It wasn’t supposed to end like this.

Troy Angus and his crew watched a single spark float up the historic grain elevator at Elva, in the far southwest of the province, and lodge in a hole no larger than a football.

“It was literally smoke on contact,” Angus said.

Initially he was in denial, telling himself the flash of orange was just a flag — but there was no flag on the elevator. It was fire.

It was April 5, and they’d been burning garbage at what they thought was a safe distance in the community just southwest of Melita. Minutes later, the 125-year-old structure was a heap of embers.

But for the elevator that was once the oldest of its kind in Canada, this is not quite the end.

Why it matters: While salvage efforts were cut short, the crew transforming the historic elevator in Elva says not everything was lost when the main structure caught fire earlier this month.

Biologist turned amateur historian Gordon Goldsborough had made his peace with the loss of the elevator before it burned. He knew it couldn’t be restored.

Goldsborough is the president of the Manitoba Historical Society and secretary for the Manitoba Agricultural Museum. His archival research had been what determined the Lake of the Woods Milling Company elevator at Elva was the oldest of its kind in Canada.

Grain company maps and records traced it back to 1897. While across the province from the Lake of the Woods, the roughly 25,000-bushel elevator was a weigh point for grain headed to the mill in what is now Kenora.

Around the elevator, agriculture and grain marketing changed rapidly. In 1959, Manitoba Pool bought the elevator, but by 1968 it had outlived its usefulness. A private owner bought it, and it fell into disuse.

Unmaintained, the elevator began to deteriorate. Goldsborough said that when he last visited it in fall 2021, he was dismayed at its state. The elevator had developed a tilt on its rotten foundation.

“It was an accident waiting to happen,” Goldsborough said.

Despite its historic status, the chance to turn it into a heritage site had passed.

Because it sat in the sparsely populated southwestern corner of the province, Goldsborough said making it into a museum might not have been feasible anyway. It was too out of the way to be a tourist trap.

“You need to ensure there’s enough business to keep it busy,” he said.

As best he knows, Goldsborough said the elevator and the nearby United Grain Growers elevator — newer by 20 or so years — reverted to municipal property after the owner died.

Reclamation

The usual fate of derelict elevators is to be tipped over, crunched into pieces and burned or hauled to the landfill, said Goldsborough.

When the municipality sold the elevators, however, they were slated to receive an unexpected new lease on life — albeit in pieces.

Troy Angus began reclaiming old buildings by repurposing a 10×12-foot granary into his house, set on his grandparents’ farm.

He then progressed to reclaiming old houses and barns, carefully dismantling them for their antique hardware, weathered tin, planks and beams. He made it his business — The Den Authentic Barnwood — and sells the reclaimed materials to do-it-yourself enthusiasts.

Customers include those who love the story of the materials and want their own piece of history. Others want to support recycling of the heritage material, while yet others just really like how the aged items look.

“You will not find anything else like it,” Angus said.

The elevators at Elva were not the first he’d dismantled, but the Lake of the Woods elevator was to be his crown jewel.

Angus began a video series on his company’s YouTube channel, showing the elevator pre-dismantling, talking about its history, and chronicling the process of taking it down.

The project was to go forward in stages. Angus and his team removed all the tin they could reach, including the painted “Lake of the Woods Milling Co.” sign.

They recovered any parts of the office that were salvageable, along with the elevator’s scales, the cups from the leg, and hardware like door handles and coat hooks.

They were only four days away from tipping the elevator “crib” onto its side so the last of the tin could be removed and the crib could be dismantled, when the structure burnt.

The crib was built from hardwood planks stacked and heavily nailed together. It would have provided the majority of the in-demand antique lumber from the site.

It’s difficult to quantify how much material they lost, Angus said.

“We were able to intercept these elevators from being destroyed by fire, but the ironic part is our efforts in trying to save this elevator resulted in fire,” he said. “I’m still boggled by that.”

One last hope

It may seem sacrilegious to history-lovers, but reclamation was the elevator’s best hope to live on, according to Goldsborough.

“Much as it pains me to say it — I’d like to think they would all still stand and be there for many, many years to come — it’s just not going to happen,” he said. “Better to have it salvaged and turned into something useful.”

“It was kind of nice to think it would live on in people’s homes,” he added.

It will — although less of it. The “Lake of the Woods” sign, for instance, has been purchased and will “retire” to the shore of the very lake it’s named after, Angus said. It will be an amazing showpiece, he added.

Despite the “terrible waste of a possibility” at Elva, Goldsborough said he hoped Angus and others would salvage more elevators that await a similar fate.

The post VIDEO: Up in smoke, Elva elevator will still live on in homes appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

Built in 1917, the barn was a replacement for a similar structure lost to fire several years earlier.

