Paswegin Sasketchewan. The town where Harvey and Alice Jesmer raised their family.
Paswegin Sasketchewan. The town where Harvey and Alice Jesmer raised their family. It is the town were my dad (Nelson Edward “Ted” Jesmer) grew up.
Paswegin is an unorganized area in Saskatchewan, Canada. It is located at kilometre 199 of highway 5, north of the Quill Lakes.
Link to Nelson A. and Jenny Jesmer’s page.
Link to the history of Paswegin
Songs from Paswegin Ladies’ Curling Club Banquet 1951
A Brief History Of The Hamlet Of Paswegin, Saskatchewan.
A brief history of the hamlet of Paswegin, Saskatchewan. Paswegin was started in 1905 when the C.N.R. Canadian National Railway passed this way. They chose a site, near what was known as Boggy Creek where they built a small station and built a dam to provide water for their stream locomotives.
The name was changed to Paswegin, which is boggy or swampy in the Cree Indian language. Paswegin is situated approximately seven miles straight west of Wadena Saskatchewan. Paswegin, at one time consisted of quite a few businesses, a few stores, a lumber yard, cafes, post office, school, grain elevators. The building of the Canadian Pacific Railway, that came through Wadena in 1924, spelled the beginning of the end for Paswegin. The businesses slowly began moving to Wadena. The elevators were moved out in 1975. The Paswegin school was shut for good, June 30th, 1966.
The highest attendance at the Paswegin school was 46 students in 1942. I, Ted Jesmer, started school here in 1941. By today’s standards a student will go through many teachers in every school year. It is hard to imagine that I went from grade one to the end of grade nine with only one teacher, Mrs Jenny Harris.
It was in 1940, that the Harvey Jesmer family moved from the Quill City district to Paswegin area, where Harvey acquired land. He and Alice farmed until they retired and moved to Wadena in 1969.
A hamlet that at one time, had such promise, had by the late seventies, earned a listing on a map of official ghost towns of Saskatchewan. There is still four families living in Paswegin, at the time of this writing in 1997.
(Written by Nelson Edward “Ted” Jesmer, son of Harvey Jesmer)
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