Touring Ghost Towns and Abandoned Places in Southern Saskatchewan (Episode 223)
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the DanOCan YouTube channel. I am glad you have either chosen to come back here for another DanOCan video or you're visiting us for the first time. Either way, welcome! So, I'm doing another video from the basement of DanOCan headquarters here. So I thought I would kind of go back and take a look at the very first Ghost Town Convention which was held in 2007 in Hallonquist, Saskatchewan. Now, you're probably asking yourself “What is
a ghost town convention or what was a ghost town convention?” and I may as well start right from the beginning. It was the brainchild of Mike Stobbs who you can find here on YouTube at Mr Heated Jacket’s Quebec Garage. Mike was -- or still is actually -- a fantastic photographer and he had -- as many of us do -- a real affinity for abandoned places and so he came up with the idea and I'll put the post here. So, this is going to look really dated even though it's only 15 years ago but this is how we communicated before social media exploded.
This was the Ghost Town Forum or the Ghost Town Chat page and Mike, who was posting as Impala SS, put it up on September the 27th 2006 with the idea of “Hey, let's get together next year and go tour around a bunch of different ghost towns.” So the name he originally had proposed was “Ghost Town Heaven in 2007” which eventually morphed into Ghost Town Convention, and the duration of three or four days ended up becoming two days but the basic idea was there. It's hard to imagine now, where abandoned photography and ghost towning has become such a popular online activity with tons of pages dedicated to it, but back in the day it was not easy to find other people who shared the same passion. And so Mike had this brainchild and ran with it
and it was a really amazing experience. None of us – well, I shouldn't say that. There was ten of us that made it that first year and, you know, most of us had never met any of the other people before. So this was coming together in a ghost town in Saskatchewan and meeting with a bunch of strangers who we just knew shared the same interest and it really was a success. So, now, this picture here doesn't really look like much -- and it's not -- but I put it here because this is the first photo I ever took on a Ghost Town Convention. This is a picture of a
light fixture inside the curling rink at the ghost town of Hallonquist, Saskatchewan and this I put this up here because it really shows how little I knew about what I was doing when it comes to photography. I never considered myself a photographer; I never have considered myself a photographer, but going out and meeting Mike and shooting with people who were photographers really opened my eyes to different styles. And this is a photo that, you know, I was basically trying to emulate what I saw Mike doing and it never would have occurred to me to take this picture until I saw somebody else doing it. I was more of a “documentation” photographer -- still am -- like I basically try to shoot and show you the whole scene and Mike really opened my eyes to the shooting of detail. So that's why this one's here -- not an interesting photo and don't worry, it gets better from here. This is the curling rink at Hallonquist, the building that we were just inside where I took the picture of that light fixture. Hockey rinks and curling rinks are kind
of the lifeblood of Saskatchewan. Even to this day I think and, you know, along with grain elevators they're kind of one of the iconic buildings of the life on the Prairies. And, yeah, this one was in, you know, pretty decent shape considering it obviously had not been used in a number of years and was sitting there in Hallonquist, abandoned. This one here is a shot of an interior of a car. I've always been fascinated with dashboards and car Interiors. Even as a kid -- and I don't know why that is, but they fascinate me and they always make I find really interesting subject materials even though this particular photograph is horrible in it's exposure. But I just thought
it was kind of neat. I mean, I really think we've lost something with cars, you know, the pure mechanical nature of the way cars used to be with, you know, gauges and levers and push buttons and, you know, everything was analog and mechanical and nowadays with all the digital displays and touch screens and everything cars just don't hold the same charm. I don't know what the evolution of cars is going to be like but, you know, maybe in 50 - 60 years people will look back at the cars of today with the same nostalgia I have for cars of this era. This was a car that was just
sitting out in the field. What I love about it is that the keys are still in the ignition like somebody just parked it there one day and never came back. I also love the traditional pine tree air freshener still hanging from that knob in the middle. I don't know if that's the choke or a cigarette lighter -- I think it's probably a cigarette lighter if I look at it closer, but it's amazing to me that, you know, cars…you just park them and they just sat there and stayed there for all I know this car's still there today. This was another this is probably a blacksmith shop or some sort of, you know, mechanical shop in Hallonquist. I just thought it was really cool, the old sign there above the door that says Hallonquist, I believe was from the train station that used to be in the town. The tracks and everything were long gone even in 2007 when we were there.
