2012- McLeod Lake is an unincorporated community located north of Prince George that is notable for being the first continuously inhabited European settlement established west of the Rocky Mountains in present-day Canada. Originally named Trout Lake Fort, it was founded by the explorer and North West Company trader Simon Fraser in 1805. It eventually became known as Fort McLeod during the tenure of Archibald Norman McLeod, who was in charge of the post for many years.
In 2009 and 2010, McLeod Lake’s Centennial Club revitalized the McLeod Lake Community Hall in order to increase the building’s versatility, allowing the community to come together and gather in the hall for a wider variety of events than was ever possible before.
For many years, the hall has been used as a central hub for community clubs and for residents’ important events in the rural community of McLeod Lake. The hall also serves the more official purpose as a polling station for all levels of elections and also as the designated emergency response centre for the community in the event of a disaster. The upgrades completed under this project were essential to ensuring in the event of a disaster that this hall would be suitable as a gathering place.
The renovations that McLeod’s Lake Centennial Club made to the building include improvements to the interior and exterior of the building as well as to the surrounding hall grounds. The hall was originally constructed as a bunkhouse in 1957 and was converted to the current building and site in 1987 with a grant from Expo 86. Since that time, it has become an important facility for the community acting as a multi-purpose gathering place, and with these improvements will continue as a modernized community hall for years to come.
