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Front Street
Before the
#1
highway became so busy, it used to run right through Wolseley. It
was what now is Front Street. There is a mural of five men on the
street. The first is Lord Wolseley, the second is Louis Riel, the
third is Gabriel Dumont, the fourth is Martin Luther King Jr., and the
last man is Dr. G.E. Isman, who was one of the first doctors in the
community.
 
The
murals of the Five Men Painted on Front Street - click for larger view
A bank robbery also took
place at the old bank on Front Street, when it was still the Number 1
highway. And here's the story.
The Bank Robbery
On a summer day many
moons ago, two men cruised into Wolseley in a new truck, with Quebec
license plates. As was par with most small towns, when someone new
came along, everyone in town noticed. They parked outside the bank
for two days so they could scout it out. On the second night, they
broke in through the back door of the bank. They took a sawed off
shotgun in with them and also found a pistol in the managers desk (which
should have been locked in the vault, but it was too inconvenient for
the employees to have it there). The robbers looked around the
bank and decided to hide in the cubicles that were used to look at safety
deposit boxes. They made holes in the cubicles so they could see
out in the morning. They slept in the bank that night and in the
morning when all the employees were there and the cash registers were
full, they jumped out of there hiding spots and shouted, "This is a
robbery, give us all your money!" The tellers put all the money
from the registers into the robbers sacks. The robbers then
ordered the bank manager to open the vault. They took all the
money and gold coins out of the vault and placed them into the sacks.
The robbers ordered the employees into the vault and were going to lock
them all in there, which would be disastrous because the only people
that knew the combination to the vault would have been locked in it.
The manger being a quick thinker told the robbers it would take 15
minutes to relock the vault, which was too long for the robbers to wait.
The robbers left everyone in the vault, but never locked them in, and
told them not to call the police. Then they got into their truck
for a hasty getaway. In the meantime, the alarm was in the vault
so someone pressed it and it alarmed the grocery store next door.
The grocery store manager heard the alarm and phoned the bank and when
he got no response, he phoned the police. When the robbers left,
they figured that the first place people would look for them would be
off the Number 1 highway, so they took the road to Ellisboro. They
 got to Ellisboro and bought some groceries from the store for their long
trek back to Quebec. When they came out they realized they had a
flat tire and decided it would be best if they split up. The one
robber went to Lemberg to get the flat tire fixed and the other robber
took all the money and left on foot. The coins and money were too
heavy for the robber to carry so he buried the coins underneath the
Ellisboro Bridge. As the robbers were taking off from Ellisboro
the police were at the bank. A crowd had gathered and many of the
townsfolk had seen the strange truck leave the town, so they pointed the
police towards Ellisboro. The police raced away and caught up to
one of the robbers in Lemberg while he was waiting for his tire to be
fixed. Two days later they captured the other robber in
Montemarte. The gold coins were soon recovered and the robbers
went to jail for a long, long time.
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