At 112 feet long and 50 feet wide, it held the distinction of one of the longest known barns in the province at the time and offered about 17,600 square feet of available space.

Now, however, the building is slated to join the list of similar barns that have disappeared.

As of Sept. 29, 2021, tenders opened for the demolition of the structure. AAFC has said that the current plan would see the building totally taken down, the land it sits on graded and partly returned to grass.

That plan, however, does not sit well with some ag history buffs, who worry that the federal government is rushing into a demolition that the community will later regret.

“There is precedent where they have done this in the past, where they have torn down buildings of historic value because they just wanted to and it was subsequently lamented in the community,” Gordon Goldsborough, president of the Manitoba Historical Society, said.

The historic Red Barn at the Brandon Research Centre is slated for demolition, and many aren’t happy at the news.

Many uses

The Brandon Research Centre was founded in the 1880s, and was one of the five original experimental farms established by the federal government at the time.

The others include the Central Experimental Farm in Ottawa, and facilities at Nappan, Nova Scotia, Indian Head, N.W.T. (at the time) and Agassiz, B.C.

The Brandon research site was given the task to develop production practices and breeds of livestock and crops better suited for the volatility of the Prairies.

Over the years the barn has been the scene of many research activities.

For the first decades after construction, the barn primarily functioned as housing for the farm’s Shorthorn dairy herd, before pivoting in the late 1940s, becoming instead an isolation space for sick livestock, as well as a feed-grinding facility in the upper floor.

Since then, it has gone through a lottery of uses, from crop research to storage.

One of the recent activities was to support the research program of Cynthia Grant, a now-retired crops researcher.

“We had set up the building for drying samples and storing samples and we had set up grinding facilities,” she said.

Push-back

Goldsborough is calling into question the government’s transparency and process of assessment, which he says he has yet to be convinced is fair and accurate. He further expressed concern over reports that station staff, those who he says should know the building best, have been allegedly told to stay quiet on the issue.

Goldsborough says he was contacted as far back as 2019, with concerns that the building might be slated for demolition.

But AAFC says the building no longer fits the needs of the station and, while it was previously assessed for historical value by the Federal Heritage Review Office, it was passed over as a heritage building.

When the Manitoba Co-operator requested information about how the decision on the barn’s heritage status was made, AAFC forwarded a brief letter confirming the decision that was penned in 1998.

Today, the building is not used by science staff. Even storage, one of the barn’s most recent purposes, has been shifted to newer facilities developed on the research station ground over the last two decades, according to AAFC.

Even if the building could be put to another use, the department said, the foundation is failing.

“A section of the building is no longer safe to access due to advanced deterioration,” a representative from AAFC said. “A third-party assessment in 2014 estimated that AAFC would have to spend approximately $1.1 million to extend the life of the building.”

Grant, meanwhile, is among those who would like to see a longer timeline on the demolition.

“I don’t think things need to be preserved forever if there is no use and no purpose, but I do know it was a useful building when I was there eight years ago,” she said.

At the time, she said, the station was chronically short on storage space.

According to a representative from AAFC, the review office bases demolition plans on environmental considerations (such as potential impact to a species at risk), any kind of hazardous material that may need to be contained and disposed of, as well as a consultation with the heritage review office.

Skeptical

Goldsborough, however, is not satisfied with the federal government’s word.

An assessment was done on the building in 1998, he said, and while that report did conclude there wasn’t enough merit to making the barn a heritage building, Goldsborough says details of that study were never released publicly.

Furthermore, he argued, things have changed. The history enthusiast argues that barns like the Brandon site are far rarer than a few decades ago.

“If it can be proven that the building is, One: not of historic value, and Two: has sufficient problems that it would be far too costly to repair it, then I’m mindful that you always have to be somewhat pragmatic about these things,” he said. “You can’t save everything. On the other hand, I would have to be convinced of those things, and I’m so far not.”

If he had his way, he added, he would get to see the details of that early report.

“Maybe it’s convincing,” he said. “Maybe it’s compelling. I just can’t know that.

“There seems to me no reason to rush to demolish the building until a full disclosure can take place,” he also said.

Meanwhile, he argued for the government to pursue a new assessment.

Grant echoed Goldsborough’s call to shift proceedings to a lower gear.

“I recognize that if there are structural problems or issues that really mean that it is totally ridiculous to preserve it, that’s fine,” she said. “But it just seems to me they’re kind of rushing to tear it down without investigating other avenues that can be used.

Also, Grant noted, the government has moved to preserve historical buildings at four other original experimental farms turned research stations in Canada.

“I wonder why, with a site that’s this historical and a beautiful building that’s this historical, they can’t put some effort into preserving history in Manitoba,” she said.

Outreach

In the mind of its advocates, the barn is possible opportunity for agri-tourism, assuming the economics work out.

