In the month of March 1902, Dr. W.C. Dunn, a dentist from Elroy, Wisconsin, arrived in Edmonton, filed on a homestead a mile and a half due north of White Whale Lake (now Wabamun). With help he built a log house and a barn.
A year later Mrs. Dunn said goodbye to her relations and friends that she had grown up with all her life and boarded a train with her five children and started on a journey that was to take over three weeks.
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They arrived in Edmonton on the third of March. At that time the only railway station was on the south side, then called Strathcona, so the passengers, their belongings, furniture and trunks had to be ferried across the river. The next day, with a team of horses pulling a sleigh full of supplies and in deep snow, they started on their journey. There wasn't a road, just a winding trail through the bush.
The first night was spent with homesteaders in the vicinity of what is now Spruce Grove, the next night east of the present site of Duffield, and on the third night their homestead.
For the first three years water was brought from a spring to the house in a barrel,on a stoneboat pulled by a horse. In the summer of 1907, Dr. Dunn decided to dig a well. A frame with a pulley was set up. The dirt was brought up in a large bucket pulled by a horse with one of the sons handling the horse and a neighbour helping with digging. They kept digging and digging - no water. Then at the sixty foot level - coal. For Dr. Dunn that was the beginning of a dream. Later, one of the proverbial "men with the willow stick" located water for them twenty feet down and quite close to their house.
In 1905, the homesteaders built a log school house three miles west of the Dunn homestead. For the first four years the teachers boarded with them so every day, winter and summer, they walked to school on a winding path through the bush. At this time twelve pupils attended.
Each week a different boy was allotted the job of going early and starting the fire in the woodburning heater so the school would be warm when the other children arrived. The stove had to be kept burning all day in the winter. The teacher and children kept the school clean.
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The teachers life in those days was one of dedication. Teachers received room and board with the very small salary that the homesteaders could afford to pay. Many young men, not married, and trying to get established worked for room and board and ten dollars a month. Many times they did not get the ten dollars. Most meals consisted of game, - prairie chickens and ruffed grouse shot with a twenty-two rifle. The boys were taught, when they were very young, how to handle a gun and how to snare rabbits. After the Dunns moved to Edmonton, Mrs. Dunn often said, "If anybody offered me a thousand dollars to eat another rabbit, I couldn't do it."
The names of the Dunn children were Harold, Kenneth, Wanda, Marjorie, Mercedes, Gladys, Jean and Lester (Bob).
Harold was killed in action in the First World War just before the Armistice was signed. Wanda died at the age of sixteen.
Kenneth, Marjorie and Jean reside in Edmonton, Mercedes in Saskatchewan, Lester at Cooking Lake and Gladys in California.