By Sheri Monk

North of the river hills, past the transition of grazing land into fertile farmland is the town of Eatonia, nestled in a comfortable, somewhat isolated quiet between Leader and Kindersley.
Eatonia is a community with a history, but also a future. Its very resilience and relative isolation have made it steadfastly resistant against the current trend of shrinking population and stagnant growth which has plagued rural Saskatchewan.
“It kind of hurts me inside that young people don’t know what branch lines meant to settling the country,” said local author and historian Bill Wardill.
And to Eatonia, its branchline meant a whole lot – which is just one of the reasons why the community has rallied to restore its train station as a museum. Branchlines were lifelines – they brought hope, a cause, a future and above all, a population which could be nursed into a village and one day, a thriving town.
Eatonia was established in 1919 as Eaton – the town’s name was changed in 1921 to Eatonia due to postal mail confusion with nearby town Eston.
The rail line running through Eatonia was one of the very last branches surveyed by Canadian Northern Railway, which was acquired in 1918 by the Canadian government. The line still exists and is still owned by CN.
“The first scheduled train was in 1920, we have a picture of it,” said Wardill while providing a tour of the work in progress at the station.
A temporary train station was established pending construction of the large building still at the site.
“This was it, this is the original site,” said Anne Reinhardt, chair of the Eatonia Heritage Board.
The railway station opened in 1925 and is the only of its kind. It was one of two new prototypes developed by CN and was never used again after its inaugural design at Eatonia. After a lengthy history crucial to Eatonia’s development, the station was closed in 1971. Wardill says it is the only station permitted to stay exactly in its original spot. Typically, he says, communities wishing to buy disused stations from the CNR were required to move them away fom the tracks if the line was still in use.
Half of the large, red building is now used as the town’s library. The other half will be restored as closely as possible to its original state. It features a second storey, which was used as living quarters for the station agent and his family.
“The town and the Lions were using it as storage for junk. It was not developed, not used at all,” said Wardill.
The station sat unused for years and years, until an old heritage Eaton catalogue house was donated to the town and moved onto the same tract of land adjacent to the tracks, next to the station.
Reinhardt says a committee was formed and the community sprang into action to preserve the station.
“The house is what spurred the interest,” said Reinhardt.
The community’s interest was realized in the form of fundraising and planning. The, station, the Eaton’s house and the tract of land both reside at have all officially been designated as heritage property. Now known as Eatonia Heritage Park, the unique attraction features the museum, catalogue house and a caboose. The result was a major community undertaking.
The local Legion used its remaining funds once folding the Eatonia chapter to renovate the second floor of the station. Reinhardt, who grew up in a railroad family, was able to secure many antique and heritage items from her father’s collection. However, without her knowledge, many of the items she intended to display at the station had been sold as content of a cabin which was moved to the U.S.
Reinhardt was not deterred – she tracked the new owner down and arranged to buy back the valuable items, now on display at the station.
The basement, featuring its original concrete construction, features a secret bunker build to shield the station manager from nuclear radiation. Its presence speaks to a time of cold war paranoia and yet also of an innocence – though the bunker’s walls are thick, it would not have been capable of stopping the fallout. Whatever the bunker contained never became public knowledge. Wardill believes there was a short wave radio and an encrypting machine.
Stepping into the station is like stepping back into a simpler past. A collective history shared across the nation, but perhaps remembered most wistfully by those who learned to walk in the wide, open prairie.
Those like Wardill, now in his early 80s, grew up at Eatonia and is now fighting to preserve even the memories of his way of life. Like clockwork, Wardill works at the station every afternoon. Though he still enjoys using his hands to fix the basement staircase for instance – he says he needs some additional manpower to complete the project and ready it for the public. In keeping with his need to record history, he has lovingly prepared laminated information sheets throughout the station’s many rooms to ensure visitors will have a wealth of information to take away from the experience.
Wardill claims the first station agent, F.J. Corcoran charted the future of his town by building a movie theatre/dance hall in 1934, which turned Eatonia into a Saturday night shopping centre. Later, as mayor, he brokered the deal in which the town took over the railway’s water system and an abondoned sewer line. This made Eatonia the smallest town in the province with a complete sewer and water system and the second on the North American Continent to use a lagoon for effluent disposal.
“Whatever we are now, we are the result of our yesterdays,” said Wardill.