Brandon has strong agricultural roots, Goldsborough argued, and remains a centre for the industry. Within that context, the research farm itself has played a major part in the industry’s story, he added.

“Why couldn’t they develop, for example, on the main floor of the barn, some exhibits on the history of agriculture and particularly the role of the experimental farms?” he said. “There were farms all across Canada that were groundbreaking in developing new technology, for adapting new techniques and crops and livestock that were better adapted to Canadian conditions. That story could be told, because to be honest, I’m not sure that many Canadians know that story.”

The building’s location, right next to the station’s main hub, would lend itself to that use, he argued.

The local MLA of Brandon-Souris has since weighed in on the issue. In early October, Larry Maguire said he had spoken with the office of federal Agriculture Minister Marie-Claude Bibeau, as well as the Manitoba Historical Society. The minister’s office is looking into the issue, Maguire said, although no promises have been made.

“The main thing that I’m wanting to find out first before I pass judgment on it is what is the present condition of the facility?” he said.

Maguire said he was waiting on an assessment of the building’s status, although he echoed Goldsborough on the building’s agri-tourism potential.

He equated the building to wooden elevators, now mostly relegated to the annals of history. But in some places, such as Inglis, Man., those old structures have been used to draw visitors and highlight the province’s agricultural foundation. In his mind, the Red Barn in Brandon could play a similar ambassadorial role for ag.

The post The last days of Brandon’s Red Barn? appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

Lack of local processing capacity is a popular topic among the sector, one that has cropped up time and time again for decades, and one that gains particular traction when, like now, the market turns sour.

Why it matters: Processing issues out of Alberta have brought the debate over local processing back into the forefront, but what would have to change in order to make that local capacity a reality?

The temporary closure of Cargill’s High River beef plant, as well as slowdowns at JBS’s plant in Brooks, Alta., thanks to fears around COVID-19, have sent beef markets into a nose-dive bad enough that feeders in Manitoba have compared it to BSE.

Cattle surpluses ballooned in the wake of the slowdown, while the Canadian Cattlemen’s Association estimated that feedlots were facing losses of several hundred dollars per head.

Those market conditions have breathed new life into the debate over how robust the beef supply chain is, and why, after decades of conversation, federally inspected slaughter options within Manitoba are still at a standstill.

Disappearing capacity

The years between 1979 and 2004 saw five beef slaughter facilities close in Manitoba, victims of widespread restructuring in the meat sector as beef processing increasingly moved to Alberta.

In 1976, Manitoba slaughtered 581,000 cattle, a number that dropped to 16,400 by 2002, just before the BSE crisis.

By 2004, only Winkler Meats offered federally inspected slaughter facilities for cattle, a company that later fell off the map for beef processing, while True North Foods in Carman rose to replace it as Manitoba’s only federally inspected facility in 2015.

In 2017, the Manitoba government reported that just over 14,300 head of cattle were being processed in Manitoba itself, a 26 per cent jump over the year before.

That’s a far cry from the province’s heyday as a beef transport and processing centre, when St. Boniface’s Union Stockyards drew cattle from across Western Canada and where six packing plants in the late 1920s produced an annual value of $20 million, making it the largest stockyard in the British Empire, according to the Manitoba Historical Society.

By August 1988, when the Union Stockyards closed, only about 20 staff remained. At one point Canada Packers, J.M. Schneider, East West Packers, Burns and Jack Forgan Meats had all processed cattle in the area, none of which remained.

In 1990 Burns announced the closure of the last remaining major packing house in the province, in Brandon.

Parallels and catalysts?

Following BSE, a crisis that also saw supply chains stall and cattle volumes back up to the farm gate, there was a concerted push in the province to address the problem.

In 2004, the province published a feasibility study on increasing beef processing in Manitoba.

In 2006, the province established the Manitoba Cattle Enhancement Council, a program that applied a refundable checkoff of $2 a head in order to develop federal slaughter capacity.

By 2013, however, producers had grown frustrated by the lack of progress. Members of the Manitoba Beef Producers pushed their organization to lobby the province to do away with the checkoff or, at the least, ensure that those dollars went to facilities outside the perimeter of Winnipeg.

The years after BSE saw a string of optimistic, but ultimately unsuccessful processing projects, according to Dr. Allan Preston, a beef producer, veterinarian and, during the time directly following BSE, assistant deputy minister of agriculture.

In the case of ProNatur (formerly Keystone Processors), which promised to go up in Winnipeg, the sector struggled with years of back and forth before the project quietly disappeared.

“Running a beef-processing plant anywhere in the world, but in Western Canada in particular, is a highly competitive, low-margin business,” Preston said. “It works on volume. It works on having markets for every last piece of the carcass, including the offal and liver and kidneys and heart and tongue and so on. It’s not a venture for the faint hearted. A lot of people got into it thinking that it was a pretty simple procedure to set up a plant and access those markets. A lot of them found out in a very quick hurry that access to markets was and is a very complicated business.”

