd Ave, we see a beaming group of men and women as well as a pipe band, a Northern Stage Lines bus, and the iconic Mile 0 marker. These are the staff of the Northern Stage Lines company and they are celebrating the inauguration of their bus service to Prince George.

Since 1930 this site has seen many changes: from a small general store, to W.O. Harper's General Store, to the New Palace Hotel and Cafe, to an empty lot, to the present day Bank of Montreal.
Here we see it in its days as the New Palace Hotel and Cafe. The New Palace was opened in 1943 by Mah Show and Mah Fong, members of Dawson Creek's small Chinese community. The hotel stayed in business until 1967.

A crowd of onlookers has gathered in front of the Dawson Creek Co-op to watch a detachment of Royal Canadian Air Force service members parade down the town's main street during the Second World War. Notice the Union Jacks and Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) flags at the left of the historic photo.

Here we see several dog teams harnessed up ready to be mushed across the snowy prairie. They were once a common sight in Dawson Creek, one of the most efficient forms of winter transportation. To their right is the storefront of Dawson Creek Motors, which once stood on this spot. It was for many years the only car dealership in town. This corner lot was also home to the Empress Hotel and a small cafe. All of this space would eventually become the Park Hotel in the 1960s. Currently it operates as the Silverado Inn.

Returning to N.A.R. Park, we are just about to wrap up this tour. Along the way we have learned about the many different people, ideas, and technologies that have shaped Dawson Creek. There remains one major development over the last 50 years we haven't yet mentioned: oil and gas.

We conclude this tour of Dawson Creek at the Mile 0 Cairn that welcomes visitors to Dawson Creek and to the World Famous Alaska Highway. We hope you enjoyed the tour and learned much about this city's unique history.
If you are energized to dig deeper into Dawson Creek's story you can check out the Walter Wright Pioneer Village, located just 2.5 kilometres north on the Alaska Highway. You can see it on the left.
We also strongly encourage you to listen to our audio driving tour, which accompanies you on a drive through the region's attractions. It also covers the first section of the Alaska Highway as far as beautiful Kiskatinaw Provincial Park and the historic trestle bridge built there in 1942.