Willis Reese Bowen
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Willis Reese Bowen
Willis Reese Bowen (February 6, 1875 – 1975) was one of the first settlers in Amber Valley, Alberta. His home, Obadiah Place, is a historic site. Bowen was born in Butler County, Alabama, and was one of a group of black Americans who moved from Oklahoma to Canada in 1911, filing for homesteads north of Edmonton and east of Athabasca Landing. They were responding to the government's encouragement of new settlers in Alberta. Bowen organized the original group of five families who moved from Oklahoma. Others, like Bowen, had left the South after emancipation and Reconstruction, moving to Oklahoma for what they hoped would be better conditions. Bowen originally settled in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, with his wife Jeanie (Gregory) Bowen and their children. Bowen hauled gravel by horse team, earning $25 per day. The family had little money and the oldest child, Mary, abandoned her plans of becoming a teacher in order to work as a maid and help support the family. Their baby gi ...
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Amber Valley, Alberta
Amber Valley is an unincorporated community in northern Alberta, Canada, approximately north of Edmonton. Its elevation is . Originally named Pine Creek, Amber Valley was among several Alberta communities settled in the early 20th century by early Black immigrants to the province from Oklahoma and the Deep South of the United States. About 1,000 African Americans emigrated to Alberta from 1909-1911. Amber Valley is the location of the Obadiah Place provincial heritage site, a homestead of one of the first African-American settler families. History In 1909, a group of 160 African-American homesteaders established the community. The homesteaders, African Americans from Oklahoma and Texas, were attracted by the government's promises of land to homestead, as it was trying to encourage immigrant settlers to develop the land. They were leaving Jim Crow conditions in the United States that discriminated against their rights. Henry Parson Sneed, a clergyman and mason, led a group of ...
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Obadiah Place
Obadiah Place is a historic site in Amber Valley, Alberta. It was the homestead of Willis Reese Bowen and later the home of his son Obadiah Bowen, a pastor for the town. Willis (sometimes spelled Willace) Reese Bowen brought his family and four other black Oklahoman families to the Amber Valley in 1911. They had applied for homesteads under Clifford Sifton's immigration campaign to bring new settlers to the Canadian Prairies. Sifton had not anticipated that African Americans would migrate to Canada. Most immigrants were of European ancestry, from Britain, the United States and Europe, including Ukraine and Russia. Sifton later sent immigration officers to the US South to try to dissuade black farmers from emigrating to Canada. He and the Department of Immigration also implemented racist policies that created barriers to such immigration, while not explicitly prohibiting entry of people of African descent. These policies were not overturned until 1962. Violet King Henry, whose fam ...
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Butler County, Alabama
Butler County is a county located in the south central portion of the U.S. state of Alabama. As of the 2020 census, the population was 19,051. Its county seat is Greenville. Its name is in honor of Captain William Butler, who was born in Virginia and fought in the Creek War, and who was killed in May 1818. History Butler County was formed from Conecuh County, Alabama, and Monroe County, Alabama, by an act passed December 13, 1819, by the Legislature while in session at Huntsville. This was the first session of the Legislature of Alabama as a State. The name of Fairfield was first proposed for this county, but was changed on the passage of the bill to Butler, in honor of Captain William Butler. The precise date of the first settlement made by whites in Butler County is unclear. Some have it as early as 1814, but the earliest settler of no dispute is James K. Benson, who settled in the Flat in 1815, where he built a log house near the current location of Pine Flat Methodist ...
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Vancouver
Vancouver ( ) is a major city in western Canada, located in the Lower Mainland region of British Columbia. As the List of cities in British Columbia, most populous city in the province, the 2021 Canadian census recorded 662,248 people in the city, up from 631,486 in 2016. The Greater Vancouver, Greater Vancouver area had a population of 2.6million in 2021, making it the List of census metropolitan areas and agglomerations in Canada#List, third-largest metropolitan area in Canada. Greater Vancouver, along with the Fraser Valley Regional District, Fraser Valley, comprises the Lower Mainland with a regional population of over 3 million. Vancouver has the highest population density in Canada, with over 5,700 people per square kilometre, and fourth highest in North America (after New York City, San Francisco, and Mexico City). Vancouver is one of the most Ethnic origins of people in Canada, ethnically and Languages of Canada, linguistically diverse cities in Canada: 49.3 percent of ...
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British Columbia
British Columbia (commonly abbreviated as BC) is the westernmost province of Canada, situated between the Pacific Ocean and the Rocky Mountains. It has a diverse geography, with rugged landscapes that include rocky coastlines, sandy beaches, forests, lakes, mountains, inland deserts and grassy plains, and borders the province of Alberta to the east and the Yukon and Northwest Territories to the north. With an estimated population of 5.3million as of 2022, it is Canada's third-most populous province. The capital of British Columbia is Victoria and its largest city is Vancouver. Vancouver is the third-largest metropolitan area in Canada; the 2021 census recorded 2.6million people in Metro Vancouver. The first known human inhabitants of the area settled in British Columbia at least 10,000 years ago. Such groups include the Coast Salish, Tsilhqotʼin, and Haida peoples, among many others. One of the earliest British settlements in the area was Fort Victoria, established ...
