RM of Val Marie’s story
The Rural Municipality of Val Marie No. 17 sits in the southwest corner of Saskatchewan, right up against the Canadian border with Montana's Phillips County. It incorporated as a rural municipality on January 1, 1969, and surrounds the village of Val Marie, with which it shares an office and an administrator.
The name has an interesting story. Louis-Pierre Gravel, a missionary who promoted French Catholic immigration to the southwest of the province, first called the settlement Rivière des Français, after the nearby Frenchman River. In a 1911 report to the superintendent of immigration, for reasons no one knows, he formally proposed Libreval, meaning "Free Valley." Neither name stuck. Val Marie, "Valley of Mary," was coined by Fr. Claude Passaplan, the area's missionary priest, who had earlier served as the first Roman Catholic parish priest in Swift Current.
Today the semi-arid land supports a mix of ranching and crop farming, and much of the RM is taken up by large community pastures. The Val Marie Irrigation Project uses two artificial lakes on the Frenchman River to water land beside the village. The creation of Grasslands National Park in 1981 boosted tourism, and the RM now holds the park's West Block, its operations compound and two guesthouses.
Written from Wikipedia’s article “Rural Municipality of Val Marie No. 17” (CC BY-SA 4.0), and shared under the same licence.
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