the town also benefited urban drift as farms and other towns steadily depopulated. This process was precipitately accelerated in the early 1960s. Highway 35 had reached Fort Qu'Appelle by branching off the Trans-Canada Highway at the once-significant town Qu'Appelle and somewhat laboriously proceeding into the Qu'Appelle Valley by winding through an un-occupied coulee. The old highway was supplemented and effectively replaced by Highway 10, leaving the Trans-Canada at Balgonie and taking a straight route from the plain into the valley. This vastly eased access from the southwest and increased Fort Qu'Appelle's attraction over other market-places for farmers. In 1963, with steadily decreasing density of farm neighbourhood populations and increasing quality of highways, the rural school districts were abolished and farm primary and high school children—taught in one building with one or two classrooms—were thereafter bused to town schools. Rural churches having largely closed in the 1950s, the collapse of rural farming communities was now assured, to the benefit of minor metro-poles such as Fort Qu'Appelle though arguably to the impoverishment of the community as a whole. With the building of Highway 10 making access to Fort Qu'Appelle from outside the valley easier and faster, the process of farmers using it rather than previously substantial towns such as Qu'Appelle, Edgeley and Balcarres for selling grain and buying groceries further increased its size and vitality. The town itself is today "a shopping, service, and institutional centre serving the surrounding [f]arming community, neighbouring resort villages, cottagers and summer vacationers." Many traditional lake summer cottages have become year-round residences, together with winter skiing further expanding demand for the town's shopping facilities. Historic and current medical facilities Maurice Macdonald Seymour, Commissioner of Public Health, was a physician and surgeon of the early North-West Territories in Canada. He founded the Saskatchewan Anti-Tuberculosis League which incorporated and constructed the Fort Qu'Appelle sanitarium. This tuberculosis sanatorium was operated by the provincial department of public health under the direction of R.G. Ferguson and opened in 1917 at nearby Fort San; when tuberculosis ceased to be a public health problem the facility was turned into a fine arts complex where a substantial summer program was operated 1967-91 when the provincial government terminated its funding: latterly it has become a resort village housing the Echo Valley Conference Centre. In addition to the ample summer lake cottages—in later years many occupied throughout the year—and the successive uses of the former Fort San