Those startups also quickly ran into the need for a steady stream of finished animals.

“Most of the ventures that got started post-BSE failed on either one or both of those points,” Preston noted.

True North Foods, the only successful federal plant in Manitoba to come out of the post-BSE push for processing, has focused efforts into developing both ends of the production cycle, he noted.

Calvin Vaags, owner of True North Foods, already owned a meat retail location when he purchased Plains Processors near Carman in 2008. Vaags renamed the business and, in 2013, broke ground on a new processing facility. The plant started operation under a provincial licence in 2014, gaining federal certification the following year.

“The situation today, there are similarities, for sure,” Vaags said, looking at the processing backlog as plants shut down or slowed due to COVID-19.

Chicken or egg?

Cattle volumes are the often-cited culprit during any conversation of processing capacity in Manitoba.

The province boasts relatively few backgrounding or feeder operations, instead leaning heavily towards cow-calf producers who would not be finishing cattle for slaughter.

“Without feedlot capacity, there isn’t much incentive to attract a major packer to build a plant here in Manitoba,” Preston said. “It’s a real chicken and egg (situation). Do you encourage the development of the feedlot sector hoping that the processing sector will follow? Or do you start with processing and hope that the feedlots will move to this province? Nobody has yet been able to answer that question.”

There is enough demand to support more federally inspected processing facilities, Vaags argued — his own facility was setting production records even before the stress of recent Alberta plant closures — but the regulatory red tape looms large for any project hoping to get off the ground.

“I think it’ll be a catalyst for guys to talk about it, and there might even be a few who try it, but I’ll tell you, it is an incredibly difficult thing to try and get a federal packing plant up and running,” he said, looking at the backlogs out of Alberta. “The barrier to entry is huge, so to say, ‘Oh yeah, little packing plants are going to spring up all across Canada,’ I’m not sure that that’s going to happen real quick.”

Vaags had his own extensive list of challenges that he faced while launching True North Foods.

Firstly, he said, most engineering firms are geared more towards larger plants, making design for a smaller plant fraught with difficulty.

Vaags then spent years navigating the necessary regulatory hurdles, while securing CFIA inspection services is, “the mother of all problems.”

Financing such projects also quickly becomes a hurdle, he noted, since banks are reluctant to back such an endeavour.

Vaags also doubts that any of the over 20 provincial abattoirs currently operating in Manitoba could make the jump to become a federally inspected facility.

“There isn’t any provincial slaughter plants in the province which are large enough or new enough,” he said. “It doesn’t make any sense to try and spend money on those to get them federalized because it would just cost way too much and you would still be left with too small of a plant.”

What needs to change?

In an ideal world, new processing facilities might start at the ground up, with frustrated producers pooling resources to start a plant, Preston said, although he has doubts that such a grassroots movement will appear.

“The glass-half-full side of me would say that yes, there’s potential. There’s opportunity there that could be capitalized upon,” he said. “The glass-half-empty side of me tells us that cattle producers are extremely independent. They like to run their own businesses in their own fashion and, sometimes, they follow the dollar very closely, which is logical, they have to do so, but trying to get that co-operative spirit going is a real challenge.”

Manitoba does have a healthy number of direct-market producers on the hunt for processing capacity, he acknowledged, but added that those producers represent a fraction of the cattle volumes produced in Manitoba.

Instead, he argued, the sector might be better served by standardizing regulations across provincial lines.

Preston argued that a standardized national meat code would bridge the gap between provincial plant standards and federal plant standards, allowing meat to trade across provincial borders, something that is currently not allowed unless animals are processed at a federal plant.

“For example, there’s a market in northwestern Ontario for meat,” he said, noting that the area is undercapacity when it comes to local meat plants, but that the streams of people who use the area as cottage country create a demand.

Manitoba Agriculture and Resource Development Minister Blaine Pedersen also has his eye on that market.

Pedersen said he has asked the federal government to relax regulations, given market backlogs from the COVID-19 pandemic. Pedersen said he is pushing for the federal government to allow meat from provincial facilities to move across domestic borders.

“We’re headed into cottage season,” he said. “Think about all the meat that we could be moving out of Manitoba out of a provincial plant into northwestern Ontario and the cottage country.”

Vaags, however, is more doubtful.

“That may make a difference in some other provinces,” he said, citing the larger provincial facilities in places like Ontario.

“If you take that argument and you apply it here in Manitoba, try to count up how many of these provincial establishments you have and what their overall capacity is. Most of them are only doing 10 to 20 head a week at max,” he said. “Even if you had a national code and you had all those provincial plants that said, ‘OK, now we can move meat across the border into Ontario,’ is it really going to help that much? They’re not going to be able to do much more than what they’re doing now.”

