Western Canada Hagells

The Western Canadian Hagells of Alberta, Canada 

The western Hagells are descendants of Edward Hagell and his wife_____

Below is the lineage chart for Edward.

Edward Frederick Hagell joins the Army, WW1 

Obituary

Thursday, April 16, 1953

Edward G. Hagell

Passes at Coast Pioneer Newspaperman Is Dead

Edward G. Hagell, 92, of Vancouver, and a pioneer Lethbridge printer and publisher, died in a Vancouver hospital Wednesday.

In 1942, Mr. Hagell had retired from the newspaper field ending a 66 year career started in his native England and continued in Regina with the Regina Leader Post. He was one of the pioneers in the printing business in Lethbridge, coming here in 1890 from Regina.

Mr. Hagell was born in Maidstone, Kent, England, where he apprenticed as a printer. In 1889, he came to Canada, and with his brother Ernest, started farming in Maclean, Sask., 30 miles east of Regina. When disaster struck their farm efforts, Mr. Hagell went to work as a printer on the Leader Post, under the famed Nicholas Flood Davin. When Lethbridge News, the city's first newspaper, under frontier publisher E.T."Si" Saunders offered him a position, Mr. Hagell came further west.

The following newspaper article comes from a photo copy from an article my brother, Robert Charles Hagell obtained from the Glenbow Foundation in Calgary, Alberta, Canada in the summer of 1992. It is at the Glenbow Foundation that many of Edward Frederick Hagell's works are kept.

"But it will depend on what happens with the proposed cultural centre here", said E.F. Hagell. "An artist needs someplace to hang his work, so I hope the answer to that problem will be the cultural centre". "My wife and I want to make this our last move, and we both  love Lethbridge," he said. Mr. Hagell's work will be on display at the centre in any case, whether he makes his permanent residence here or not. Some four years ago a collection of his works was purchased by city council for use in a cultural centre.

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The fact that he has been sketching since he was little more than a baby would make one think that his whole world revolved around art. It isn't really so. The west is the big thing to Mr. Hagell. All his work is on the west, and it is his view of the great changes that have been made in one man's lifetime that are the important things to him. "To me, it is fantastic. I can remember looking out from my home in Lethbridge and seeing nothing but virgin prairie land. It is really something now to think that all these trees and beauty have been put there by someone’s spade". To record these great changes - both in art and in writing - is the goal of Ted Hagell. Besides a total of approximately.

1500 art works, he has had one book published and a collection of short stories in which he attempted to preserve the viewpoint of the early western settler.  His memories are vivid. he can recall his father putting out the old Lethbridge News and himself delivering the paper to the entire city. "I delivered the complete south side on Friday evenings and the complete north side on Saturdays. In those days I took a big dog with me because the people on the routes had some pretty wild looking animals protecting their

property", he said. His sister, Mrs. Violet Cowie, also got a taste of the newspaper business, writing for both The News and The Herald. It was a visit by his sister, on her way back to her home in Victoria after visiting London, England, that brought him to Lethbridge for the current visit.

Mr. Hagell's reputation as an artist has stretched almost around the world, with one collection hanging in the Beaver Club in London, a collection that has been copied for sale on numerous occasions. The Glenbow Foundation  in Calgary............(section missing).....lahoma shortly, a museum that also features a number of selections from the world famous Russell and Remington  collection, considered by many to be the top art works of early Western American civilization. He has had some excellent training, studying under top sketch artists in New York and Los Angeles in his early years. Since then he has lived in Ontario and B.C. before moving back "home" to southern Alberta in 1952, to Pincer Creek. He has farmed and ranched along the way, can even recollect having broken many acres of land in the early days of southern Alberta. In those days whole crews moved through the area from farm to farm, to work the fields in an effort that can only be described as a community effort. "And the work didn't stop when the sun disappeared either. We used carbide lamps and went far into the night on a good many occasions, "he said, with an almost wistful gleam in his eye. Some times weren't so good to remember though. Like the days of grasshoppers when a farmer could look at a beautiful green field in the morning and in the evening see the same field completely black. He can remember farmers spreading 40,000 tons of grasshopper bait when the wave was at its thickest, and also trying to shield himself from windstorms. But even bad memories are exciting to relive and help to make the area - 1963 style - even better.

The old trails and the old wagons that were drawn by 40 head of cattle, a profession so large that present Galt Gardens were laid out to provide a place for the wagons to turn in. It's all worth preserving, says Mr. Hagell.