These photographic images are drawn from the Edward T. Walker fonds held at the S.J. McKee Archives, John E. Robbins Library, Brandon University. Edward Walker was a native of England. In 1895, he left his home in Stockport England and traveled to the village of Millwood, Manitoba where he, his wife, and their three children began a new life on the Canadian settlement frontier.

Edward Walker was a professional photographer. The Walker fonds contain a variety of images of Millwood and the surrounding agricultural community, its people, and life. These images were produced from gelatin dry plate negatives, a process introduced around 1880 to replace the wet collodin process in which a photographic solution was applied to a glass plate just prior to exposure. Edward Walker’s pictorial account of life in and around Millwood Manitoba circa 1900 is an important photographic legacy of pioneer life on the upper reaches of the Assiniboine Valley.

The village of Millwood was - and is - located in the Assiniboine River valley close to the Manitoba-Saskatchewan border just a few miles northwest of Binscarth and a similar distance southwest of Russell. It came into existence in 1887 with the construction of the Manitoba and North-Western Railway, a road that ran diagonally through the new West from Prince Albert, North West Territories to Portage la Prairie Manitoba.