Our History

The congregation at St John’s Lutheran Church, Beach Corner is a pioneer congregation of Lutheran Christians. Our cemetery features the names of the first European families to live in this area. A preaching station was established here when the territory was first opened to settlement in the late 1800’s. One of the settler families donated a few acres of land at the intersection known as “Beach Corner”. It is where the Jasper Highway and the road that connected Alberta Beach with Edmonton Beach (now known as “Spring Lake”) crossed one another. The congregation built its first building at the southeast corner of the intersection and was officially registered in 1911. Over time, the village of Beach Corner grew up around the church. Eventually, the Jasper Highway was replaced with a modern freeway that passed several kilometres to the north. The businesses of the village relocated to lands beside the new highway, leaving the church, the cemetery and the school behind.   

Today

Today, the commercial district established beside the new highway is known as Beach Corner. The location where our congregation continues to meet today was known by the locals as “Blueberry” on account of the many blueberries that once grew in the area. This is the name that the school adopted, leaving us in a situation where St John’s, Beach Corner, is not at the new Beach Corner, but across from Blueberry School. It is also the reason why it is not uncommon for people hoping to attend a wedding or a funeral to become lost looking for us! The old Jasper Highway was renamed “Parkland Drive” and the old beach road was renamed “Range Road 20″. We identify our location, then, by advertising that we are at the corner of Parkland Drive and Range Road 20 across from Blueberry School.

Because this area is about a half hour drive from Edmonton, the descendants of the settler families were not forced to leave the area in order to find the outside jobs that helped to keep the farm going. This makes us unusual for Western Canada for having such a large  proportion of founding families still holding membership in our congregation. The area, which is at the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountain Foothills and the southern edge of the Boreal Forest, has also attracted many people who want to live in the country and work in the city. Their tracts of land that are a few acres in size are known in Alberta as “acreages”. There are so many acreages in this area that the area surrounding the church has the population of a small city.