Description of Historic Place

The Canadian National Railways (Canadian Northern Railway) Station at Humboldt is a one-and-a-half story, wood-frame, railway station built in 1905. It is located at the edge of the business and institutional core of the city. The formal recognition is confined to the railway station building itself.

Heritage Value

The Humboldt railway station was built as the central point on the Canadian Northern Railway (CNoR) main line from Winnipeg to Edmonton, and illustrates the CNoR’s confidence in the viability and potential of its prairie network. Humboldt was created and surveyed by the CNoR with the railway station as its visual and commercial focus within the street grid.

The Humboldt station illustrates the CNoR’s economic approach to station construction. The use of a “Special” CNoR plan for the Humboldt station reflects the importance projected for Humboldt by CNoR. At the same time, the incorporation of standard design elements adapted from its third class station plans, illustrates the continuing concern to limit initial building costs. Later extensions to the station reflect the CNoR policy of making improvements only as warranted by increasing business.

The railway station retains many functionally related components of its setting, including railway buildings, warehouses and grain elevators clustered along the track, trees and shrubs in the front yard, dating from the early days of the station and an early, exterior, free-standing light fixture. The area surrounding the station retains numerous contemporary structures, as well as the original rectangular street grid oriented to the railway line.

Sources: Heritage Character Statement, Canadian National Railways (Former Canadian Northern Railway) Station, Humboldt, Saskatchewan, October 1992; and Analytica Associates, Railway Station Report 115, Canadian National Railways (Former Canadian Northern Railway) Station, Humboldt, Saskatchewan.

Character-Defining Elements

The Character-defining elements of the Canadian National Railways (Canadian Northern Railway) Station at Humboldt include but are not limited to:
-its simple, horizontal massing, consisting of a one-and-a-half storey, elongated rectangular structure with a projecting operator’s bay on the ground floor of the track elevation
-the form, proportions and detailing of its roof line, consisting of a long, bellcast roof on the first storey, with exposed rafters supported by plain wooden brackets, and a high, pyramidal roof on the upper storey, broken front and back by gabled dormers
-the asymmetrical yet balanced arrangement of window and door openings
-the double-hung, eight-over-one, sash windows
-the wooden doors.