Dear Editor
It was definitely arson, but the mischief makers who set fire to an old, abandoned home just over a week ago not only started a blaze that could have destroyed much more of the landowner’s property, they erased the structure built by someone’s grandfather in the 1930s.
Ed Barr, a deaf mute, and his wife Josephene, also deaf, moved in 1932 from dried out Southern Saskatchewan to greener pastures in the Hillside district just southwest of Sandwith. The one-and-a-half storey house was sturdily and skillfully built, much of it with logs hauled with horses from the forest over 25 miles north. I think it was about the best house in the area at the time. But frosts were as disastrous here as the dust storms of the south. The Barrs soon moved to Ontario to provide better futures for their five children.
I learned of the fire one afternoon from my son-in-law who had helped the landowner put out the spreading fire, first noticed about 5 a.m. That evening I received an email from Ed Barr’s granddaughter, soon to leave her B.C. home and planning to visit her grandfather’s house. I had to send her the sad news that someone had burned it down. She came anyway and visited the cellar hole filled with charred ruins.
Fred Grant
Glenbush
