When Elaine Peake started reporting on council meetings at Chestermere Lake, the whole local government worked out of an ATCO trailer: a mayor, two councillors and a secretary. She later took a seat at that table herself, serving ten years on council and five of them as mayor, and spent decades putting the lakeside community's story into print. Peake died on September 27, 2026, at the age of 101, the City of Chestermere announced.

Her Chestermere began as a summer cabin. She and her husband, John, were living in Calgary in the mid-1960s when they took a place at the lake, and once year-round residency was allowed they moved out for good. “One of the things that I’ve always said about Chestermere is that we all moved here because we liked what we saw,” she told The Chestermere Anchor in 2016.

Writing came first. She remembered winning a writing award in Grade 5, and once her children were grown she began freelancing for Heritage magazine. As a summer resident she wrote comic columns that nicknamed the lake the “Muddy Puddle,” to the annoyance of some nearby farm and acreage owners, and she later wrote for the Rocky View News, the Rocky View Times and several Western Canadian magazines. Covering council for one of the Rocky View papers was how she learned local government. “I always covered council meetings from right off the bat,” she said.

John Peake had served on council and was active among the lakefront owners; John Peake Park was later named for him. He died unexpectedly, and a couple of years later friends and neighbours, knowing she had been covering council and working on the history book, told her she should run. She said she had been “only 56, too young to just give up and sit at home,” and was frank that widowhood had made it hard to fit in: “it is different when all your friends are couples.”

After two terms as a councillor, she ran for mayor when the sitting mayor retired. “I decided I would get really brave and go for Mayor,” she recalled. One of her proudest achievements in office was the arrival of municipal water. “We finally had really good water and that was a real thrill and to think that I was Mayor when that happened,” she said. She also helped carry the Summer Village of Chestermere Lake through its change to a town, which took effect on March 1, 1993, and then judged it time to leave. “I don’t think you should stay in there for too long,” she said.

She edited Growing Through Time: Stories of Chestermere Lake. Its 228 pages record the lake's cabin owners and families, its community organizations and its early development under the CPR's Western Section Irrigation District, and the book is held in the University of Calgary's Local Histories Collection. She also co-wrote two books on Calgary's public art, research that meant walking the city's streets. One of them, A Second Look at Calgary's Public Art, written with Barbara Kwasny and published by Detselig Enterprises in 1992, was offered in its preface as a “handy companion for walking tours of the city,” as Calgary Arts Development noted.

After leaving office she became the first reporter for The Chestermere Anchor. A lifetime member of the Chestermere Whitecappers seniors' club, she was pressing it in 2016 to bring in younger seniors. “It’s a fifty plus club and we need some fifty plus people,” she said. She had vowed on the day her husband died to stay in their Chestermere home. She took comfort in being recognized wherever she went: “The most comforting thing to me is that I’m known so well around here.”

The city announced that flags at its facilities would be lowered to half-mast in her honour, StrathmoreNow reported.

The 228-page record of the lake's early families is still available through libraries, and her walking-tour guide still documents Calgary's public artworks and the people who made them. Chestermere itself, grown from a summer village into a city, is the place whose earliest council meetings she reported, whose council she went on to lead, and whose history she wrote down. Few people do all three for one community. Elaine Peake did.