The province has said it hopes to attract $500 million in primary livestock production and processing by 2025, part of the provincial protein strategy released last year, although Pedersen noted that goal is for all livestock production, not just beef.

Building up?

Vertical integration is less than popular in corners of the cattle sector, although Manitoba’s pork industry, such as HyLife Foods out of La Broquerie has used the model to great effect.

While the production cycle for beef certainly differs, the idea of maintaining animal ownership to the processing level has merit, Preston argued.

“If the cow-calf producer were able to retain an interest or ownership of those cattle through to the final marketplace, perhaps we would have more consistency in terms of how the various arms of the cattle industry come together,” he said.

“The people who are doing the direct marketing have done that,” he added.

There is already some level of vertical integration between feeders and packers, he noted, pointing to the massive feedlots that processors in Alberta use to feed their plants.

Current market woes might become a catalyst for another processing push, he said, although his experience post-BSE has made him cautious.

“I’m cautiously optimistic, but frankly I don’t see a dramatic change occurring,” he said, looking at the current, Alberta-centric infrastructure of the industry.

“Trying to turn that process around and trying to move more to small plants is a huge task… I’ve seen this movie before and I know how it ends,” he said.

The post Manitoba no closer to new beef-processing capacity appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

The Manitoba Historical Society (MHS) is gathering information about all elevators that ever stood in Manitoba, regardless of their present status. Collaborating with the Manitoba Co-operator it is supplying these images of a grain elevator each week in hopes readers will be able to tell the society more about it, or any other elevator they know of.

MHS Gordon Goldsborough webmaster and Journal editor has developed a website to post your replies to a series of questions about elevators. The MHS is interested in all grain elevators that have served the farm community.

Your contributions will help gather historical information such as present status of elevators, names of companies, owners and agents, rail lines, year elevators were built — and dates when they were torn down (if applicable).

There is room on the website to post personal recollections and stories related to grain elevators. The MHS presently also has only a partial list of all elevators that have been demolished. You can help by updating that list if you know of one not included on that list.

Your contributions are greatly appreciated and will help the MHS develop a comprehensive, searchable database to preserve the farm community’s collective knowledge of what was once a vast network of grain elevators across Manitoba.

Please contribute to This Old Grain Elevator website here.

You will receive a response, by email or phone call, confirming that your submission was received.

Goldsborough is interested in hearing all sorts of experiences about the elevators — funny, sad, or anything in between. Readers willing to share their stories can leave messages at 204-474-7469.

The post PHOTOS: This Old Elevator: October 2019 appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

The Manitoba Historical Society (MHS) is gathering information about all elevators that ever stood in Manitoba, regardless of their present status. Collaborating with the Manitoba Co-operator it is supplying these images of a grain elevator each week in hopes readers will be able to tell the society more about it, or any other elevator they know of.

MHS Gordon Goldsborough webmaster and Journal editor has developed a website to post your replies to a series of questions about elevators. The MHS is interested in all grain elevators that have served the farm community.

Your contributions will help gather historical information such as present status of elevators, names of companies, owners and agents, rail lines, year elevators were built — and dates when they were torn down (if applicable).

There is room on the website to post personal recollections and stories related to grain elevators. The MHS presently also has only a partial list of all elevators that have been demolished. You can help by updating that list if you know of one not included on that list.

Your contributions are greatly appreciated and will help the MHS develop a comprehensive, searchable database to preserve the farm community’s collective knowledge of what was once a vast network of grain elevators across Manitoba.

Please contribute to This Old Grain Elevator website here.

You will receive a response, by email or phone call, confirming that your submission was received.

Goldsborough is interested in hearing all sorts of experiences about the elevators — funny, sad, or anything in between. Readers willing to share their stories can leave messages at 204-474-7469.

The post PHOTOS: This Old Elevator: August 2019 appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

The Manitoba Historical Society (MHS) is gathering information about all elevators that ever stood in Manitoba, regardless of their present status. Collaborating with the Manitoba Co-operator it is supplying these images of a grain elevator each week in hopes readers will be able to tell the society more about it, or any other elevator they know of.

MHS Gordon Goldsborough webmaster and Journal editor has developed a website to post your replies to a series of questions about elevators. The MHS is interested in all grain elevators that have served the farm community.

Your contributions will help gather historical information such as present status of elevators, names of companies, owners and agents, rail lines, year elevators were built — and dates when they were torn down (if applicable).

There is room on the website to post personal recollections and stories related to grain elevators. The MHS presently also has only a partial list of all elevators that have been demolished. You can help by updating that list if you know of one not included on that list.

