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City Hall honours Yellowknife's past

Kevin Allerston
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (July 20/05) - Ever wonder what's behind the names of Yellowknife's streets? Well, if you swing by City Hall, you'll have your answer.

Tyler Heal may only be 14, but he has a keen sense of history. For a school project, he decided to research the names behind the streets of Yellowknife - and the result is The Times Behind the Signs, now on display at City Hall for the duration of the summer.



Tyler Heal knows his Yellowknife streets. His studies show that Lamoureux Road was named after Emil "Frenchie" Lamoureux who owned Frenchie's Transport Ltd. that hauled a lot of the building materials to help build Yellowknife. - Kevin Allerston/NNSL photo


Every year he does a project as a part of the Historica Fair, where people research history that is related to them or their country.

While he was at the 2005 Territorial Historica Fair in April, he said Mayor Gord Van Tighem asked him if he would let it be on display downtown.

"This year when it came to pick another project, I thought I would choose the street signs because it's interesting to me," Heal said. "Unlike some places down south where they name them after the local flora and fauna, in Yellowknife they name them after the people that the town has been built around," he said.

The project is set up inside near the entrance to City Hall. It's complete with pictures of many of the 124 streets he researched and contains a short biography on each of the people the streets are named after. Some notable names include Doug Finlayson, who moved up in 1951 to take over Sutherland's Drugs Ltd. He moved the store from Old-Town to where it is downtown today. Then there is Bob Borden who came to the city in 1946 and was an accountant for many of the area mines.

Heal also has a personal motivation for doing the project: his own grandfather has a street named after him: Heal Court is named after Smokey Heal, who came to Yellowknife in 1940 and worked at the Yellowknife Hotel.

The William MacDonald Grade 8 student spent the last two months of school researching the streets, using documents from the city and going through history books.

"Now, when I pass by a street, I think, 'that one's named after Max Ward,'" Heal said by way of an example.

He said it was nice to see the interest people show in his project and it was worth all the hours of work.

"A lot of the people in my class would come up to me and ask 'well, I live on this street, who is that one named after?'" Heal said.

The project will be on display until the beginning of September.