Vilna is a historic village in central Alberta

Central Alberta

Central Alberta is a region located in the Canadian province of Alberta.Central Alberta is the most densely populated rural area in the province...

, Canada

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

.

Vilna is located in Smoky Lake County

Smoky Lake County, Alberta

Smoky Lake County is a municipal district in north-eastern Alberta, Canada.It is located in Census Division 12. The county seat is in the Town of Smoky Lake.-Demographics:...

, on Highway 28, 150 km (93.2 mi) northeast of the city of Edmonton. Bonnie Lake Provincial Recreation Area is located 6 km (3.7 mi) north of the community, on the shores of Bonnie Lake

Bonnie Lake (Alberta)

Bonnie Lake is a small lake in Alberta, Canada. It is located outside of Vilna, Alberta, north of Highway 28, and is part of the North Saskatchewan River basin....

.

History

Vilna was founded in 1907, mostly by central European settlers, and started to develop in 1919, when the railroad

Canadian National Railway

The Canadian National Railway Company is a Canadian Class I railway headquartered in Montreal, Quebec. CN's slogan is "North America's Railroad"....

 reached this area. It was named in 1920 after the Lithuania

Lithuania

Lithuania , officially the Republic of Lithuania is a country in Northern Europe, the biggest of the three Baltic states. It is situated along the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea, whereby to the west lie Sweden and Denmark...

n capital city of Vilnius

Vilnius

Vilnius is the capital of Lithuania, and its largest city, with a population of 560,190 as of 2010. It is the seat of the Vilnius city municipality and of the Vilnius district municipality. It is also the capital of Vilnius County...

, similarly to the community of Wilno

Wilno, Ontario

The community of Wilno, Ontario is situated on the border of Killaloe, Hagarty and Richards and Madawaska Valley townships in Renfrew County, Ontario.-Geography:...

 in Ontario

Ontario

Ontario is a province of Canada, located in east-central Canada. It is Canada's most populous province and second largest in total area. It is home to the nation's most populous city, Toronto, and the nation's capital, Ottawa....

, Canada

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

. Vilna was incorporated as a village

Village

A village is a clustered human settlement or community, larger than a hamlet with the population ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand , Though often located in rural areas, the term urban village is also applied to certain urban neighbourhoods, such as the West Village in Manhattan, New...

 on June 13, 1923.

On February 5 1967, Vilna experienced an unexplained explosion event with a yield estimated at about 600 tonnes of TNT (2.5 TJ). Subsequently two very small meteor

METEOR

METEOR is a metric for the evaluation of machine translation output. The metric is based on the harmonic mean of unigram precision and recall, with recall weighted higher than precision...

 fragments were found – 48 milligram (4.320043200432E-09 gr) and 94 milligram (8.46008460084601E-09 gr) which are now stored at University of Alberta, in Edmonton.

It claims to be home to the world's largest mushroom

Mushroom

A mushroom is the fleshy, spore-bearing fruiting body of a fungus, typically produced above ground on soil or on its food source. The standard for the name "mushroom" is the cultivated white button mushroom, Agaricus bisporus; hence the word "mushroom" is most often applied to those fungi that...

: a metal sculpture.

Demographics

In 2006, Vilna had a population of 274 living in 145 dwellings

House

A house is a building or structure that has the ability to be occupied for dwelling by human beings or other creatures. The term house includes many kinds of different dwellings ranging from rudimentary huts of nomadic tribes to free standing individual structures...

, a 1.9% increase from 2001. The village has a land area of 0.9 km² (0.347491942733282 sq mi) and a population density

Population density

Population density is a measurement of population per unit area or unit volume. It is frequently applied to living organisms, and particularly to humans...

of 305.3 /km2.