The Kittlitz Family and the Kittlitz Park
By Tom Monto
You might wonder why there is a Kittlitz Park in the Wild Rose neighbourhood of The Meadows just east of Millwoods. Back around 1900 the Kittlitz family was prominent among the farms that stood where Millwoods and The Meadows is now. They, like the other immigrant families that settled in what is now southwest Edmonton, had struggles. But descendants of those hardy folk still live in this city today.
Polish immigrants arrived in the Edmonton area in noticeable numbers in the mid to late 1890s. At that time, Poland was in Russian and residents of Russia were under the heavy thumb of the Czar. Moravians faced religious persecution, and landlords controlled the land. A simple family farm was almost an impossible dream.
Historic records tell us that Samuel Schultz emigrated from Poland in 1896. Samuel settled south of Edmonton, next door to the present site of Kittlitz Park, and wrote back to the Old Country about the opportunities that were available here in Canada.
Unlike in Russia, land in Western Canada was available at affordable prices. In the 1890s land relatively close to Edmonton came available because a proposed Indian reserve for the Papaschase Indian band had been dismantled and the land was available for as little as $3 per acre. Although the immigrant families of this era had few material things, they did have their entire life savings. A true accounting of the pioneer days should recognize how Canada benefited from the money the thousands of immigrant families brought with them.
Samuel’s letters to his relatives still in Russia encouraged three sisters and two brothers to take their families out of Poland and settle at Edmonton. His sister Anna Kittlitz and her family settled very close to the location of Kittlitz Park today.
In 1897 Anna, husband Karl and their three children - Gustav (9), Anna (Annie) (5) and Edward (2) - made the long journey to a seaport and then boarded a ship to Canada. They disembarked at Quebec City and boarded a train for the two-week trip west to Calgary. It was then a two-day trip up the C&E line to the South Edmonton station at Whyte Avenue.
In the 1890s, Edmonton was in an isolated location in the northern prairies on the north bank of the North Saskatchewan River. There were no highways or paved roads back then. Only one railway line came even close to Edmonton. The Calgary & Edmonton Railway came north from Calgary, but in the 1890s there was not even one bridge across the N. Sask. River. The C&E line ended south of the river, in a separate hamlet named South Edmonton,. The old C&E rail-line is still in use today, running along Queen E. II Highway and Gateway Boulevard just west of Millwoods. (In 1899 South Edmonton became the Town of Strathcona. Later it became a city, and then in 1912 Strathcona and Edmonton amalgamated.)
Upon arrival at South Edmonton, Anna and Karl met up with relatives and moved out to spend a bit of time living with the Job family who had settled near what is now the Aster neighbourhood. When Anna and Karl found their bearings, they bought land adjacent to the farm of Anna’s brother Samuel. Their land is now the east half of the Wild Rose neighbourhood.
The site of present-day Kittlitz Park became surrounded by farms belonging to different branches of the Kittlitz clan. East of the park Karl and Anna’s first farm was later farmed by son Gustav, and then by his son Albert in the 1950s. Southeast of the park the Schmidt family welcomed Ed Kittlitz as a new son when he married daughter Mary, and Ed and Mary had that farm for many years. North of the park was Karl and Anna’s second farm. This was later farmed by their son Theophil. Another branch of the Kittlitz family was in the area as well, and in 1916 provided a husband for Karl and Anna’s daughter Annie. A woman of the Job family married Ferdinand Schmidt, and their daughter Mary married Karl and Anna’s son Ed. So the Kittlitz, Job and Schmidt families were connected in several ways.
The land that Karl and Anna took up in 1897 was not developed at all. So the first job that Karl took on was building a place to live. He built a log cabin, likely assisted by Anna and any of the kids old enough to help. Then gradually the land was cleared by hand (some trees had already been made into logs for the house construction). Crops were planted, and barns were built to shelter the animals.
The family attended the Bruderfeld Moravian Church about 2 kms away, along today’s 23rd Avenue.
Anna and Karl had three more children - Theophil, Gerhard and Mary. The kids might have spent any free hours exploring the Mill Creek ravine not far from their house. Later a coal mine operated along the creek (just east of today’s 34th Street south of 34th Avenue).
A year after the family arrived, a simple one-room log school opened about 1.5 kms southeast of the farm. This was the Colchester School. The school’s location, near the intersection of Township Road 520 and Range Road 233, is even today, more than a hundred years later, still outside the City of Edmonton. It was a good walk for the young legs of the Kittlitz kids. Until 1919, the school had just one teacher, and by herself she had to teach all the grades that the local children needed. Back then few were schooled past Grade 8. By Grade 8, kids were big enough to be useful on the farm and in the kitchen.
And many did not get to Grade 8 even. Anna Kittlitz died in 1904 at the age of just 34. She was buried near the family farm, in the Bruderfeld Moravian Cemetery along Mill Creek. The eldest daughter Annie, just 12 years old, had to stop her schooling and take over as much of the job of running the household as she could.
There were dangers on the farm. In 1912, Annie’s 12-year-old brother Gerhard fell into a large vat of boiling water being used in the slaughtering of pigs. He was rushed to Strathcona’s small hospital but died.
Same as now, in the old days the Edmonton area experienced economic booms and busts. Karl took advantage of one of them to get a good price for his farm. The family then bought their second farm at 18-52-23-4, east of 34th Street north of today’s Whitemud Drive. Fulton Creek runs through that land. Their original farm was sold on a payment plan. And when the boom turned out to be short-lived, the purchasers bailed and the Kittlitz’s got their farm back. Son Gustav married Clara Lange in 1916, and the young couple took over the repossessed farm.
Their other son Ed married a young woman of the Schmidt family that farmed next door to the Kittlitz farm, and Ed and Mary took over her father’s farm just to the south of Gustav’s.
In 1916 Annie left her job as “replacement mother” and married a cousin, Herman Kittlitz. Perhaps he was the son of a sister of Annie’s mother. Herman and Annie moved into Edmonton. Like her mother, Annie died young, passing at the age of 29, in 1919. Herman went on to marry Annie’s younger sister Mary. That sort of thing apparently happened a fair amount in the old days.
And now you know a bit of why Kittlitz Park bears the name that it does today. Thanks for reading.
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Sources
Naming Edmonton from Ada to Zoie
South Edmonton Saga
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(first published in the Millwood Mosaic, Feb. 2024)
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