With fewer than 10 people still living in the ghost town located half an hour north of Drumheller, this ghost town serves up the charm of the old west with a slice of pizza on the side.
“We’ve got people coming from everywhere,” says Rowley Community Association president Christopher Foesier. “We get folks from Australia, New Zealand, you never know. They’re traveling along, they’re coming from all over the place.”
Why? For those in the know – and you can now count yourself in this number – it’s a rip-roaring pizza party for one night a month at Sam’s Saloon.
Some 20 years ago – Foesier isn’t sure exactly what year the tradition began – a group of locals decided to do something about their struggling main street. Once a small hub, the population started to dwindle as folks moved to bigger centres. But people are coming back to visit the town, Sam’s Saloon and for the pizza.
“We went to an auction sale and bought pizza ovens and started making pizzas,” says Foesier, an oil and gas worker who has called Rowley home for 36 years.
It was a hit. Nowadays they’ll make upwards of 200 pizzas in the trio of ovens for the biggest Rowley Pizza Night of the year in September. There’s no pizza night in December, but on 11 other nights a year Foesier says things get going around 5 p.m. He recommends coming early just to watch the stream of vehicles pull in to town, turning west off Highway 56 and driving the few kilometers to Rowley.
A staff of 10 to 15 hard-working volunteers makes sure everybody’s fed, and often there’s entertainment on hand. It makes for a good old-fashioned night in the Canadian Badlands.
There’s a few ghost towns worth a stop in the Canadian Badlands. Places like Rowley, Dorothy or Wayne transport you back to a time of simplicity, charm and western roots. Many of these ghost towns main street shops have been turned into museums that transport you back to another time. And Rowley has even made the big screens in movies like Legends of the fall and the Canadian-made Bye Bye Blues that utilize the charm of main street as a backdrop for their stories.
The pizza in Rowley is just one of the stops that are a must in the ghost towns of the Canadian Badlands.
