Agriculture

Agriculture. . , According to legend, the Honourable John Dryden, Ontario Minister of Agriculture, got off the train at Barclay Tank to stretch his legs on a trip to the west in 1893. He was impressed with the clover growing along the embankment, and as a result established a Provincial Experimental Farm here. North Dryden is built on part of it , Highway 17 skirts its south and west boundaries. It was judged successful, and by 1896 six townships (a unit of land measure generally 6 miles square) had been surveyed and homesteaders were arriving. Both the federal and provincial governments encouraged and assisted people to establish homesteads in wilderness areas, and over the next 30 years hundreds of small farms were established in the Dryden District. This land rush was centered on the Experimental Farm at Barclay Tank and on Oxdrift to the west. The land around Wabigoon being less suited to agriculture, Barclay Tank was named New Prospect in 1896 and renamed Dryden in 1898. It was incorporated as a town in 1910. Because of this land rush Dryden had passed Wabigoon as the commercial centre of the district by that time. The massive rural depopulation which occurred all over North America after World War II was intensified in the Dryden area because of ample well paid jobs in town and the marginal nature of agriculture. By 1955 the country side was almost entirely depopulated. A small, stable agricultural community remains.