Strathcona County’s history of rural governance 

It was the 56th year of Her Majesty Queen Victoria's reign. Residents of the Clover Bar area had just learned the outcome of their petition to the North-West Territorial Legislature to organize as a district.

It was following the end of the fur trade, when local lands were being opened up to homestead settlement as Dominion land surveyors completed their land surveys. As more and more settlers took up land claims, starting in the 1880s, the then governing North-West Territories urged the homesteaders to band together to address for themselves their challenges involving livestock, roads and wildfires.

The homesteaders of Clover Bar had their petition granted on April 14, 1893 and the area was declared Statute Labor and Fire District No. 2, the first of many such districts to form in what is now Alberta. This was the earliest iteration of the governance of our municipality.

This initial labor district comprised just one township—that of Township 53, Range 22, West 4th Meridian; it was 36 square miles in area, within a locale already widely known for decades as Clover Bar. The size of the district was enlarged in 1903 to six townships (216 square miles), and enlarged again in 1912-13, this time to nine townships (324 square miles) and given the name Local Improvement District No. 517. In 1918 the Local Improvement District No. 517 was renamed yet again as the Municipal District of Clover Bar No. 517.  In 1918, Local Improvement District No. 518 was renamed the Municipal District of Strathcona, No. 518.

Besides paying an average 5 cents per acre property tax, homesteaders were required to work at building and maintaining local trails and roads, and fighting fires. 

With a tax rate of $8 per quarter section, property owners could see a 10-per-cent discount if they paid before the July 1 deadline. Property owners in the local improvement district could also sign up to do work (on for example building roads) in exchange for a reduction in the amount of taxes they paid; in 1913, these wages were paid at: 

• 25 cents per hour to a man doing manual labour 
• 30 cents per hour to a man working as foreman  
• 50 cents per hour for a man working with a team of horses 

In 1938, the province began to align school and municipal boundaries. The Government of Alberta amalgamated 76 one-roomed schools in the Clover Bar, Strathcona and Leduc areas; the new entity was called Clover Bar School Division No. 13. .

In 1943 the Municipal District of Clover Bar No. 517 merged with the Municipal District of Strathcona No. 518. The new larger municipality was temporarily named the Municipal District of Strathcona No. 517. Then in 1945 when the province renumbered all of the municipal districts in Alberta, the Municipal District of Strathcona No. 517 was renamed the Municipal District of Strathcona No. 83. 

In 1955, under the Co-terminus Boundaries Act, the province aligned borders of the Municipal District of Strathcona with those of the school division within its borders. This move eventually led to the amalgamation of these two bodies under the County Act—the municipality and school division—on January 1, 1962; the new entity was called County of Strathcona No. 20. The county model of governance was in place here until 1994, when the province repealed the County Act and the school division was split off to form Elk Island Public Schools Regional Division No. 14. 

Effective January 1, 1996, Strathcona County was granted status as a specialized municipality by Alberta Municipal Affairs. This means that Sherwood Park and the Urban Service Area immediately around it are considered equivalent to a city for purposes of provincial programs and grants, and rural Strathcona is recognized as equivalent to a municipal district for program and grant purposes. 

Local government timeline

Researched in part from Story of Rural Municipal Government in Alberta 1909 to 1983, published by the Alberta Association of Municipal Districts and Counties, 1983