Hey, Hussar, Alberta! It’s taken us a while, but we’ve finally made it. I blame Regretsy, The Hunt for the Worst Movie of All Time, and Mental Floss. And my day job.
Hussar, Alberta, like our previous stops of Milo, Alberta, and Marlin, Washington, is infinitesimal in comparison to the wide open grasslands surrounding them. Hussar has a population of about 160 people, and – judging from what I can find via my Internet searches – they’ve only posted about seven photos of Hussar online.
Hussar's Park
For such a small village, they seem to have some pretty nice amenities – a high school, an ice rink/curling center, and a town park. If you read our post on Milo, Alberta, the idea that such a tiny community would have all this stuff should sound familiar. I’m not sure if it’s the case with Milo or not, but I found an answer to this that I wasn’t expecting: the community finances itself by volunteering at a casino. Or at least it did: members of Hussar’s community would volunteer at a casino in Calgary in order to take a cut of the profits, but that casino has since shut down. If you read the article I linked to, you’ll see that they generated a surprising amount of revenue for themselves doing this. I should point out that volunteering at casinos is not the town’s economic base; like a lot of smaller communities, it’s agriculture.
In learning about Hussar, I was curious about its name, specifically what it had to do with Prussian light calvary. The area was initially settled by loose bands of cattle ranchers in the late 1800s, but at some point around 1910, a company of German immigrants – most of them former army officers – bought a lot of the land, took up farming, and named it after the Hussars of the German army. When World War I broke out, many of these immigrants left Hussar in an effort to return to – and fight for – Germany, but they were all detained. Ownership of the Germans’ eventually went to other local families, but the Hussar name stuck.
That’s about all I have for you for Hussar. I’ve found a “Hussar” group on Facebook, so maybe I can find a citizen to tell us a little more about the town, but we’ll have to wait and see.
One thing that I can tell you about Hussar, though, is that they’ve got a pretty good history of themselves available on-line (case in point: this page), which is something that a lot of other communities lack. When I first started #N?S?E?W? out, I was intrigued by the challenge of seeing how much I could find out about a place, just by poking around online – remote-seeing, if you will. Really, that’s the heart of this project: using our current technologies to tour a place as faithfully as we can. A few of the posts I’ve written have fooled people into thinking that I was actually in their town, hanging out and finding out what I could. No, I’m still here in Portland, Oregon, at my dining room table. I’m using teleportation. I’m using virtual reality. I’m using Google Streetview. Anyway, it’s been really interesting to me to find what is – or isn’t – available about different cities online, and one of the things that I am surprised by is that sometimes there’s a lot more information about a smaller community more readily available than in larger communities. Anyway.
Thoughts on Hussar? More knowledge than I’m dropping? Suggestions for road trip music as we travel through the Prairies of Alberta? As always, leave it in the comments!