Your contributions are greatly appreciated and will help the MHS develop a comprehensive, searchable database to preserve the farm community’s collective knowledge of what was once a vast network of grain elevators across Manitoba.

Please contribute to This Old Grain Elevator website here.

You will receive a response, by email or phone call, confirming that your submission was received.

Goldsborough is interested in hearing all sorts of experiences about the elevators — funny, sad, or anything in between. Readers willing to share their stories can leave messages at 204-474-7469.

The post PHOTOS: This Old Elevator: July 2019 appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

In the southern part of our province, just north of the village of Cartwright, is the Clay Banks Buffalo Jump. Many years ago, when bison still roamed these vast stretches of prairie grasslands, this spot was used by the natives as an important feature in their annual hunts.

In prehistoric times, from perhaps 1,200 to 2,500 years ago, the site was used by Sonata and Besant people to kill bison by driving them over this cliff, where Badger Creek has cut a deep ravine. Projectile points found here are evidence of an ancient campground, named Mistu Nusk Sepesis by archeologists (meaning Arrowhead Creek in Cree).

One usual method of using a buffalo jump was for the native hunters to cover themselves with animal hides — from wolves, coyotes or bison. Thus disguised, they would creep slowly closer and closer to the herd, trying always to keep downwind, and then gradually ‘drive’ the bison towards a cliff or steep drop-off. This was all done on foot, in the time before horses were brought to the Americas by early Spanish explorers.

Piles of rocks and brush were sometimes placed to help direct the herd. As the hunters edged slowly towards them, they narrowed the width of the drive area, causing the bison to bunch up together. Then, when the animals finally noticed the hunters, the men stampeded them forwards and over the steep cliff. If the drive was carried out in early morning, the sun to the east might prevent the bison from realizing that the southeast-facing cliff was in front of them.

When the bison fell or jumped over the cliff, some died outright, while others had fatal injuries, or were killed by other hunters waiting below. Sometimes corrals previously constructed at the bottom helped to trap the animals. The bison were then butchered, with nearly all parts of the carcasses being used for food, tools, shelter and clothing. Very little was ever wasted.

To reach the Clay Banks Bison Jump, drive north from Cartwright on PTH 5 about two km from the village’s north entrance. There a large sign directs visitors to the viewing area 2-1/2 miles (four km) farther north. Follow this road to the end where there are parking spots and an interpretive sign explaining the site.

Another Manitoba site known to be important in the bison hunt is the Stott site northwest of Brandon, where Grand Valley Recreation Park is located today. This place was named for the Stott family who farmed there and discovered numerous bison bones. Such artifacts as arrowheads, beads and pottery were also uncovered. Excavations carried out by archeologists from the National Museum of Canada, as well as others from several universities, determined that large numbers of bison had been killed there at least twice in prehistoric times. A mound on the property was also discovered to contain remains of human burials from two ancient time periods.

To reach this location, drive about eight km west from 18th Street on Highway No. 459 (at the mall on the north side of Brandon.) The Stott site is where this road reaches the Trans-Canada Highway, between the road and the Assiniboine River, and it is actually bisected by the Trans-Canada. Unlike the Clay Banks Jump, this spot did not have steep cliffs over which to drive the bison. Instead, the hunters probably built, on the bottom of the valley, an enclosure (a pound) using branches stuck into the ground. Experts assume they may have hunted here in the winter, and chased the bison into gullies or old river oxbows where they were easier to kill.

Manitoba’s buffalo jumps may not be as well known as Alberta’s Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, but for history, geography or geology buffs, or for anyone exploring some new part of the province, they can make an interesting side trip.

For more information on these sites, read sections of the book In Search of Canada’s Ancient Heartland by Barbara Huck and Doug Whiteway, or check out the Manitoba Historical Society website.

The post Visit Manitoba’s buffalo jumps appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

The “Imagining Summer Gardens: Images from the A.E. McKenzie Visual Archive” exhibit at Daly House Museum tells the story of A.E. McKenzie, and his company’s rise to be one of the largest domestic seed companies in Canada.

Albert E. McKenzie moved to Brandon with his family in 1882, according to the Manitoba Historical Society. Brandon was incorporated as a city that year, and its population was rapidly expanding.

In 1896, A.E. took over his father’s flour, seed and grain business and brought in his vision for the company: leaving agriculture and conquering the domestic seed market.

In McKenzie’s fourth annual catalogue from 1900, A.E. wrote a note to his prospective customers, captured in the exhibit:

“Perhaps you are neither a Gardener nor a Farmer, but you have a Home. If you have a garden, you want vegetable seeds. If no garden, you surely have a lawn, and that means you want our Superfine lawn grass mixture. If you have no Lawn, perhaps you have a few yards of Earth around your home for flowers, Beautify Your Home.”

“He was the marketing genius,” said Eileen Trott, curator of Daly House. She said lawns, and gardens around every house were a new concept at the time.

