Where Agriculture and Wilderness Meet!
About North 44
written by Dorothy Montgomery
Excerpt from the History of Dapp & Districts
The road to Westlock {Highway 44} was at that time really just a winding trail, following areas of least resistance, in and out from quarter to quarter, searching for a better and more solid footing, corduroying across swampy, muskeg places, until it reached a firmer, higher ground.
As settlers were moving more and more ever northward, the Provincial Government decided to make this trail into a connecting link between the main road from Edmonton and the Alaska Highway in the North as a two lane highway. The equipment used up to this was small and inefficient for this work. In those early days, the homesteaders could pay off their taxes by building and repairing the roads in their own areas and often have a little "to boot". Horse drawn slips and scrapers, men with axes, picks and shovels, stone-boats to haul boulders and rocks for a base in soft spots, chains clanking as trees were hauled off and stumps pulled out, with the occasional burst of dynamite to dislodge the tough ones that defied horse power to loosen them. It was a long, slow, tedious process building a road in those days, and weeks passed as it slowly progressed northward. To take a horseback ride each weekend to observe the progress of the new road from Westlock north was a "must" in our calendar.
In those days we didn't ever dream that passenger buses, school buses, huge lories and trucks, tractors, powerful farm machinery, cars of all types and descriptions would one day zip up and down a broad asphalt topped, two lane highway, into the far North; a day when horse drawn vehicles would be practically obsolete. But, we enjoyed those week end rides to view pioneer "Progress". Soon new powerful machines moved in and the road was quickly pushed to completion. Please see link below to view satellite map