November 13, 2026

This is the tale of two very different prairie families whose legacies warmed the future of a bitterly cold place. These families lived in my hometown of Edmonton, but landed there from far off: Lebanon and England.

In the late 1800s, my grandfather’s family emigrated from England. By 1906, Walter Ramsay had been a schoolteacher and principal for 13 years. A year later, he’d quit to open up the first greenhouses in Western Canada, in a place where the ground froze in October.

Flash forward to the 1920s when Dany Assaf’s great-grandfather immigrated to Alberta from Lebanon. He made his living with a general store in Edmonton and his son worked in the northern fur trade. In the depths of the Depression, he was part of 20 Lebanese families who decided to build a little mosque on the prairie.