On this day in 1950, it was reported that the residents of West Jasper Place voted to rename their village Jasper Place, choosing that rather unimaginative new name from a ballot of nearly 90 choices, including New Edmonton, Oil City, Opportunity, Boomtown, Dogpatch, and Westmonton.
The "West" was in the moniker to start with to differentiate it from the original Jasper Place between 142nd and 149th Streets. Edmonton swallowed that Jasper Place in 1913, leaving West Jasper Place on its own along what is now Stony Plain Road between 149th and 156th streets, later extending to 170th Street.
People started moving to the area in the 1930s to escape higher taxes in Edmonton, but it really started growing after oil was discovered near Leduc in 1947, wrote Lawrence Herzog. In 1948, West Jasper Place incorporated as a hamlet with a population of 4,000. It had more than doubled by 1949 when it became a village, and in 1950, with its new name, Jasper Place became the largest town in Alberta.
The town had no sidewalks until after sewer and water lines started to be installed in 1953, and it was known for having "the worst damned mud in the country," Herzog said. There wasn't much of an industrial tax base to support the schools, sports facilities, and Meadowlark Park Shopping Centre under development by the early 1960s, and the provincial government of Ernest Manning refused to bail the town out.
Residents voted to amalgamate with Edmonton in 1962, and the deed was done in 1964, with the city assuming the town's debt of more than $8 million and welcoming more than 37,000 people.
This clipping was found on Vintage Edmonton, a daily look at Edmonton's history from armchair archivist @revRecluse.