RM of Mountain View’s story
The Rural Municipality of Mountain View No. 318 took shape in 1909. Before that, the area was the Mountain View Local Improvement District. That spring a municipal committee petitioned the Municipal Commissioner for Saskatchewan for a vote on forming a rural municipality, and sent along seven possible names, among them Glengarry, Bramley and Newbury. Mountain View was the one chosen. In a July 1909 vote, 36 of the 52 voters favoured the new RM, and it was officially established on December 13, 1909.
Early on, big farms took up much of the land. The Engen farm of 1909 covered nine sections, the Lamborn farm of 1910 five sections, and the Bellamy farm of 1912 seventeen. The Lamborn farm was sold to a group of Mennonite settlers in 1925, and the Engen and Bellamy farms were later broken into smaller ones. In recent years the trend has turned the other way, with smaller farms being taken over by larger units. In 1911 a Canadian Pacific Railway branch line from Macklin to Rosetown opened through the southwest corner of the RM, following the Eagle Creek valley. The villages of Herschel and Stranraer grew up along it.
Land that once fed herds of plains bison now grows some of the best farmland in Saskatchewan, and agriculture remains the main economic activity, with ranching in the hills as well. Soft coal was mined in a small valley south of Herschel in the 1930s, and it became known as the Coal Mine Ravine. Today it is home to the Ancient Echoes Interpretive Centre in Herschel, a Municipal Heritage Property, as is the Stranraer United Church, built between 1926 and 1929. The RM office is in Herschel.
Written from Wikipedia’s article “Rural Municipality of Mountain View No. 318” (CC BY-SA 4.0), and shared under the same licence.