Vacation in Canada, eh? 7: Dorothy, Alberta
Human presence is fleeting, but traces linger.
By Peter Coffman
I’ve read that the locals don’t like it when you call Dorothy a ‘ghost town’. But it does what every good ghost town should do: it reminds us of mortality. The vast landscape that cradles Dorothy is eternal. We are not.
Dorothy was settled around the beginning of the 20th century. At its peak, it had (maybe) about 100 people. I’ve heard various estimates of Dorothy’s population today. None of them hits double digits, but they’re all above zero. So technically, no, not a ghost town. But it is, surely, a place full of ghosts. The very buildings themselves are ghosts – traces of what was once present, and is now absent.
You never see a ghost coming – they just appear. That’s how it is with Dorothy. The epic landscape of the Badlands stretches before you, then the earth divides and a chasm opens below. There lies Dorothy.
Who lived here? Walk around long enough, and attentively enough, and you may begin to hear their voices.
You can start with the United Church. One of the voices you hear there might belong to suffragette Nellie McClung, guest speaker at a Chicken Supper fundraiser held in Dorothy under a full autumn moon in 1931. Proceeds went toward the purchase of the church building ($50) and the horses and trucks needed to move it from its original site 25 miles away. Mrs. McClung spoke on the theme of “Silver Linings”. These must have been hard to find in 1931. “It is the dry ‘30s”, the parish records note, “and money is scarce and crops are little or none.”
Despite the scarcity of money and crops, the hamlet’s Catholics also managed to find a building – a redundant schoolhouse – and move it to Dorothy for a second life as a church. It still has something of a classroom air. But statues of Jesus and Mary, images of the Stations of the Cross, and the stately oak altar all mark it as sacred space.
If you hear a soft, disembodied chuckle drifting across an empty room, that might be the shade of rancher Tom Hodgson, once Dorothy’s most eligible bachelor. In April of 1952, renowned photographer Richard Harrington published a feature in Toronto’s Star Weekly called “The Lonely Bachelors of ‘Dinosaur Valley’”. Exhibit A was Tom Hodgson. Tom was a successful rancher in Dorothy, financially comfortable, secure, handsome – but lonely. Why? Because there weren’t enough single women in Dorothy.
The story was picked up by other publications, including New York’s popular Parade magazine. By the summer, Tom had received 3,400 letters from ladies eager to relieve his loneliness. One woman, Rose Brewer, traveled all the way from Chicago to Dorothy to meet Tom. But she went back home and married the boyfriend she already had.
Part of the problem, Tom explained, was the houses of Dorothy. “I guess some of the ranch houses and furniture are a little old fashioned and out of date, because the houses are mostly 40 years old or more. They were built by our dads when they first homesteaded this country before the first war.”
A couple of those homesteads still linger on the lonely streets of Dorothy. Tom of course is long gone. He died in 1988, aged 75 and still a bachelor.
No building evokes the West more instantly or evocatively than the grain elevator. At its peak a hundred years ago, Dorothy had three. One endures. The Alberta Pacific Grain Co. elevator is the hamlet’s proudest landmark; the first building most visitors see and the last one they forget. Now roofless and weathered, it stands defiantly, like a fugitive from modernity, positively Ruskinian in its beauty:
For, indeed, the greatest glory of a building is not in its stones, nor in its gold. Its glory is in its Age, and in that deep sense of voicefulness, of stern watching, which we feel in walls that have long been washed by the passing waves of humanity.
John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, 1849
Those passing waves have receded from Dorothy, and the tide is all but out. But their voices still echo distantly in the empty buildings.
Peter Coffman, History & Theory of Architecture program
peter.coffman@carleton.ca
@petercoffman.bsky.social