Road Trip: The West Side of Lake Manitoba
- Sharron Arksey
- 1 day ago
- 8 min read
By Sharron Arksey
Manitoba’s Provincial Trunk Highway 50 begins where it meets the Yellowhead Highway (Provincial Trunk Highway Number16) in the south-central portion of the province. The paved highway stretches north for approximately 50 miles before it makes a turn to the west, ending at McCreary, MB. Its north-south route parallels the western shore of Lake Manitoba. The highway is on a gravel ridge left by the receding of Glacial Lake Agassiz thousands of years ago.
It is a land of marshes and cattle and many birds. Langruth has named itself “The Birdwatching Capital of Manitoba” and large swathes of the area along the west side of Lake Manitoba are included within the boundaries of Canadian Important Bird Areas.
About six miles north on the highway, I pass an intersection with Provincial Road 567. If I followed that road, and then made a turn south, I would arrive at the farm site where I grew up. This is familiar territory.
Another five miles up the highway and I come to the Lakeland Cemetery. It is the cemetery where my parents and grandparents are buried, as well as a brother and numerous aunts and uncles.
Approximately five miles west of the Lakeland Cemetery lies a smaller cemetery visited occasionally by cattle and wildlife, but seldom by people. It is the graveyard for the abandoned settlement of Marshland, and it is where my paternal great-grandparents are buried. But there are no roads to take you to the site, and GPS is unreliable.
The Marshland community extended 15 miles from north to south, east to within a few miles of Langruth and west to the Big Grass Marsh (the first Ducks Unlimited conservation project in Canada).
Icelanders came in 1899 looking for agricultural and stock-raising land. Many came from what is now Saskatchewan; some came from Leifur and Big Point to the north. They built a thriving community, with two schools, a community hall, and a library of Icelandic books.
The Hecland School District was formally established in 1903, and the teacher was the renowned author J. Magnus Bjarnarson, who remained there until the school closed in 1912. My Amma spoke often of the pride she felt in having such a famous person as the local teacher.
The Marshland School was also organized formally in 1903. From about 1920 on, attendance was low and on at least one occasion (1933) it was closed because there were no students. Attendance increased to about 10 students in the 1940s, but the school closed permanently in 1945, and its catchment area was added to the Langruth School District.
A community hall was built in 1906 and was torn down in 1922, with the building material donated to Langruth for its first hall.
The Icelandic library was also donated to Langruth, and I can remember seeing it in the club rooms for the Auxiliary to the Langruth Legion. What happened to it after that is a mystery, with few people remaining who might remember.
As time went on, families began to move away. Some moved to Big Point, some to Langruth. Others ventured further to more fertile soils in the Portage la Prairie area. As the 1930s brought the Great Depression to the Canadian prairies, more families departed. In 1935, the Canadian government established the Prairie Farms Rehabilitation Administration (PFRA) to help western farmers with drought and soil erosion. The Marshland community became part of a new community pasture system. In effect, families were forced to relocate because of all these changes. Some settlers moved graves out of the local cemetery to the Lakeland Cemetery.
As decades passed, the cemetery and its headstones suffered from the intrusion of wandering cattle. A group of Langruth area residents erected a fence surrounding the remaining graves as protection. PFRA ended in 2009, and local municipalities later signed conservation agreements with the Manitoba Habitat Heritage Corporation to permanently protect forty-five thousand acres of wetlands and aspen parklands. The cemetery lies within those boundaries.
Another five miles north on Highway 50 brings me to the hamlet of Langruth, but before I start touring the village, I drive to its end and turn right at Provincial Road 265, locally known as the Big Point Road. Big Point plays an influential role in the history of Icelandic settlement in the area.
The "big point" that gave the community its name extends far out into Lake Manitoba. Although the Icelanders were not the first to settle in the area, they arrived within the following decade. The earliest Icelander to settle in the community arrived in 1894. A post office was opened in 1897, and a school built of logs was erected in 1898. This log structure was replaced with a new frame building in 1909. Many stories are told of the first teachers who used physical punishment to deter Icelandic speakers in class and on the impact that had on Icelandic families.
The first Big Point picnic was held on July 1, 1898. It was an event that would continue for decades, transferred in time to Langruth and renamed the Langruth Sports Day.
For the first five years, the local schoolhouse was the focal point of community events, but in 1903 a community hall was built of logs. A new frame building was erected in 1910.
In 1903, a grade road connecting Big Point and Marshland was built, but most of the time it was impassable. This was the origin of Provincial Road 265, which still today can be a challenging drive depending on the weather and water levels.
For years, a Lutheran minister from Winnipeg would come to Big Point several times a year for services. In 1906, Big Point was able to get a resident minister who served the community for the next decade. In 1929, the congregation built a new church in Langruth. Herdubreid Lutheran Church provided services in Icelandic until the early 1960s. A sign outside the church today indicates that it is Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church; it has been designated a municipal heritage site, and it is still in use.
In 1994, Big Point celebrated its 100th anniversary. The site of the former community hall, which had been dismantled in the 1950s, already had a memorial cairn. At the anniversary celebration, a special plaque naming it as a provincial heritage site was affixed to the cairn.
In 1996, another plaque was affixed to a cairn on the site of the former Big Point School.
The Big Point cemetery remains in use, although flooding events, most recently in 2011 and 2013, have proven disastrous. Area residents in the past few years have worked to restore the site.
