An Interpretation

When Rundle Park Was a Dump
by Lawrence Herzog

I remember when Rundle Park was a dump. That's where many of our discards ended up through the 1960s and into the 1970s, as my parents ripped up our old patio, our old grass and a dozen other elements of our family home. We'd load up our old Ford truck and chug off to the dump, sometimes coming back with nearly as much as we had taken - treasures my father deemed we should salvage.

The dumping ground is all gone now, buried under progress, the fairways and greens of the Rundle Golf Course and Rundle Park. The dump began life as a coal strip mine on the farm of Jacob and Aafje Prins and their eight children. The Prins family had bought the 186-acre farm from the estate of William Humberstone, who, in 1880, was one of the first to mine coal from the banks of the North Saskatchewan River valley.

During the 1950s, the dump was frequented by black bears, which used to rummage through the garbage and provide amusement - and a few anxious moments - for locals. The landfill site, south of 118th Avenue and east of 30th Street, was purchased by Edmonton in 1956 for $30,000, heralding the start of many years trucking the city's garbage through the heart of Beverly.

Part of the local legend of the dump are stories of those who frequented it - and even a man and his son who lived there. "You couldn't get anywhere near the fellow; he smelled so bad," long-time resident Walter MacDonald recalls.

"Every so often, somebody would drive or haul an old car into the dump and it wasn't long before somebody else was in there in fixing it up and driving it out again." Many times, fire broke out in the rubbish and crews were called to extinguish the flames - a process that sometimes lasted for many hours and even days.

Rundle Park, the eastern gem in the river valley necklace that became the Capital City Recreation Park, officially opened in the summer of 1978. With it came an end to a smoky, smelly chapter of the Beverly story.

Now, driving the undulating road that enters the park isn't just a trip into the river valley - it's a passage over the discarded past. Flare stacks, strategically placed around the site to burn off thane produced by decomposing garbage, are the only visible reminder of what lies below.