Church part of disappearing history

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This article was published 19/09/2024 (623 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

RM OF GRASSLAND — It’s silent, except for grass rustling and crickets chirping. There’s nothing to keep the sound out — the windows are shattered and the doors are taken off, piled into a corner of the room.

A truck passes outside, stirring up a cloud of dust on the gravel road. It drives into the distance, bringing its sound of crunching gravel with it. The Berbank Memorial Church, standing alone south of Brandon, returns to silence.

The memorial church was built to honour four Westman casualties of the First World War. It has been abandoned, and more than ever its future is uncertain. Acts of vandalism and the slow erosion of the elements have put it into dangerous disrepair.

Cracks line its concrete foundation, peeling wallpaper hangs from its ceiling, and bird droppings have splashed on benches in the hall. Walking through the building, with each step rubble cracks. It feels like you could fall through an open hole to the basement.

It’s been here for more than a hundred years — but chances are that it won’t be much longer.

It was built in 1919 near Nesbitt, Manitoba. At the time, the church was a memorial for Jack Fisher, Harry Hardwick, Harry Martin and Cecil Minary, four young men with ties to Nesbitt who never saw 30. These local men went off to fight in the First World War and never returned home.

It was closed about 40 years later and has stood at the side of a rural road south of Brandon since. The church stood up well to time until the pas 15 years, when chaos came all at once.

In 2010, Gordon Goldborough visited the site as he documented the historic building for the Manitoba Historical Society. He recalls that the church was in good condition — in his words, it looked structurally sound.

“It looked like somebody had done some fairly recent work on it,” he said to the Sun. “A fairly recent coat of paint. The roof was in fairly good shape.”

The historian snapped some photographs, showing a piano neatly tucked into the corner, flowers laid for the casualities of war, and a shine reflecting from wooden benches. Fifty years had barely made a scratch — he thought the piano probably would have been playable.

The church was still noted to be in good condition seven years later.

Documentation continued in 2017, when photographer Holly Thorne visited the site. She told the Sun it was then, too, in good condition. Its doors were intact, its windows were intact. The only damage appeared natural, like water stains.

When shown photographs of the same space this year, Thorne was saddened.

“It’s just one of those unfortunate, kind of heartbreaking things to see,” she told the Sun. “What really bothers me the most is just graffiti, you know … it’s angering to me that people go in there and feel the need to spray paint for no reason.”

In the time since Thorne left, the church flipped on its head. The windows were broken, the doors taken off their hinges, nature was let in, and images were sprayed on the front in bright orange paint. The piano was battered, with years of bird droppings piled onto the low keys of the scale.

The spiral of damage comes when the “envelope” of the building is broken, explained Goldborough. When that line is crossed, where doors and windows are broken and no longer seal the building, nature takes its toll — fast.

“Somebody breaks windows, for example, then you can get birds going in. And, of course, birds leave all kinds of remains behind,” he said. “You can get four-legged animals getting in, and they can tear things up. As soon as the envelope of a building is compromised, that’s when the when the damage really starts to accelerate.”

Observably from the photographic trail, the damage that sent the church into deep disrepair all occured in recent history. As someone who loves history, Thorne mourns the damage the recent acts of vandalism have done to Manitoba’s past.

“That’s really the unfortunate part. I mean, you think about the fact that … you have this building that was built by a community for the community. And over the years, you think of the weddings that were there and the funerals that were there, and the celebrations that were there, and all of these things. And then to see it in that state.”

But this downspiral is the fate that many historic buildings in Manitoba face. Thorne talks of abandonment — in this case, how the church previously served the community of Berbank, but has found itself “in the middle of nowhere” through the passage of time.

Abandonment is something Goldborough has written three books about. He studies the phenemonen of how small communities in Manitoba shrivel and disappear. He said the church — which Google does not even recognize and provide an address for upon search — is in an area hit hard.

“If you draw a circle around the Berbank church and take in all the communities in the near vicinity, they’re all ghost towns,” said Goldsborough. “[And] there’s many more towns, you know, in the vicinity … basically ghost towns in waiting.”

The church is kilometres down a dirt road no matter which direction you go. It’s off Highway 10, about halfway between Brandon and Boissevain.

“If you go back to the ’50s, ’60s, there was probably still a number of people living in that area. You know, most sections would probably have had a farm on them,” said Goldsborough.

Through research, the historian believes one driving force for abandonment in small areas is technology. Farmland previously required more hands, but as technology improved, there’s less need for people to populate the small communities and service the land, because one person can accomplish the same task when backed by today’s machinery.

In previous examples where he witnessed other buildings saved from abandoned communities, he said there were two keys: having someone nearby who keeps an eye on the site, or having a purpose for saving the building.

In the case of Berbank, with very few neighbours, the most feasible future for the building would be picking it up and moving it, said Goldsborough.

“Can it be moved, for example, to a better spot? A place where it would be protected, a place where it could be useful?”

Where it stands, parties like the province would have limited interest in preserving the building, he said, because it does not serve a population centre, and it would likely continue to be vandalized in its remote location.

In similar examples, the historian said other abandoned churches were purchased by a family and moved onto private property, or moved to a nearby town and restored as part of a museum.

The Sun tried to get comment from the Municipality of Grasslands, the authority of the land where the church sits, but could not get an interview before deadline.

As time presses on, the future of the church becomes more vulnerable. Thorne pointed to the fact that several forces get involved as the building deteriorates.

“There’s also a liability for the landowner. If I go into a place and I fall through a floor, even if I’m trespassing, I can still sue the guy, right? So there’s that part of it too,” she said. “This is another one of those situations where it’s just like, is this church going to get to the point where whoever owns the land is just sick and tired?”

It’s common in abandonement, she said. Vandalism leads buildings to become safety hazards — which then become a risk that many owners would sooner demolish than pay a settlement for.

She said she’s fallen through a few floors in her time photographing for the Manitoba Historical Society. She didn’t file lawsuits, but merely provided the example as one factor of the phenomenon of abandonment in Manitoba.

It’s something that, like at Berbank Memorial Church, hastens the process of Manitobans losing important historical monuments, she said. As a history buff, Thorne is especially upset for that reason.

“The more people who vandalize and take advantage of these abandoned buildings, the more we’re going to lose our history,” she said. “”That’s what really bugs me … It’s like, Why? Why do you need to do that? … The history may not mean anything to you, but it means something to somebody.”

Justin Oertel, a Westman resident, sees the meaning. He started a fundraiser in September for the church, and wrote an appeal, encouraging others to donate.

“The church, once a proud monument to our collective past, is now at risk of being lost forever,” he wrote for the fundraiser. “We cannot let this happen … This is our chance to preserve a vital piece of our history for future generations, ensuring that the legacy of those who served our country and built our community remains intact.”

But at the time of writing this, the fundraiser had not received a single dollar.

» cmcdowell@brandonsun.com

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