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Oliver Bowen
Oliver Bowen (December 21, 1942 – January 1, 2000) was a Canadian engineer who managed the design and construction of the first line of Calgary's light rail transit system: the CTrain. The City of Calgary acknowledged his engineering work by naming a light rail transit (LRT) maintenance facility in his honour. Family Oliver Bowen was the grandson of Willis Reese Bowen and the son of Obadiah Bowen, who were among the first black settlers and civic leaders in Amber Valley. Following Clifford Sifton's 1910 Canadian immigration campaign to lure settlers from Southern US states as part of the Great Migration (African American), many black settlers came to Alberta. The Canadian government tried to bar black people from settling in Canada and hired agents to dissuade them, but was only successful in barring future settlers. Career Bowen started working on Calgary's street construction crews and rose to manage the design and construction of Calgary's first LRT line. The Calgary C-Tr ...
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CTrain
CTrain (previously branded C-Train) is a light rail rapid transit system in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Most of the network functions as a light metro, though in the free-fare zone that runs through the downtown core the Red and Blue lines operate like a urban tramway (this transition occurs due to the density of stations in the free-fare zone, and is possible due to the design of the rail vehicles and their ability to operate on both segregated and road-integrated tracks). The CTrain began operation on May 25, 1981 and has expanded as the city has increased in population. The system is operated by Calgary Transit, as part of the Calgary municipal government's transportation department. In , the system had a ridership of , or about per weekday as of , making it one of the busiest light rail transit systems in North America. About 45% of workers in Downtown Calgary take the CTrain to work. History The idea of rail transit in Calgary originated in a 1967 Calgary transportatio ...
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Obadiah Bowen
Obadiah Bowen (born May 16, 1907, Lincoln County, Oklahoma, USA; d. Apr. 7, 2004, Athabasca, Alberta, Canada) was one of the original settlers to Amber Valley, Alberta, as well as a pastor and community leader. He was one of the first Black settlers to Alberta. Homesteading Obadiah Bowen came to Canada from Oklahoma in 1909 with his parents Willis Reese Bowen and Jeanie Gregory Bowen and several siblings, as well as four other families his father helped organize. Bowen's father homesteaded Obadiah Place (Bowen Residence) in 1913. His original log cabin was a community meeting place, post office, and site of the first telephone. In 1938, his son Obadiah Bowen replaced the cabin, building a house. It was recognized as an Alberta historic site in 1999. Civic leadership Bowen served as the town preacher for people of various denominations. His interdenominational church was built on land he donated in 1953, about a half mile from the house. Work Bowen also worked in construction at ...
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People From Amber Valley, Alberta
A person ( : people) is a being that has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations such as kinship, ownership of property, or legal responsibility. The defining features of personhood and, consequently, what makes a person count as a person, differ widely among cultures and contexts. In addition to the question of personhood, of what makes a being count as a person to begin with, there are further questions about personal identity and self: both about what makes any particular person that particular person instead of another, and about what makes a person at one time the same person as they were or will be at another time despite any intervening changes. The plural form "people" is often used to refer to an entire nation or ethnic group (as in "a people"), and this was the original meaning of the word; it subsequently acquired its use as a plural form of per ...
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Black Canadian People
Black is a color which results from the absence or complete absorption of visible light. It is an achromatic color, without hue, like white and grey. It is often used symbolically or figuratively to represent darkness. Black and white have often been used to describe opposites such as good and evil, the Dark Ages versus Age of Enlightenment, and night versus day. Since the Middle Ages, black has been the symbolic color of solemnity and authority, and for this reason it is still commonly worn by judges and magistrates. Black was one of the first colors used by artists in Neolithic cave paintings. It was used in ancient Egypt and Greece as the color of the underworld. In the Roman Empire, it became the color of mourning, and over the centuries it was frequently associated with death, evil, witches, and magic. In the 14th century, it was worn by royalty, clergy, judges, and government officials in much of Europe. It became the color worn by English romantic poets, business ...
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People From Butler County, Alabama
A person ( : people) is a being that has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations such as kinship, ownership of property, or legal responsibility. The defining features of personhood and, consequently, what makes a person count as a person, differ widely among cultures and contexts. In addition to the question of personhood, of what makes a being count as a person to begin with, there are further questions about personal identity and self: both about what makes any particular person that particular person instead of another, and about what makes a person at one time the same person as they were or will be at another time despite any intervening changes. The plural form "people" is often used to refer to an entire nation or ethnic group (as in "a people"), and this was the original meaning of the word; it subsequently acquired its use as a plural form of per ...
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American Emigrants To Canada
American(s) may refer to: * American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America" ** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America ** American ancestry, people who self-identify their ancestry as "American" ** American English, the set of varieties of the English language native to the United States ** Native Americans in the United States, indigenous peoples of the United States * American, something of, from, or related to the Americas, also known as "America" ** Indigenous peoples of the Americas * American (word), for analysis and history of the meanings in various contexts Organizations * American Airlines, U.S.-based airline headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas * American Athletic Conference, an American college athletic conference * American Recordings (record label), a record label previously known as Def American * American University, in Washington, D.C. Sports teams Soccer * B ...
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