Years After Its Closure, Uranium City Lives On in the Hearts of Former Residents

On a crisp Saturday afternoon in Saskatoon, a modest community centre filled with laughter, tears, and the faint smell of maple syrup. The occasion? A reunion of people who once called Uranium City, a remote mining town on the north‑west shore of Lake Athabasca, their home.

Uranium City thrived in the 1950s and ’60s, buoyed by the booming uranium industry. When the mines shut down in the early 1980s, the town was gradually emptied, its schools closed and its streets fell silent. Yet for those who grew up there, the memory of snow‑covered sidewalks, the hum of the school bell, and the bright summer evenings at the community hall never truly faded.

“It was a beautiful place to live,” said Marjorie Lowe, 68, who moved to Saskatoon after the town closed. She clutched an old photograph of herself with a group of friends perched on a wooden dock, the water glistening behind them. “We didn’t have a lot of stuff, but we had each other. The sky was always so clear you could see the stars like a blanket.”

The reunion, organized by a small committee of former residents, featured a potluck of dishes that once graced the town’s modest kitchen – reindeer stew, bannock, and a surprisingly popular cherry pie that reminded many of Saturday night gatherings at the community centre.

Stories flowed as easily as the coffee. A former miner recounted the first time he saw the aurora borealis from the town’s edge, while a retired teacher spoke of how she taught a class of twenty‑seven students in a building that doubled as a church on Sundays.

For younger attendees – the children and grandchildren of original residents – the evening was a window into a world they’d only heard about in old newspaper clippings. “I never knew my grandparents lived in a place where the whole town was built around a mine,” said 22‑year‑old Liam Peterson, scrolling through a slideshow of faded black‑and‑white photos. “It makes me proud, even if the town is gone.”

Organisers hope the gathering will become an annual event, a chance to keep the spirit of Uranium City alive, and perhaps inspire a small historical archive. As Marjorie put it, “The town may have vanished, but the love we have for it hasn’t. It lives in us, and that’s what matters.”