There is a rich rural heritage to the Canadian Prairies, one that I worry will increasingly be lost and forgotten.
My earliest memories regarding a family address was for a PO box in Clashmoor, SK, a town with a Saskatchewan Wheat Pool elevator on a ribbon of branch line steel. There was a store, a post office with a residence in the back, and a couple of other houses.
But grain trucks rolled in there with grain from the area, and we picked up mail, and at least some groceries.
The store burned. The post office closed, as did the elevator. The rail was ripped from the earth.
Today, no aspect of Clashmoor remains except in a few area histories and the fading memories of the likes of myself.
So why do I mention that here now?
Over the summer I have noticed how rural communities continue to fade.
I walked in an area in Preeceville just the other day. The ghost bed of the railroad was still visible, but the long-gone steel was another reminder the big rail companies were eager to abandon small town Western Canada, shipping grain deliveries to highways now pocked with potholes you have to think grain trucks are at least partly responsible for.
The grain elevator remains standing in Preeceville, but it is not the draw for area farmers to visit the town as it was when built.
The area along the rail bed is now a green space, one we scouted with the hope it might one day soon be a disc golf course. It would be ideal for that, but the loss of the elevator and the rail line were not lost on me. They were major blows to the community.
But the loss of branch lines is a relatively recent thing.
Our history extends decades before that.
But how do we get people to care about that more distant past?
The Yorkton branch of the Western Development Museum recently held day camps for youth. It was a chance to make butter by hand, to create rope the old fashioned way and to make ice cream.
They may seem like skills that are no longer needed, so why bother? But they do connect us to our past too.
Not that most youth seemed to be interested. In a community of near 20,000, four youth were involved the day of my visit.
Our heritage is important though, although maybe that is best recognized from afar.
An example was pointed out to me by a friend on Facebook just last week. New Finland is losing one of its historic settler homes.
For the record, New Finland measures about 12 miles north and south and 14 miles east and west within the municipalities of Willowdale and Rocanville. It is circled by five towns. To the south are Whitewood and Wapella on the Number 1 Highway; to the northeast is Tantallon on the Qu’Apelle River; to the east and northwest respectively are the potash towns of Rocanville and Esterhazy.
The home is not being lost due to the ravages of age, but rather the 100-year-old home is being dismantled in order to send it to a museum in Finland (specifically the World of Trails museum in Peräseinäjoki).
The project speaks to the importance of history to those in Finland shown by their willingness to be involved in what has to be a costly venture to connect to those who immigrated a century ago.
Perhaps it is something we in Canada can learn from. Our past is important for it is the foundation of our future, and at present we seem satisfied to let many aspects of that foundation fade away.
