The Crousers in Alberta, Canada

Elmer Crouser, who was born in Mercer County, PA, in 1866, was married twice and had 8 children. For further information about Elmer's origins, see "The Crousers of Mercer County, PA". In August of 1914 he and his second wife, Myrtle Hallabaugh, and the children (Roy, Iva, Paul, Sela, and Mildred) left Ohio where they had lived for several years, and boarded an immigrant train to go to Alberta where they homesteaded some land near Rochester. Family tradition says that they and their five children lived in a tent until just before Christmas when their house was completed. Many mornings the blankets were frozen to the sides of the tent. Brrr!

The area in which they homesteaded was full of muskeg bogs, and horses and oxen could not cross the soft soil so all their materials had to be carried across on the backs of the family. It was reported that horses being ridden across the muskeg might break through the crust and sink into the bog up to their bellies.

Elmer and Myrtle Crouser worked hard at surviving in those difficult circumstances. They supplemented their income by Elmer working as a land agent who showed young men land to buy or homestead, they provided overnight housing to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police visiting in their area, and they applied for a post office. (The area in which they lived had to have a name before it could be granted a post office, so they named it Meadowbrook after their old farm in Ohio.) It was during those exciting but difficult days on the homestead that their last child, Earl, was born.

Elmer and Paul were excellent hunters, and they kept the family well fed. Once they shot a moose out of season, but the Mounties who arrived at exactly the wrong time just ignored the fact. Myrtle and the girls gathered berries in season, and they caught a lot of fish from Irish Creek. If they caught more fish than they could eat, they fed the surplus to the chickens because grain was hard to get.

They stayed on their homestead for four years and then moved to Androssan where Elmer managed a farm for a year. They returned to their homestead for another four years, and then decided to go back to Ohio. It wasn't long until they began to miss Alberta, so in 1926 they bought a Model T and headed back to Alberta. This time they bought a farm one half mile south of Jarvie where they raised sheep. In 1935 they turned the farm over to their daughter Sela and her husband, and in 1945 they moved to Vancouver.

Elmer died in Vancouver in 1956 at the age of 90. Myrtle died in 1960 at the age of 82.

Elmer and Myrtle Crouser at Irish Creek - 1916