Fort McMurray, 1960: The River Town Before the Oil Sands

In January 1960 about eleven hundred people lived where the Clearwater River runs into the Athabasca, in a river town at the end of the Northern Alberta Railways. The passenger train came twice a week and there was no road out. On paper the town was not even called Fort McMurray. Everyone knew about the black sand in the riverbanks; the people of this river had sealed their canoes with it long before any trader arrived. That same year a company filed an application to build a plant on the river, and within eight years the town was five times its size. This is how the river town lived before the oil sands, told from the census, the railway timetables, the local walking tours and the families who are still there. 📌 What you'll learn • How a Hudson's Bay Company post became two settlements, Fort McMurray and Waterways; why the railway ran a Packard car on its rails and why its arrival has three different dates; and why the barges for the North started from Waterways • What the valley lived on before the boom: the Waterways salt plant (1937–1950), the Abasand works that burned in 1941 and again in 1945, the wartime Canol supply line, and the Port Radium ore that came south in burlap sacks • Why there was no Fort McMurray on paper in 1960, who lived in the town — Cree, Dene and Métis families, railway and river families — the drugstore on Franklin Avenue, and what one January day looked like at the end of the line • What the 1960 Great Canadian Oil Sands application set in motion, the morning of 30 September 1967, how 1,186 people became about 5,900 in seven years, and what is still standing today Images are reconstructions; real photographs are held by the Provincial Archives of Alberta and the Fort McMurray Heritage Society. Educational and historical content. 📚 Key sources — Alberta Source (Heritage Community Foundation), Waterways Takes the Lead (1921–1959) and Capital of the Tar Sands, archived 2010 — Fort McMurray Heritage Society and Provincial Archives of Alberta — Waterways and Downtown Fort McMurray historical walking tours (On This Spot) — Canadian Railroad Historical Association, Canadian Rail No. 559 (March–April 2014): Passenger Trains on the Northern Alberta Railways — Government of Alberta, Abasand Oils Ltd. Self-Guided Historic Walking Tour and Map (2014) — McMurray Métis (Métis Local 1935) community report, About the Community, ABMI — and other sources. #FortMcMurray #Alberta #CanadianHistory #LifeInTheNorth #HowWeLivedHere ℹ️ About this video Educational and historical content. The script, research and edit are the author's own, based on the sources listed in the description. The visual reconstructions and the narrator's voice are created with the help of AI, for illustrative purposes — these are not real recordings or authentic archival footage. Stories are simplified for a general audience and may contain small approximations. Purpose: to inform and to remember. 🕰️ Historical context The events described took place under legal and social conditions very different from today's. They are presented for historical understanding, without intent to justify or condemn any person, community or group.