Driving east along Highway 14, somewhere between the familiar hum of grain trucks and the distant thunder of freight trains, you’ll pass two places that don’t quite qualify as towns—but still manage to leave an impression. Shonts and Poe, Alberta. Blink and you’ll miss them. But if you slow down, roll down the window, and let the prairie wind do its thing, you’ll notice something quietly remarkable: two grain elevators standing alone, like sentinels watching over fields that stretch farther than the eye can follow.
Shonts sits just off the highway, tucked beside the main rail line that connects Winnipeg to Edmonton. It’s not a town in the traditional sense—no post office, no gas station, not even a welcome sign. But it does have a name, and it has a story. Established in 1909 as a railway siding, Shonts was named after Theodore Perry Shonts, an American railroad executive who likely never saw the place himself. The town never grew beyond its siding, but the elevator became a fixture. In fact, there were two of them once. One still stands today, weathered and proud. The other was relocated to Heritage Park in Calgary in 1967, where it now serves as a museum piece—a rare prairie relic preserved for future generations.
Locals still talk about the time someone added a few letters to the side of the elevator, transforming “Shonts” into “Dirty Shorts.” The paint’s mostly faded now, but the story hasn’t. My sister-in-law’s sister-in-law claims she knows who did it. I’m not saying she’s right—but I’m not saying she’s wrong either.
Just a few miles down the line sits Poe. If Shonts is a whisper, Poe is a breath. No founding date, no recorded population, no townsite to speak of. Just a solitary elevator and a name that feels like it belongs in a poem. There’s no signage, no paved road leading in—just a gravel path and a structure that looks like it’s been waiting for something that never arrived. Poe likely served as a grain collection point for nearby farms, a quiet cog in the machinery of prairie agriculture. Today, it’s a landmark for those who know where to look.
The trains still roar past—about sixty a day, if you believe the rail watchers—and I do. I live between these two elevators, and I’ve been stopped more times than I can count. But the trains don’t stop here anymore. The sidings are gone. The elevators stand alone, surrounded by wheat, wind, and the kind of silence that only the prairie can offer.
There’s something oddly poetic about these places. They’re not ghost towns, because they were never really towns to begin with. They’re more like punctuation marks on the prairie—quiet, stubborn, and full of character. They remind me that history doesn’t always come with a plaque or a parade. Sometimes, it’s just a name on a map and a building that refuses to fall.
And that’s enough.