Ghost towns and abandoned buildings are nothing out of the ordinary for southwest Saskatchewan, the mostly decimated Hamlet of Neidpath is one such example.
What was a bustling community a century ago is now little more than a few lonely buildings that have been reclaimed by the prairies.
A book detailing life during Neidpath's height of its time was written by local resident, Edna Tyson Parson, titled Land I Can Own: A true account of homesteading and the years that followed at Neidpath, Saskatchewan.
Parsons recounts some of the earliest settlers who filed on their homesteads in 1906, including Mitchell and his wife, William and Alex Jack, Rafe Runyon, and Harry and Arthur McColl.
Neidpath School District was formed in September of 1912, and a schoolhouse was soon built by Frank Thomson, who moved to Neidpath from Belleville, Ontario.
In the 1920s, the community boasted a population of roughly 100 people as well as churches, a blacksmith shop, a bank, a post office, a pool hall, a general store, the Neidpath Rural Telephone Central Office, several hotels, and four grain elevators.
The Canadian National Railway extended to Neidpath in 1924, and the Pioneer, Western, Pool, and Federal grain elevators were erected.
With the addition of the railway, Neidpath was known as a town and continued to develop until the 'dirty thirties'. During the spring if 1933 alone, grasshoppers ate $30 million worth of wheat in western Saskatchewan, an equivalent of more than $722 million today.
Grasshoppers weren't the only problem as horses were suffering from equine encephalitis caused by mosquitoes, wireworms and sawflies picked at the crops, wind blew dirt across the prairies, and in 1937, the area recorded only eight inches of water throughout the entire year.
After the general store burned down in the late 1930s and the school closed in the early 1940s, grain elevators were the last remaining businesses by 1945.
In the years that followed, another school was built in Neidpath. Luxor School's first graduating class was in 1953, and the school remained in operation into the late 1900s.
With Neidpath's downfall already in the cards, the hamlet's fate was set in stone after the Canadian National abandoned the rail line that supported the community.
Today, all that still stands is an aging church, two wind-eroded grain elevators, a dilapidated school, the remnants of a few long-abandoned houses, and a peaceful reminder of the end of an era.
