Stirling looking forward to celebrating 125 years in 2024

Posted on November 24, 2023 by admin

By Kenyon Stronski
Westwind Weekly News

The year 2023 will soon be coming to a close, and with it Stirling will be one step closer to celebrating its 125th anniversary as a Village in southern Alberta. The Village of Stirling was founded in 1899 and according to CAO Scott Donselaar it used to be generally composed of people who had come forward to help work on the irrigation system. 

“We’ve moved from that to a diverse background of individuals from all kinds of professions and trades in the industry. Agriculture is still at our core – we do still have a lot of the farm industry around us and it’s supported by people within the Village, but we’ve really kind of grown as a community. There’s professionals of all types within our community and we have a large number of entrepreneurs who have their own home-based businesses here. We’ve come a long way in 125 years.”

Stirling has a few other accomplishments under its belt, including them being the first net-zero community in Alberta and one of the few rural communities that currently supplies high-speed fibre optic internet to its residents. 

“In such a short time frame since the inception of the Village I believe we’ve come a long way. It’s celebrating our past and our heritage and looking to where we’ve come from and where we can eventually go. It’s all about making the best community that we can for the residents that want to live here and the businesses that operate here.”

Donselaar noted that by looking at their roots, they hope it’ll help them plan for the future ahead. 

“We have a few different capital projects on the books that we’re looking at doing for some of our facilities. We’re looking more to having an event to really kind of celebrate things for 125 years and we do our annual Settler Days every year so we’re really looking to bolster that event. We’re trying to put on some things that will be both memorable for the residents and showcase why living in Stirling is such a good thing and why you’d want to move here.”

Some things planned for Settler Days already include some ceremonies with the 20th Independent Field Battery who the Village has maintained a good relationship with, an artist exhibit and fair so local artisans can showcase their process and they are in talks with Trevor Panczack who will do a free concert. 

“Our goal is for people to learn about where the Village came from and where we’ve gone so we can really highlight that we’re a great place to live. We want to show we’re not just a smaller community of Lethbridge but a community where people want to live, raise their families, grow their businesses and participate because when we do things it’s really all about the community. It’s all about people coming together and doing things together and we really want to highlight that.”