1904 Edmonton municipal election
municipal election in Alberta, Canada

The 1904 municipal election was held December 12, 1904 for the purpose of electing a mayor and eight aldermen to sit on the Edmonton City Council, as well as five public school trustees and five separate school trustees. It was Edmonton's first election as a city, and the first in which there were eight aldermanic positions instead of six. Because of this new composition of city council, all aldermanic positions were elected instead of only half as had been the case in previous elections and would again be the case in subsequent elections. Accordingly, even though Edmund Grierson, Charles May, and Joseph Henri Picard had been elected to two-year terms in the 1903 election, their terms were truncated. May and Picard decided to stand for re-election, while Grierson did not.
In order to re-establish staggered aldermanic terms, the top four finishers were elected to two-year terms ending in December 1906, while the next four were elected to one-year terms that ended in December 1905.
Voter turnout
There were 743 ballots cast in the 1904 election. Information on the number of eligible voters is no longer available.
Results
(bold indicates elected, italics indicate incumbent)
Mayor
Kenneth W. MacKenzie was acclaimed as mayor.
Aldermen
Charles May - 471
John Boyle - 349
Kenneth McLeod - 330
Thomas Bellamy - 310
William Clark - 277
Joseph Henri Picard - 262
Daniel Fraser - 257
William Antrobus Griesbach - 239
Thomas Grindley - 231
Gustave Koerman
Peter Butchart - 204
Donald MacDonald - 171
William Deyl - 170
Herbert Charles Wilson - 162
Frank Haldane - 161
Samuel Paton - 143
W S Weeks - 80
Public school trustees
Arthur Cushing, H A Gray, Kenneth McLeod, Alex Taylor, and Hedley C. Taylor were elected.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “1904 Edmonton municipal election” as municipal election in Alberta, Canada. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as municipal election in Alberta, Canada. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5339132. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1904, 1903, 1906 and 1905.
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This entry incorporates text from “1904 Edmonton municipal election” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.