We obtained and assembled present-day County Maps, topographical maps and copies of Archives Ownership Maps from Hanna, Alberta.

Roy provided me with a hand drawn layout of all the original buildings and structures around the home site and accompanied me to Jenner where we walked the entire location to see what was still there.

We found all the old building sites by locating their basements, the corrals by remaining pieces of fence posts and wire, and on-grade structures by imprints and banks left when the builders leveled the ground for construction. Lots of artifacts could be found by scraping the surface of the ground in the areas where the houses and the blacksmith’s shop had been located. We photographed everything for later study and Roy told me stories about the ranch for most of the day.

We met with Ted and Linda Davies and traded stories for a while. Then we traveled to Brooks and met Gloria and Walter Olsen, who coordinated the gathering of information about the Jenner area for their community heritage book.

From our first field trip, we established that there was enough information to write the Lone Star story. Also, people in the area were very interested in the ranch. Some of them had worked there and they were enthusiastic about telling their stories. There is a chance that someday the ranch could become an Alberta Heritage Site as well.

We ordered more maps and early air photographs and we did some geological research. Preliminary information about the ranch was sent off to Brooks for the Heritage book. Then we continued to gather information about locations in photographs, documents, etc. and talked to people that might have any information about the Stapletons and the Lone Star Ranch.

The project came together when Colleen (Stapleton) Irwin convinced Margaret (Stapleton) Dickie to come out to Calgary from Winfield, B.C. for a field trip to Jenner and to bring all the photographs she could locate. Most of these were in the hands of Mike (Michael John) Stapleton for safekeeping.

This second field trip revealed more artifacts and more information about the locations of the buildings. And after a meeting with Jim Musgrove the location of the original Lone Star brand was found on the side of an old building near the ranch, where Jim Musgrove’s father and the Stapletons sealed an agreement on the sale of some horses, by ‘vetting’ (re-branding) the animals. But first they tested the branding iron on the side of one of the nearby buildings.

The gathering of all this information resulted in this report and will be published as a story about the Stapletons and the Lone Star Ranch in the Alberta heritage book, The Prairie Crucible.

Lone Star Ranch Homestead