When land developers George Langdon and Judson Ruth selected the site in the early 1900s, and a railway line was established in 1909, the new town of Langruth was a magnet for Icelanders from Leifur, Big Point, and Marshland. Langruth was not the first choice for the town’s name, which was vetoed because another Canadian town had the name. Not surprisingly, the name Langruth, which was an amalgamation of the two men’s surnames, was not replicated elsewhere.
As the population grew, new businesses flourished. There were two grocery and dry goods stores, a hardware store, a lumber business, a butcher shop, a women’s clothing shop, a barber shop, hairdresser’s, a pool room, a boarding house, a hotel, a blacksmith shop and livery business, a movie theatre, a farm machinery dealership, an automobile dealership, a bank, a community hall, several garages, restaurants, and more. It was a booming place. And most of the businesses were owned and operated by Icelanders.
George Langdon, the real estate developer whose name forms part of the town’s, settled in the community with his family. In a history book published in the 1950s, he wrote that, although he in no way wished to diminish the contributions of other ethnic groups,
“I cannot speak too highly of the part (the Icelanders) have continued to take in all matters affecting the advancement of the community and general welfare. They took a general interest in the development of the little town from the outset and many of their young men were among our pioneer merchants. The Icelanders adopted Canada upon their arrival in the country as perhaps no other nationality from a non-British country and there are no better Canadians.”
The Langruth community celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2009 with a weekend reunion and special events. The town is now much smaller than it was in its heyday, and the old Icelandic names are fewer.
Leaving Langruth, I continue north on Highway 50. I drive past the Langruth Cemetery,
which is a mile outside of town. Like the Amaranth Cemetery, which I shall drive past sixteen miles from now, there are a lot of Icelandic names. I am reminded that it is not just in the Icelandic settlements of Marshland, Big Point and Langruth that Icelandic names survive. In this part of the province, no town was without its Icelanders.
I drive past Leifur, which lies to the west. According to the local community history book, Leifur was named after an Icelandic settler Leifur Olafson, who lived near the lake.
First settlers arrived in the Leifur and Beckville areas about 20 kilometres (12 miles) north of Amaranth, in the 1890s. Some came from the Interlake area, others from the west. My great-grandparents came from the Churchbridge area in what is now Saskatchewan, but their stay there was brief.
School was the centre of community life, and the nearby beach also afforded a place of leisure activities for residents. The Leifur School District was established formally in January 1911, and a one-room schoolhouse operated until June 1966. As of 2018, the building stood at its original site, renovated into a private residence.
The local history books talk about the strength of the Icelandic community and the sturdy bonds that held the settlers together. I am struck by how much movement there was between settlements—from Leifer to Marshland, to Big Point and back to Leifur or maybe Langruth.
Highway 50 eventually turns to the west, but I shall continue north on Provincial Road 278, a paved road that will connect me to Highway 68. I pass the turnoff for Kinosota, which was once a Hudson Bay fur trading post, one of the company’s first inland posts. It was also home for a time to several Icelandic families, including Eggert Jonsson and Sigridur Jonsdottir, great-grandparents of author and Icelandic Roots volunteer Doreen McFarlane.
Next, I drive towards the small but historic hamlet of Reykjavik, named, of course, after
Iceland’s capital city. What big aspirations the new Icelanders had, I think. The Reykjavik School was established in 1909 and quickly became the central point of community life. The school closed in 1967.
My maternal Amma’s sister Sigridur married a man from Reykjavik, and the couple raised their family there. I heard about her but never met her. Although it was only about twenty-five miles from Reykjavik to Vogar on the other side of the lake, there was not much visiting. Twenty-five miles in those days was considered too far to travel.
A low-lying road on private property accesses the local cemetery. There are fewer than 100 graves, and I see that my great-aunt and her husband are buried there. She died in 1991, two years after my Amma died and the same year that my youngest child was born.
The bridge across Lake Manitoba at The Narrows was built in the late 1960s. It is the only place where the lake can be crossed by bridge, and it connects western Manitoba to the Interlake area.
Before the bridge existed, there was a ferry across the lake manned by my mother’s uncle, her mother’s brother-in-law. On the east side of the lake, my great-aunt worked in a small café offering coffee and food to travelers. I wonder now what happened to the ferry boat.
This has been a familiar drive, featuring sights that I have known all my life. If I cross the bridge, I will open the cover of another story, the story of my mother’s family who settled in The Narrows area on the east side of Lake Manitoba. They moved to Lakeland on the other side of the lake in the early 1950s. But that is a road trip for another day.
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Sources:
1 Langruth Historical Society. Langruth Along the Crocus Trail, p69, 1984. Retrieved from: http://hdl.handle.net/10719/3024992 : 21 Jul 2026.
2 Langruth Community. Tribute to Soldiers and Pioneers of the Langruth District, p133, 1950. Retrieved from: http://hdl.handle.net/10719/2337503 : 21 Jul 2026.
3 Everall, H.J.. "Historic Sites of Manitoba: Reykjavik School No. 1489 (RM of Alonsa)" in Manitoba Historical Society Archives [website]. Sourced from Archives of Manitoba, School Inspectors Photographs, GR8461, A0233, C131-2, page 127.Retrieved from: https://www.mhs.mb.ca/docs/sites/reykjavikschool.shtml : 21 Jul 2026.
