Arnes

History

The Rural Municipality of Gimli was first settled by a large group of Icelandic settlers who arrived in New Iceland on Lake Winnipeg in the 1870s. Other settlements established beyond the community of Gimli with further fisheries based settlements at Arnes, Hnausa, Beyond the borders of Manitoba as it was then, this settlement fell within the District of Keewatin, until 1881 when Manitoba was enlarged. In 1897, the Gimli area was opened up to homesteaders and saw a surge of settlers from Ukraine, Poland, Hungary and Germany. Originally organized as a self-administering "Icelandic reserve" directly responsible to Ottawa, the settlers of New Iceland developed a unique constitution of by-laws for local government which remained in effect until 1887. The initial status of New Iceland as a "reserve" remained in effect until 1899. Fishing was always a primary source of income for those in the riding since the arrival of the original settlers of New Iceland. Some of the production of the fish occurred outside of the town of Gimli, such as the now abandoned fish processing plant in Arnes, Manitoba, that was built in 1951. In the Gimli Glider incident on 23 July 1983, an Air Canada Boeing 767 en route from Montreal to Edmonton ran out of fuel and made an unpowered landing on a decommissioned runway (converted to a drag strip) at Gimli Industrial Park Airport, a former RCAF base near Gimli with no control tower and no fire trucks available. A reenactment of the incident aired on Discovery Channel's Mayday series and on Syfy's Urban Legends series. The Town of Gimli amalgamated with the Rural Municipality of Gimli on January 1, 2003.