This is the oldest stone fur trading post still intact in North America and base of the Hudson's Bay Company in the area for many years. Stone walls encircle the fort's enclosure, the largest group of original 19th century fur trade buildings in Canada. It was built in 1830 by the Hudson’s Bay Company after Fort Garry, at the junction of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers (now central Winnipeg), was destroyed by flood in 1826. It was constructed 20 miles north, high above the flood waters, and below the dangerous St. Andrew’s Rapids. The Hudson’s Bay Company felt that Lower Fort Garry would become the headquarters of the richest fur region in the British Empire. However, this did not happen, as for two decades the fort’s influence extended little beyond the Red River Settlement.

In 1837 the Upper Fort (at the junction of the Red and Assiniboine River) was reconstructed, as this was the established social and economic centre of the Red River Settlement. Upper Fort Garry conducted the Hudson’s Bay Company’s trading and administrative functions and the Lower Fort evolved as a significant fur trade provisioning and transshipment centre, and retail outlet for the Red River Settlement.

It was the signing of Treaty Number One with Ojibwa and Swampy Cree peoples in southern Manitoba at Lower Fort Garry in August of 1871 that led to the fort’s commemoration by the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada. The first of eleven numbered treaties negotiated across the west between First Nations peoples and the Crown, Treaty Number One assisted the government in its goal of establishing immigrant agricultural settlement within the borders of southern Manitoba.

Lower Fort Garry was also used as a training ground for the Northwest Mounted Police, as a provincial penitentiary, and in 1885-86 as a provincial lunatic asylum. The fort continued as a Company residence until its closing in 1911 and two years later was leased by the Manitoba Motor Country Club who occupied the site until 1963. In 1951 title passed from the Hudson’s Bay Company to the Crown. Parks Canada began the restoration of the site in the 1960s and in the 1980s carried out conservation work on the fort’s perimeter stone walls.