1912-1913 - The Urban Land Boom       The second Annual Meeting held in January, 1912, featured the introduction of several topics which have long since become familiar. A proposal was made for the compilation of a surveyor’s manual in the form of a consolidation of the various acts relating to surveys and plans, to be produced at the expense of the provincial government. There was a discussion on the preservation of survey monuments and some complaints were aired about building site certificates prepared for loan companies by persons other than qualified land surveyors. A resolution was adopted to have the Land Titles Act amended to provide for the registration of survey liens to ensure recovery of surveyors’ fees from delinquent clients. Twenty-three members attended the meeting and Mr. Charlesworth was elected to succeed Mr. Pearce as President of the Association. That year was one of the good years for Alberta surveyors in private practice. The big urban land boom was is full swing and townsite subdivisions by the dozen were being laid out far beyond the corporate limits of many towns and cities. Mr. R.H. Cautley used to relate some years later that in 1912 his survey firm, one of the busiest in Edmonton, cleared over $8,000.00. In those days, that was big money for survey work. All this activity in townsite promotion was known as “wild-catting,” presumably because it was entirely speculative and without reference to the probable realities of urban growth. It was so much overdone in those years that it led the government in 1913 to pass legislation authorizing the Public Utilities Board to exercise control over it by a procedure entailing the Board’s prior approval of any proposed subdivision of more than twenty-five lots, based on the anticipated need for the subdivision. At the same time, the first subdivision regulations, prescribing lot sizes, street widths, the provision of public reserves and so forth, were enacted. These regulations were administered by the Department of Public Works, and rudimentary though these town planning measures were, they were no more popular than the planning measures that we have today. It was objected that having to obtain the approval, not only of the Director of Surveys, but also of the Public Utilities Board and the Deputy Minister of Public Works entailed far too much delay in getting plans registered, with the consequence that the subdividers suffered great losses of time and money before they could put their lots on the market for sale to eager buyers who seemed to live mostly in England and eastern Canada. However, it can be said to the credit of the land surveying profession that its membership was not entirely out of sympathy with these measures. When centres such as Edson and Tofield were being extended to provide enough twenty-five foot lots to accommodate populations of 70,000 people each, it was obvious that much of this land speculation would materialize in nothing more than fat profits for the promoters who were behind it. The Association’s concern was reflected in the records of their meetings and in the interest which it began to take in the subject of town planning as early as 1913. At the Association’s third Annual Meeting held in that year, Mr. Latornell delivered a paper on subdivision design and the need for planning which was noteworthy for a prediction, made at a time when automobiles were rare, that in the not too distant future the safe and uncongested movement of self-propelled vehicles on the public streets would be one of the most difficult problems that urban authorities would be called upon to deal with. While all this survey work in connection with private land subdivision was going on, the Dominion Land Surveyor who relied for his livelihood on township subdivision work was having a comparatively thin time of it. The big years for township subdivision work in the west had been from 1882 to 1884 and from 1906 to 1910, when two big upsurges in agricultural settlement took place. By 1912, that line of work had dwindled very considerably and it is not altogether surprising that the Dominion Land Surveyors felt aggrieved at being disbarred from the highly lucrative townsite work for which they could only qualify themselves by taking a provincial examination. Nevertheless, many of them swallowed their pride and wrote and passed the examinations, with the result that the names of twenty-eight Dominion Land Surveyors were added to the ALS register during the period of April, 1912, to October, 1913. This influx of new members brought the membership total at the end of 1913 to 96, a figure that was not attained again until 1955. This may appear to represent an over-abundance of surveyors in relation to the population of the province at that time, and that soon proved to be the case. Eighteen of those registered in 1913 lived outside Alberta and presumably practised very little here or not at all, but nearly all the others seem to have been in active practice, judging by the appearance of most of their names on plans of subdivision that were registered during that period. The sphere of activity of those in private practice, however, was almost wholly restricted to townsite subdivision work, with a limited amount of township work for the few whom the federal government chose to favour. For the man in private practice there was no road survey work, as all such surveys, whether for provincial or municipal roads, were carried out by the district surveyors employed by the provincial Department of Public Works. Similarly, the railway companies employed their own surveyors on right-of-way surveys, there was no requirement whatever for pipeline, power line and wellsite surveys, and the demand for building site surveys was, of course, far less than it is today. So, naturally, when the townsite land boom collapsed in 1913, the number of registered surveyors began to diminish and from that year on, it kept going down steadily until it hit its lowest figure of 37 in 1937.   Back - 1910-1911 - The Birth of the ALSA Forward - 1914 - "The Hoodooed Year"