Fort Victoria, National historic site and open-air museum in Smoky Lake County, Alberta, Canada
Fort Victoria is a national historic site and open-air museum in Smoky Lake County, Alberta, on the north bank of the North Saskatchewan River about 100 kilometres downstream from Edmonton. Its centrepiece is the 1865 clerk's quarters, the oldest building in Alberta still on its original foundations, surrounded by other wooden structures of the fur-trade and settlement era.
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 in 1865, is the oldest building in Alberta still on its original foundations. Victoria Park Cemetery, established around 1896 on a hill above the river, is the second of six cemeteries in the settlement and holds about 100 recognizable graves of Native and settler people, likely including victims of the 1870 smallpox epidemic.
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