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From the Smoky Lake Signal, July 9, 1980. Volume 3, Number 10. 1500 Attend Bellis Homecoming by Armin Hecht Last weekend the little town of Bellis relived its former glory. More than 1,500 people from as far away as Ontario and the West Coast of the United States came to celebrate home coming 1980. Old friends and former neighbors visited with each other and swapped memories. "Remember when..." was the most frequently heard expression. Most people hadn't seen each other for decades. There was a shaking of hands, there was hugging and there was kissing. It was a great get-together. Old girl friends had a good look at old boy friends and old boy friends did likewise. The intervening years had left traces on all of them. There were quite a few more wrinkles. Everyone had put on more weight. But none of that mattered as yesteryear came back to life. Classmates of a long time ago swapped tales of how they teased the teacher. It is a moot point whether they talked about the consequences as well. One lady in her mid-fifties remembered the spot where she and her brother had slipped underneath a tent wall into a fenced-off area to hear Wilf Carter sing something like "Gold Mine in the Sky." The two youngsters had only a quarter each and they wanted to keep that for candies. That happened on the Bellis picnic ground nearly 50 years ago on the same spot on which this year's home coming celebrations took place. Even the timing was much the same. It was July 7, St. John's Day, an Ukrainian church holiday. the Bellis home coming was from July 4 to 6. Bellis was once a thriving community of nearly 500. Today it is home for about 50 people. Technological change was its undoing. The fateful year was 1928 when the CPR railway line reached Willingdon to the south on the other side of the North Saskatchewan River. Over night Bellis lost half its trading area. Today Bellis is a sleepy little community. Some old timers at the do used the term ghost town, although a neat one at that. But more than 60 years ago Bellis had all the shops and services which the early pioneer farmers needed to go about making a living. There were farm machinery dealership, two blacksmith shops, hotels, a bank, lumber yard and saw mill, a livery stable, a flour mill, livestock, holding pens by the railway road, elevators and a neat little station. The flour mill, by the way, was the best of the entire district. Farmers travelled a long way to have their wheat milled to flour in Bellis. Most of these buildings are all gone now. There are just a few houses in Bellis and a machinery dealership. But buildings and businesses and their proprietors came back to life through large panels of historic photographs displayed in the Bellis school during home coming festivities. It was one of the most popular exhibits. Young and old scanned the pictures carefully for friends, relatives, loved-ones and memories. But maybe Bellis will make a come-back. It is clean, it is neat; housing is less expensive than in the big urban centres and there is nearby Pine Ridge Forest Nursery. One or two couples have made the move from the city already. Return to the
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