Gretna, Manitoba

Gretna is a town situated in south-central Manitoba, Canada located within the Municipality of Rhineland. Just north of the Canada - United States border on PTH 30, Gretna had a reported population of 574 in 2006.

It is bordered by Pembina County, North Dakota. The nearest American community to Gretna is Neche, North Dakota.

History

Once home to roaming Buffalo herds, the area around Gretna attracted European settlers as far back as the early 19th century. Originally, Gretna was only known as "Smuggler's Point", a simple border crossing where the flow of undeclared goods were smuggled over the border by early settlers and fur trappers. Soon after establishing the 49th parallel as the international border, Gretna became an important customs centre and border community for both the Canadian and American governments.

Gretna's strategic geographic location raised the interest of the Canadian Pacific Railway which encouraged the creation of large grain elevator operations in the area. The Ogilvie Milling Company was one of the first and most prominent private companies in Gretna around the turn of the 20th century. It is believed company founder William Ogilvie, originally from Scotland, named Gretna after Gretna Green in Scotland, also a border community, where runaway couples were married by the blacksmith at his anvil.

Manitoba

Manitoba (ⁱ/ˌmænᵻˈtoʊbə/) is a province located at the longitudinal centre of Canada. It is one of the three prairie provinces and is the fifth-most populous province in Canada, with a population of 1,208,268 as of 2011. Manitoba covers an area of 649,950 square kilometres (250,900 sq mi) with a widely varied landscape; the southern and western regions are predominantly prairie grassland, the eastern and northern regions are dominated by the Canadian Shield, and the far northern regions along the Hudson Bay coast are arctic tundra. Manitoba is bordered by the provinces of Ontario to the east and Saskatchewan to the west, the territory of Nunavut to the north, and the US states of North Dakota and Minnesota to the south.

More than 90% of Manitoba's population lives within the far southern regions of the province, where its arable land and largest cities are located. The northern region of Manitoba, which encompasses nearly 70% the province's total area, is mostly undeveloped consisting primarily of remote and isolated communities amongst vast wilderness.Winnipeg is the capital and most populous city in Manitoba by a significant margin, with 730,018 people residing in the Winnipeg Capital Region. Other cities in the province are Brandon, Portage la Prairie, Steinbach, Thompson, Winkler, Selkirk, Dauphin, Morden, and Flin Flon.

Manitoba (disambiguation)

Manitoba is a province of Canada.

Manitoba may also refer to:

People with the surname

See also

Manitoba (computer chip)

Manitoba was a system-on-a-chip (SoC) introduced by Intel Corporation in 2003. It was a mostly unsuccessful attempt by Intel to break into the smart phones market. The chip integrated flash memory, a digital signal processor and an XScale processor core. After the chip's failure in the marketplace, the business was sold to Marvell in 2006 for $600 million.

References