“Everything that we see now, you know, that we take for granted, it was basically started with men like A.E. McKenzie changing our mindset,” Trott said.

McKenzie also began to use his catalogue covers to give customers their own visions. Covers moved from black-and-white drawings of their building to vibrantly coloured, stylized drawings of flowers and vegetables. These covers are displayed at Daly House.

Trott says she imagines how these pictures, in the dead of winter, might have inspired customers to buy for the coming spring.

By 1905, McKenzie had about 50,000 customers across Western Canada. The company had about 100 employees around that time, according to the Manitoba Historical Society.

Many of these workers were women and immigrants because they were cheap labour, said Trott. A.E. could pay them less and channel money into marketing and building his seven-storey concrete-and-brick office building on Ninth Street in Brandon, which was briefly the tallest in the city.

More than 100 years later, McKenzie Seeds still operates in Brandon.

Trott said since the exhibit opened, they’ve had many visitors including former employees of McKenzie Seeds who remember working with the historic seed-packaging and office equipment displayed. They can also tell stories of A.E. McKenzie.

“He supposedly would watch the staff come in and if you were a few minutes late he’d grab your time card and dock you for the time that you were late,” said Trott, laughing.

“We’re always glad to have them come and tell us their stories about McKenzie Seeds. We love to hear them.”

The exhibit will be open until October 12.

The post The seed company that grew Brandon appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

The Manitoba Historical Society (MHS) is gathering information about all elevators that ever stood in Manitoba, regardless of their present status. Collaborating with the Manitoba Co-operator it is supplying these images of a grain elevator each week in hopes readers will be able to tell the society more about it, or any other elevator they know of.

MHS Gordon Goldsborough webmaster and Journal editor has developed a website to post your replies to a series of questions about elevators. The MHS is interested in all grain elevators that have served the farm community.

Your contributions will help gather historical information such as present status of elevators, names of companies, owners and agents, rail lines, year elevators were built — and dates when they were torn down (if applicable).

There is room on the website to post personal recollections and stories related to grain elevators. The MHS presently also has only a partial list of all elevators that have been demolished. You can help by updating that list if you know of one not included on that list.

Your contributions are greatly appreciated and will help the MHS develop a comprehensive, searchable database to preserve the farm community’s collective knowledge of what was once a vast network of grain elevators across Manitoba.

Please contribute to This Old Grain Elevator website here.

You will receive a response, by email or phone call, confirming that your submission was received.

Goldsborough is interested in hearing all sorts of experiences about the elevators — funny, sad, or anything in between. Readers willing to share their stories can leave messages at 204-474-7469.

The post PHOTOS: This Old Elevator: June 2019 appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

On the peak facing the road, it says “Maplegrove Farm 1913” in big white letters, newly painted by Sheila after the old ones fell off.

Why it matters: The barn was once the hub of the family farm. The cumulative stories of these structures tell a history of rural life in the early 20th century.

There are no maple trees in the vicinity, but when the barn was built by the Lamb family over 100 years ago, perhaps there were.

The Lambs abandoned the site in the ’30s after hard times struck. In the 1950s, Jeff’s grandfather bought the land. They used the barn for grain storage.

Since then, the barn has passed out of use but it remains a landmark in the area. It sits alongside a road many locals use to drive to Brandon.

“A lot of people know what it is from miles away. They know about the red barn,” said Sheila.

The barn holds over 100 years of history, but the Elders fear that will soon be lost as the barn, no longer useful, deteriorates.

Heart of the farm

The barn was once the hub of the family farm, writes Kristin Catherwood of Memorial University of Newfoundland. Catherwood, who catalogued all barns in two rural Saskatchewan municipalities, suggests that barns reflect the realities of life on family farms better than any other type of rural building. The barns held horses, cattle and hay, but also served as the venue for social occasions.

“The barn was the first place the farmer went in the morning, the last place he went before bed,” writes Catherwood. “Now at best, barns have moved to the fringes of the farm. At worst, they have disappeared entirely.”

The heyday of barn building was 1910-30, Catherwood said. This was a boom era of agricultural growth in Canada, coinciding with an influx of settlers to the Prairies.

Starting in the 1960s, the barn began to be less vital to the family farm due to changing technology and methods of farming.

Catherwood counted 123 barns in the two municipalities she studied. Of these, 20 per cent were still being used for some sort of livestock, and 25 per cent were used as storage or workshops. One was still being used exactly as it would have been when built.

About a third of the structures were in poor condition, past the point where they could be restored.

Tough choices

The Elders have already put about $50,000 into maintaining another barn, built on their original farm site around 1886. The two-level barn, dug into the sloping farmyard, was built with tamarack logs squared off with a broad axe instead of milled lumber.

