Lemberg

Town, pop 306, located SW of Melville on Hwy 22 between the villages of Abernethy and Neudorf. There was some settlement in the district in the early 1880s; many of these settlers, however, would leave within a number of years owing to the promised railroad not arriving and difficulties encountered in farming. Intensive settlement of the Lemberg area occurred in the 1890s as both Protestant and Roman Catholic Germans arrived. Ukrainians followed in 1902. Two years later, trains were running through the area and the townsite was developing rapidly. Lemberg was incorporated as a village on July 12, 1904, its name the German form of L’viv (today, an industrial centre in western Ukraine). By 1906 the population was 365, and in 1907 Lemberg attained town status. In 1911, James Garfield Gardiner, future Premier of Saskatchewan and federal Minister of Agriculture, became the principal of Lemberg School, a position he retained until 1914, the year he first became an MLA. Gardiner bought a farm outside Lemberg and served as the community’s mayor in 1919–20; he retired to his farm at Lemberg in 1958, passing away in 1962. His son, J.W. Gardiner, was the town’s secretary-treasurer in the 1950s, at which point the town had reached a peak population of over 500. Lemberg continues to be a trading centre for the surrounding agricultural district, where grain and livestock production and a number of seed farms form the basis of the area economy. Community landmarks include: Trinity Lutheran Church, built in 1926 using an estimated 83,000 bricks; St. Michael’s Roman Catholic Church, dating to 1901; and the former Weissenberg School, a fieldstone structure built in 1900.

David McLennan