Hudson's Bay is gone but legacy of company that birthed Winnipeg is hidden in plain view
CBC
The Hudson's Bay Company vanished in June, when the last of its stores ceased operations, but its presence in Winnipeg might never be fully erased.
The 355-year-old retailer was fundamental to Winnipeg's founding and its ghosts endure, scattered about the city in street names, buildings cloaked in new veneer, road designs, and a cache of archives.
"The Bay will never be gone — ever — because there's just too many signs of its existence," said Gordon Goldsborough, acting executive director of the Manitoba Historical Society. "We'll never be beyond their influence."
The six-storey, 650,000-square-foot former HBC department store at Portage Avenue and Memorial Street — the largest poured concrete building in Canada when built in 1926 — is the most obvious piece of the once-mighty empire, but there are more hidden in plain view.
Most were built around HBC's first department store, which opened in 1881 at Main Street and York Avenue after the company left the confines of Upper Fort Garry, a block away.
The fort, considered Winnipeg's birthplace, was demolished between 1881 and 1888, leaving only the historic governor's gate in what is now Upper Fort Garry Provincial Park.
The store at York and Main met the wrecking ball in 1931 after the one on Portage opened, but many ancillary buildings the company built nearby remain.
They include:
"They don't call out like The Bay building on Portage but they were still really important parts of the Hudson Bay downtown complex," said Murray Peterson, the City of Winnipeg's historian.
The HBC, founded in 1670, was granted a royal charter by the British Crown for a fur-trading monopoly in Rupert's Land, a vast swath of British North America territory.
Named for the HBC's first governor, Prince Rupert, the expanse included what is now northern Quebec, northern Ontario and Nunavut, most of the Prairies and parts of Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana.
It encompassed the watershed of rivers flowing into Hudson Bay — hence the company name (formally: The Governor and Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson's Bay).
During the fur-trading era, HBC established hundreds of trading posts, from small ones to major centres. As that era withered, it shifted more to retail and sold Rupert's Land to the Dominion of Canada in 1869.
The deed of surrender permitted HBC to retain large blocks of land around its active trading posts.
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