Wetaskiwin District Heritage Museum Centre & City of Wetaskiwin Archives

With Alberta’s history deeply entrenched in agriculture, it is no surprise that many immigrants settled in the province in the hopes of owning farmland. Though many Swedish immigrants first settled in the United States with the same intention, they would eventually travel north in the 1870s to engage with Canadian policies which made prairie farmland accessible to some immigrants. The Swedish broad axe pictured here is a large-headed axe with a wooden handle used to shape logs into squares for log-cabin construction by a man named Peter Olson. An axe such as this one may have also assisted in the clearing of land along with shovels and saws, as the removal of trees and stumps would have needed to be done by hand. Many of those hardworking individuals like Peter found work in lumber camps, mines, or building railroads. In turn, they utilized their earnings to purchase staples or attempt the establishment of their homesteads. A large influx of Swedish immigrants followed in the 1920s and later the 1940s, but a culture cultivated by the agriculture industry lives on in Alberta today!