Nestled near the banks of the Assiniboine River and not far from the Trans-Canada Highway, a winding gravel road leads to a field of golden wheat ready for harvest. Tree lines offer privacy on all sides, while the nearby body of water glistens in the sun and lush grass carpets the ground below. What truly sets this stretch of land apart, more than its scenery, is that it has remained in the same family longer than any other farm in the province, held by the same Métis family since 1859. Roughly 155 acres southeast of High Bluff has stayed in the Hourie family for 167 years — eight years before Canada became a country, and more than a decade before Manitoba became a province. Today, the river lot is owned by Colin Hourie and his wife, Angela, who live there with one of their sons. Colin, 62, the fourth generation of Houries to own the land, said he was never pressured by earlier generations to keep it in the family. “I think it just kind of naturally happened,” Colin said. “It’s such a beautiful spot. Why would you want to leave?” That continuity earned the Hourie farm the title of “Farm of the Century” during Manitoba’s 1970 centennial, following a search for the province’s oldest family-owned farm. It was an honour that would soon put Colin and his family face-to-face with the Queen. “It’s something I’ve basically lived with my whole life,” said Colin, who was six years old when the farm was bestowed the accolade. “It’s always been kind of a fact of life for me that I happen to be lucky enough to live on — and continue to live on — the same place that my family has for 167 years.” Before any of that, though, comes the journey of the ancestor who first brought the Hourie name to what is now Manitoba. From the Orkneys to the Assiniboine It started in 1800, Colin said, when his great-great-grandfather John Hourie boarded a Hudson’s Bay Company ship in Scotland’s Orkney Islands, bound for York Factory on the shore of Hudson Bay. From there, John made his way west, working in the fur trade for the company. He married a First Nation woman in what is now Alberta, Colin said, and the couple had seven sons. Their youngest, Philip — Colin’s great-grandfather — was born in the Lower Fort Garry area. Like his father before him, he went to work for the Hudson’s Bay Company, taking a job hauling freight in 1851. He later married Euphemia Cook. “By 1856, he left employment. He had enough, I guess, of hauling those 150-pound packs upriver,” Colin said. “The following year … he decided they were going to homestead somewhere to the west of Fort Garry.” In 1859, the couple settled on what is now the river lot that Colin and Angela call home today. At the time, the land was part of Rupert’s Land, the vast territory the British Crown had granted the Hudson’s Bay Company, spanning the Hudson Bay drainage basin. The company surrendered the territory to the Crown in 1869, and it was absorbed into Canada the following year, the same day Manitoba became a province. When surveyors began mapping the newly acquired territory, their new grid system clashed with communities already living across it. That conflict prompted officials to include a provision in the Manitoba Act allowing settlers who had occupied land with the Hudson’s Bay Company’s permission to convert their claims into full ownership. “If people could prove that they had settled there, they would be given title,” Colin said. Philip received his title from the Crown on April 7, 1875 — the land patent stating he had been in “undisturbed occupation and actual and peaceable possession” of the land since before March 8, 1869, the cutoff date set out in the Act. Colin keeps a framed photocopy of the patent at his house, one his late father tracked down at the land titles office in Portage la Prairie. Tucked into the legalese is a clause reserving the right for anyone travelling the Assiniboine River to land and tie up along the riverbank on the property, a detail Colin pointed out with interest. A home preserved in time Philip and Euphemia would go on to have 12 children in total, Colin said. The couple’s first two homes on the property were built of logs before a third, a frame house completed in 1890, took their place. That home never had electricity or running water, Colin said. Ownership of the land then passed to their youngest son, Jack, Colin’s grandfather, who was raised in that house and ultimately acquired the river lot in the 1910s. His son James was then raised there, from his birth in 1934 until the late 1950s. James inherited the river lot in 1957 but two years later opted to build a new house roughly a quarter mile away, on a separate lot, Colin said. There, he and his wife Audrey would go on to raise Colin and his sister Karen. The old frame house remained standing on the farm then, though its role had changed. “Besides being a playhouse, it was pretty much abandoned,” Colin said. “There was no other use or purpose for it at the time.” A log barn also once stood nearby and served as another play area during Colin’s childhood. “Dad felt it was becoming a little unsafe. It was pretty rickety, so we burned it,” he said, “just so it wouldn’t fall on the kids.” The frame house fared better. The family donated the two-storey house to the Fort la Reine Museum, on the outskirts of Portage la Prairie, where it was moved in 1977. The following year, it opened to the public. Most of what now furnishes the rooms, Colin said, was added after the move. Photos of Hourie family members spanning several generations now line its walls. But years before the house found another life at the museum, the farm itself had already made headlines, starting with a contest that crowned it Manitoba’s oldest. ‘Farm of the Century’ With Manitoba’s 1970 centennial approaching, Shell Canada served as the main sponsor of a contest to find the province’s oldest continuously family-owned farm, working alongside the Manitoba Centennial Corporation and the provincial government, Colin said. Advertisements ran in local papers across southern Manitoba, inviting families to apply. The now-defunct Winnipeg Tribune reported at the time that the search drew 1,031 entries, vetted by a panel of judges headed by provincial archivist John Bovey. The Hourie farm won. On June 18, 1970, then-premier Ed Schreyer unveiled a limestone cairn on the property, drawing 300 people, Colin said. The bronze plaque affixed to it identifies the river lot and lists 1859 as the year Philip Hourie settled there. “To mark the centenary of Manitoba and to honour the province’s agricultural pioneers, the Manitoba Centennial Corporation proudly designates the land east of the site where you now stand as the farm of the century,” reads a portion of the plaque. Colin said he doesn’t remember much about the ceremony as a kid but recalled it being a “big deal” the day of. A few weeks later, the family was presented to Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Philip, Prince Charles and Princess Margaret on the grounds of the Manitoba Legislature, a moment captured in a photograph the family still has. Colin said his mother didn’t believe the invitation was real until official confirmation arrived in the mail. One memory that remains, Colin said, was shaking hands with Prince Charles, now King Charles III, using his left hand. “He had his right arm in a sling,” he said. “He’d had a polo accident, apparently, and broken his arm falling off his horse.” The farm’s history was affirmed again in 1981, when the province introduced the Century Farm Program. The family received a certificate signed by then-premier Howard Pawley, recognizing the farm’s continuous operation “for more than one hundred years commencing 1859.” The certificate is now kept by Colin’s younger sister, Karen, who lives in Alberta. Colin would go on to leave the farm himself, joining the Canadian Armed Forces in the 1980s and serving for two decades. While he was away, he said his father continued farming the land until about 2000, when he began renting it out to a nearby family who still work it today. About 100 acres of the river lot is farmland, Colin said, with the rest largely made up of bush. Colin said he took ownership of the river lot in 2003, though he and Angela didn’t move onto the property until 2006 when they had their house built. A shop went up the following year on the site where the house, now preserved on the museum grounds, once stood. Though no vestiges of the original log structures remain on the farm, the property still carries reminders of its past and present. A Métis flag flies near the house, a marker of the family’s heritage. Among the artifacts on display are a horse-drawn plow from the nineteenth century and a threshing machine Colin’s grandfather bought used in the 1920s. Another artifact the family proudly displays has outlasted even the buildings it helped raise. Mounted on the home’s wall is a broadaxe that belonged to Colin’s great-grandfather. “(It) would have been the axe he used to shape all the logs that he used to build the barn and the first couple of houses,” he said. When asked whether he would like to see the family farm in Hourie hands for another 167 years, Colin said, “Certainly. I would like to see that.” “We have three kids and one grandson, so there’s certainly potential for Houries to be here for the next couple of generations.”
