Manor is a small village located along Saskatchewan Highway 13, approximately 14 km’s east of Carlyle and 115 km’s northeast of Estevan. Also in the area is Cannington Manor Provincial Park which was established in 1882 by Captain Edward Michell Pierce (died June 20, 1888) as an aristocratic English colony and is now a historic park.

By the mid 1890s, more than 200 people lived at Cannington Manor. They fell into three main groups: homesteaders and tradesmen, upper-class families and a group of young bachelors. The village provided them and neighbouring settlers with carpentry and blacksmith services, a hotel, general store, a dairy, a school/town hall, two cheese factories, a pork packing plant, a land titles office and a flour mill whose product earned the community a gold medal at the 1893 world's fair in Chicago. But it was the cultural and recreational life of its inhabitants that set Cannington Manor apart from the other utopian, religious and ethnic communities that sprung up on the Canadian prairies in the latter 19th and early 20th centuries.

By the mid 1890s, the colony's unprofitable industries, its lack of leadership and failure to achieve standing as an economic centre for the district combined with drought and low grain prices to bring it to the brink. When the Canadian Pacific Railway decided in 1900 to construct a regional branch line 10 km (6 miles) south of the village, rather than through it, the community's last hope for revitalization evaporated. During a time of travel by horseback this distance was detrimental to the growth of the community and the struggle to maintain the social customs of Victorian England on the Canadian prairie proved too much. The passing of the founder, a few years earlier, a drought and low grain prices soon made it unfeasible for settlers to continue the lifestyle at Cannington Manor. Ultimately, the village of Cannington Manor was abandoned by 1900. Today, the original and reconstructed buildings at Cannington Manor Provincial Historic Park recreate this distinctive experiment in the development of western Canada.

Cannington Manor survived for less than two decades and it is assumed that the village of Manor, was a result of those original settlers from the colony establishing themselves closer to the railway.

The large moose population that roamed the rolling hills along its northern boundary gave the RM of Moose Mountain its name at incorporation in 1912. Its nine townships include the town of Carlyle, the village of Manor, the hamlet of Cannington Lake Resort, the Cannington Manor Historical Site, Moose Mountain Provincial Park and the White Bear Indian Reserve No. 70. Fifty-three percent of the 43.2 million assessment comes from agriculture and 45 per cent from oil well/pipeline/commercial; the population is 565. The RM office is located in Carlyle, with a reeve and six councillors, an office administrator, and two full time and two part time public works employees.

Attractions

  • Manor Museum (1904) is a Municipal Heritage Property on the Canadian Register of Historic Places.
  • Cannington Manor Historical Site
  • Close proximity to Moose Mountain Provincial Park