The women in Winnipeg’s street names

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This article was published 04/10/2021 (1464 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

According to the city’s public works department, there are 6,750 kilometres of streets in Winnipeg. A tiny fraction of that distance is named for women.

Most of the female street names found in the original city of Winnipeg were bestowed due to the woman’s connection to a powerful man. For instance, being related to Red River Colony’s first postmaster, William Ross, warranted a street. There was Jemima Street for his wife, renamed Elgin Street in 1906, and Isabel and Ellen streets were named for Ross’s daughters.

If you were one of Alexander Logan’s eight daughters your place on the map was assured. Today we still find streets named for Harriet (Lily), Elizabeth (Lizzie), and Owena. Mary Jane had Mary Street until 1893, when it was changed to Martha to avoid confusion with St. Mary Avenue. Nena Street, now part of Sherbrook Street, was likely named for Juanita (Nina).

Sadly, the identity of many of the women behind these street names has been lost to time. This is most noticeable in the series of streets north of Notre Dame Avenue between King and Arlington streets. Some have changed over the past 147 years, but we can still see Adelaide, Dagmar, Ellen, Frances, Gertie, Harriet, Isabel, Kate, Lydia, Margaretta, Olivia, Pearl, and Emily.

Harry Shave, who wrote a column about street name origins for the Free Press in the 1960s, hit a dead end when he tried to research this series. He wrote that they were simply “names of girls said to have been daughters of prominent citizens”. A search of likely suspects, such as the children of the Bannatynes or McDermots, who donated much of the land on which the Health Sciences Centre now stands, offers no clues.

Point Douglas had an interesting situation where two streets named for women, Rachel and Annabella, met. The former ran north of the CPR tracks and the latter ran south. Not long after the subway was built under the tracks in 1906, they were merged into a single Rachel Street. City council renamed it Annabella Street in 1913.

For reasons unknown, the city’s public works committee voted in March 1952 to revert back to Rachel Street. Three weeks later, city council overrode that decision and reinstated Annabella Street, which is what we know it as today.

The origins of Rachel Street are unclear. Annabella, however, has a great back story, discovered by Winnipeg Tribune columnist Lillian Gibbons in 1946.

Gibbons spoke to J. R. Crawford, who grew up on Higgins Avenue in the 1880s. He claimed that when surveyors came to erect street signs along Higgins, they found themselves one street name short. (Maps from the era show that the two streets did not quite align, which could have led to confusion amongst the workmen.)

Crawford told Gibbons that to quickly find another street name, they asked a young girl playing nearby her name. It was Annabella Duff, who lived on Higgins Avenue. Crawford and Duff remained in touch until she married and relocated to Vancouver.