Fort Victoria, National historic site and open-air museum in Smoky Lake County, Canada
Fort Victoria is a national historic site of Canada and an open-air museum in Smoky Lake County, Alberta, set along the North Saskatchewan River. The grounds hold wooden buildings from the fur trade and early settlement era that visitors can walk through and explore.
Methodist missionaries established a presence here in the early 1860s, and the Hudson's Bay Company built a trading post on the site in 1864. The name Victoria was chosen to honor the British queen of the time.
The site sits where Cree, Métis, French-Canadian, and European settlers once lived and worked side by side. Walking among the wooden buildings today gives a clear sense of how different ways of life coexisted in this corner of Alberta.
The site opens during the warmer months, generally from mid-May to early September, and is located on Range Road 171A in Smoky Lake County. Admission is cash-only, so it is worth bringing money along before you arrive.
The clerk's quarters, built around 1865, is the only building on the site that has never been moved from its original spot. Nearby, a cemetery on a hill overlooking the river holds around 100 marked graves, many of them from a smallpox outbreak in the 1870s.
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