The bottom level had stalls for cattle, and draft and carriage horses. Feed and hay was stored on the top level where it could be dropped to the bottom floor when it was needed.

Now it’s used to store a boat, a snowmobile, grain bin parts and other odds and ends.

“It was from the original first generation that put so much work into it,” Sheila said. “There was a lot of factors that went into (fixing it). It was a lot of soul-searching.” They knew the money could go into many other areas on the farm.

“It’s been taken care of by previous generations, and we’re just trying to do the same,” Jeff said. “It’s got a neat history.”

The red “Maplegrove” barn isn’t made out of beams hand-hewn by past generations of the Elder family. It is an “Eaton’s barn.”

Between 1910 and 1932, the T. Eaton Co. sold house and barn packages through its catalogue service. These were only sold in Western Canada.

Eaton’s offered a free plan book which gave the details for the house or barn plan, including an artist’s sketch. Customers could buy the blueprints, or order a complete package of plans, lumber and everything needed to build the house. Lumber was shipped from British Columbia, and the millwork came from Winnipeg, the Canadian Museum of History writes.

The Elders have no proof that the barn was ordered from Eaton’s, but that’s the story handed down to them.

Today, the fir timbers are in decent condition, but the concrete foundation is crumbling. The Elders once used it for grain storage, but they don’t need it anymore. It’s also standing in one of their better-producing fields. Jeff and Sheila acknowledge it doesn’t make much financial sense to keep it up.

“I just don’t want to just let it go and let it fall down,” said Sheila.

Other uses

Near Winnipeg, old barns have found new lives as wedding and event venues, such as the “Rustic Wedding Barn” near Steinbach. But in Wawanesa, which is about a half-hour drive from Brandon and more than two hours from Winnipeg, finding alternative uses for the building has proved difficult.

Over the weekend of May 25-26, the Elders planned two events to test the viability of their barn as a venue. One event had to be cancelled because of lack of interest.

“I have all kinds of ideas but I know realistically the amount of money and time is beyond what I think we can consider,” Sheila said.

The Elders say they’d have to move the barn before they could remodel it as a venue. They can’t sacrifice good land for a parking lot. They were quoted $100,000 to move the barn, they said.

Vanishing history

“There will be a day not too far off where barns are an unusual thing,” said Gordon Goldsborough, author and head researcher for the Manitoba Historical Society.

There are 10 municipally designated heritage barns in Manitoba, according to Manitoba Historical Society records. Goldsborough explained that to be designated a heritage building, the building needs to have historical significance, either to the province or to the community in which it stands.

Significance could include architectural peculiarities, like some of the octagon-shaped barns in the province, said Goldsborough. Other criteria includes if buildings were the site of a noteworthy event, are considered a landmark, and are in relatively unaltered, good structural condition, according to the Heritage Resources Act.

Designating a municipal heritage site is up to local councils, with the input of municipal heritage advisory committees, made up of people who can provide expertise on the historical nature of the site.

However, Goldsborough said he can count “on one hand” how many municipalities actually have heritage advisory committees.

In the Elders’ municipality, Oakland-Wawanesa, there is no heritage advisory committee.

Sheila said she’d researched getting heritage grants, but realized they either did not apply, did not provide enough money to save the Maplegrove barn, or would have too many rules and restrictions.

In Alberta, one county’s approach to saving barns has taken another path.

Flagstaff county, southeast of Edmonton, began cataloguing its barns in 2016. University of Alberta student Sydney Hampshire drove around the county taking pictures of barns and collecting stories from their owners.

Hampshire formed the accounts into an online directory, which also includes old churches and landforms, called “Heritage Barns of Flagstaff.”

“We must not wait until scarcity elicits demand for these historic resources,” the site says. “We should take action now, while residents of the Flagstaff Region still have the access and the connection to historic barns in the area.”

Hampshire told the Manitoba Co-operator that barn owners were enthusiastic about the project, and understood that many of the structures would soon “succumb to time.”

She said people would tell her “if only you had just come by sooner.” Their older relatives would have been able to tell more stories, or they could have showed her other barns that had fallen down.

With pictures and written accounts, “it doesn’t really die,” said Hampshire.

For the Elders, if the Maplegrove barn can’t be used as a venue where it is, they hope someone will want it.

“Even if we can’t save this barn, maybe we would find somebody who — whether we gave it to or sold it to — that would be able to move it and look after it so that it would still have a part in history,” Sheila said.

“I would be sad to see the barn go but I would be even sadder to see if it just stood here and fell into the ground when it could have been saved.”

In the meantime, Sheila said they intend to enjoy the barn with their friends and neighbours. This began on May 26, when they held a market and exhibition at the barn with local artists, craftspeople and sellers.

The post Preserving vanishing Prairie barns a difficult row to hoe appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.