The original Grosvenor Park survey in the 1913 Yorath Plan map. Photo Credit: CoS Archives - Acc. 2016-001
HOMEtown Reflections STREET NAMING IN SASKATOON BY: JEFF O’BRIEN
From First Avenue to 117th Street, from A.E. Adams Way to Zimmer Court, from Avenue A to Avenue Z (yes, there was once an Avenue Z planned), they’re the streets we live on. What we name them says a lot about who we are and how we see ourselves in a changing world. Saskatoon’s Oldest Streets The oldest street in what
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is now the city of Saskatoon was the trail that led from Whitecap (Moose Woods, as it was then called) to Batoche, part of a network of prairie highways that had been used for trade and travel for generations before European settlement. In Saskatoon, it travelled up Broadway, followed the river along University Drive, then headed north where the University Gates are today.
Settlement-era trails include the Bone Trail, on the west side of the river leading toward Delisle, and the Battleford Trail, which you guessed it, led to Battleford. These settlement and pre-settlement era roads are mostly gone now, built on, ploughed over and cut by fences. A bit of the Moose Jaw Trail has been preserved in Mark Thompson Park in Stonebridge. The route of the
Battleford Trail, which went out 22nd Street and turned northwest at about Avenue P, remains in the road that runs southeast from Dalmeny Drive down into the new Elk Point subdivision. Like Warman Road (literally, the road to Warman) these names derive from usage. Traditionally, this is how streets got named. Fish Street probably had a fish market. Church Street? You
