For a hundred years, when something in Willow Bunch caught fire, someone from the same small pool of neighbours pulled on a coat and went to it. On Oct. 24 the department that grew out of that habit is throwing itself a party: a gala supper and cabaret marking the Willow Bunch Fire Department's centennial, with past members invited back and the whole town asked to come along.
The supper has a ticket cut-off of Oct. 18, but cabaret tickets can be bought right up until the night of the event. Fire Chief Keith Durand says the simplest way to reserve is to call him at 306-640-5230, ring the town office at 306-473-2450, or get in touch through Facebook.
For Durand, the evening is less a victory lap than a thank-you note. "We figured it's our way of giving back to the community for all the love and support that they have given us over the years," he said.
That sentiment runs through his explanation of how a volunteer department in a town of roughly 300 people has lasted a century at all. He credits supportive, engaged councils on both sides of local government -- the town and the surrounding rural municipality -- and, above all, the people who live there. "We have the community support behind us ... through thick and thin," he said.
Willow Bunch is one of the oldest settled communities in Saskatchewan, which gives its institutions a long memory. Red River Métis families were wintering in the area by the 1860s, following the retreating bison, and in early 1870 about thirty families uneasy about the future of the new province of Manitoba moved west near the present townsite. Jean Louis Légaré, later recognized as the town's founder, arrived that same year. The community's early life was built on herding and ranching as the great buffalo hunts ended, then on the arrival of French-Canadian settlers after the province was created in 1905. The long-delayed Canadian National Railway line finally reached Willow Bunch in 1926, and the town's prospects changed with it. By the mid-1950s the population was approaching 800; the community marked its own centennial in 1970.
Fire, in a prairie town of wooden buildings and open grassland, was never an abstraction. The department's own history is bound up with the practical business of protecting a place where help is far away: the closest full-time professional crews are in larger centres, and neighbouring volunteer departments lean on each other when a blaze outruns one hall. Willow Bunch's firefighters have answered calls well beyond their own boundary over the years, and the department has earned recognition beyond the town as well -- in 2025 it was reported to have won a national emergency management award, a notable distinction for a crew of its size.
Today the department counts 13 members. The centennial is expected to bring some of those who served before them back to town, a reunion of the people who held the hoses in earlier decades. That generational thread is part of what the gala is meant to honour: the chief's own tenure sits atop a line of volunteers stretching back to an era of hand-drawn equipment and horse-drawn apparatus, when a fire bell or a telephone tree was the whole alarm system.
The setting for the celebration carries its own bit of local lore. The fire station stands on Édouard Beaupré Street, named for the town's most famous son, the Willow Bunch Giant -- Édouard Beaupré, born here in 1881, who grew to a reported 2.52 metres and became a circus and sideshow attraction and professional strongman before his death in 1904. Willow Bunch leans into the nickname "Home of the Giant," and the street name is a reminder that this is a place that keeps its history close, whether the subject is a world-record height or a century-old fire hall.
For anyone hoping to attend, the logistics are simple and old-fashioned, in keeping with the department itself: phone the chief, phone the town office, or message the department on Facebook. Supper seats need to be claimed by Oct. 18; cabaret tickets will be sold until the night of Oct. 24. Past members, current members, neighbours and anyone else who wants to mark a hundred years of volunteers turning out for their town are welcome.
It is, in the end, a small-town anniversary of a very particular kind -- not a museum exhibit but a supper and a dance, held by the people who still keep the trucks ready. A century after the railway arrived and the department took shape, the volunteers of Willow Bunch are asking the community they serve to share a meal with them, and to meet the men and women who did the job before them.