If Mill Woods was its own city, it would be the fifth largest in Alberta, bigger than Ft. McMurray or Grande Prairie. The 2012 municipal census counted close to 80,000 residents in this southeast Edmonton subdivision.
This map shows illustrations of various points of interest and historical sites of south Edmonton in 1890-1900, including the location of the Papaschase Reserve. 1951. (Image courtesy of City of Edmonton Archives, EAM-29)
Treaty Six North West Territories, plan of the subdivision into sections of the lands reserved for the Band of Chief Papaschase, [ca. 1915]. (Image courtesy of City of Edmonton Archives, EAM-2)
Mill Woods residents filling out paperwork, March 1979. (Image courtesy of City of Edmonton Archives, ET-28-234)
Mill Woods in March 1979. (Image courtesy of City of Edmonton Archives, ET-28-1389)
City of Edmonton subdivision index, featuring an outline of Mill Woods, March 1976. (Image courtesy of City of Edmonton Archives, EAM-395)
Mill Woods, 2002. (Image courtesy of Google Earth)
Mill Woods sits on land that was once earmarked for a reserve to belong to the Papaschase band. But the reserve was deemed to have been abandoned in 1891. That is disputed by the descendants of the band as they brought a lawsuit for compensation against the federal government of Canada in 2001. The Supreme Court dismissed the lawsuit in 2008 on the grounds that the statute of limitations had expired.
Mill Woods was named for Mill Creek, which flows through the northeast portion of the subdivision, and its Indigenous heritage is reflected in the names of numerous neighbourhoods in Mill Woods.
The City of Edmonton quietly began assembling land in the area in 1970 to create the new subdivision. Jannie Edwards has lived in Mill Woods since the 1980s and helped create the Mill Woods Living Heritage project.
“They wanted to keep it [a secret] because they wanted to discourage developers and flippers,” Edwards says. “My generation, the people coming of age in the baby boom… there was an opportunity to buy lots at below market value. And there’s pictures of young people… lined up at City Hall, camping outside to get some of these lots. Kind of urban homesteading: they had to build these houses within a year… the challenge of that. So you will see a lot of really interesting residential architecture.”
“The Mill Woods original plan was, I think, a new city, a city within a city,” Edwards continues. “It was a response to the housing crises of the late 60s and early 70s as a result of the second oil boom, and that conception of it as a city within a city is still something at the heart of this community.”
Shane Bergdahl is another long-time resident of Mill Woods who has been very active in the community, especially in organizing the very popular Canada Day fireworks show. He says enthusiasm for community activities like that is because of the geography of Mill Woods.
“We are basically surrounded,” Bergdahl says. “We have the Whitemud on the north, Calgary Trail on the west and we have the Anthony Henday on the east and south of us. We are pretty much cut off from the rest of the city because of those.”
Bergdahl says that the sense of being on a kind of island has contributed to a spirit of self-reliance among the people of Mill Woods:
“So everything in the southeast part of Edmonton is like a town. It’s always seemed, in a whole bunch of capacities, like we function differently than other parts of Edmonton because of geography. We need something done, we don’t wait for it to happen through the various levels of government. We band together. We push. That’s how we got the rec centre. That’s how we got a bunch of stuff working together that way.”
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