This picture here is an old truck that was sitting in Hallonquist. You know, I really like this photo. As much as I love to look back at my early photography and talk about how bad it was, I like this image. That little cloud in the upper left corner there kind of
fills in the blank spot in the sky. This is again another Mike Stobbs influenced photo, and this is a photo I never would have thought to take on my own until I started following around Mike and seeing what he did. So, I thought it was a really… you know, it's not the greatest photo in the world by any stretch of the imagination, but I do kind of like how the shadow cuts through the Fargo on the hood emblem there and the detail with a little bit of that spider web on just to the left of it. So, it's kind of like it. Like I said, it's not the greatest photo of all time, but it's pretty good for pictures of mine from that era.
This one here is still in Hallonquist. This is an old white building on the right there, is an old General Store. You can kind of see, you know, that spot where things are cut out which probably was a front window at one point. This is a style of architecture we used to see a lot on the Canadian prairies, this slanted corner door entrance. You don't see many buildings like that anymore, at least I don't think you do, so it was quite notable for that and being one of the buildings left in the town, I thought it was an interesting subject.
And this one here, I just included because this is very typical of the way people would dispose of their trash back in the early settlers' days on the Prairies. You know, this was a foundation of a building or the basement of a building, and when you had stuff you needed to get rid of, you just pushed it into the hole and let nature take its course. There are a lot of places even in Calgary to this day where if you're on the side of a hill, you'll start to uncover old tin cans, bed frames, and things from when it was still farmland and whatnot, and people would just push their trash over the side of the hill and call it a day." So, we moved on. Uh, this is now the town of Braddock or what's left of the town of Braddock or Brad-dock, depending on how you want to say it. This was the site of an old school.
The school was long since gone, but you can see the wooden sidewalk was still there in front with the weeds growing through it. And this house here, or what's left of a house here, is notable for a special reason, and I'll get to that in a moment. But, uh, this was one of the few remains of a building in the town site. Just kind of that little front porch area remains now. What made this super interesting was on this Ghost Town convention trip, my neighbor at the time actually grew up in Braddock and so he knew the area very well. He decided to join us on this uh,
Ghost Town convention and share some of his stories from growing up in the area. This is him here. His name's Don. As far as I know, he's still alive. I haven't been in contact with Don in over 10 years now. But like I said, what made this special is this is actually the house Don lived in as a child. This was his parents' house. It used to be a two-story house, and he stood around there and told us stories about growing up and playing in the yard and helping dig, you know, dig the foundation and dig the basement and things for it. So it was quite,
uh, it was quite interesting for us to have Don there and actually hear from someone who lived in this house as a child. And it was also quite emotional for Don. He was going to be coming back, I think about a month later, to attend a school reunion at the Townsite, but this was the first time he had been back and seen his old family home in quite some time. Next up, Walsh Valley School, as you can see on the sign there, 1920 to 1960. So this had been abandoned for 47 years at the time of our visit. I don't really know exactly where this is or where this was. I don't know if it's
still there or not. There's another view of it there, kind of taken from the other side. If you were a firefighter, that first photo was kind of looking at the Alpha side. This would be kind of looking at the Charlie-Delta side. Yeah, that's a neat building. I say it is a neat building. I don't know if it's still there or not, like I said, here's a shot from inside. You can see it
was pretty intact inside. You could clearly see where the chalkboards were, and the paint was still not too bad. In terms of a lot of abandoned schools, this one was in pretty good shape inside. Another view here of the chalkboards. The name that really stands out there is Arlene Sally Sowa or Sawa. I'm not a stalker, but for interest's sake of seeing what I could find, I did a quick Google search for Arlene Sowa and/or Sawa. I found an article or a listing online that mentioned that
she got married in the nearby town of Hodgeville in 1982. So, if anyone knows Arlene, let her know that this video is out there, and that -- at least as of 2007 -- her writing was still on the wall in the school at Walsh Valley. A couple more shots here of some names written on the walls, primarily from 1984-1985. I suspect that they probably did some sort of school reunion in that era. So again, pause the video here and zoom in and see if you can recognize any names if you're from that area.
This is another view, still on the school. You can see the school is the small building there on the horizon, in between the other two buildings. So, this was a farmyard. I'm making a bold assumption that this was the farmyard of the person who probably donated the land for Walsh Valley school. That was very typical in
the day, that a farmer would carve off a little corner of his property and donate it to become the school site for the area as the areas were developing. Everything about this photo is just classic ghost town, or I should say classic Saskatchewan. You know, you've got the flat land, the grass, the abandoned building, the one solo tree standing there off in the distance. I mean, it's not a great photo in terms of its composition or whatnot, but I think it's a photo that really captures southern Saskatchewan and the spirit of the Ghost Town Convention. Moving into the evening of day one, this is one of the elevators in Neidpath, Saskatchewan. Again,
not really a great photo as the sky is horribly exposed, and the elevator itself is underexposed, so you know that I managed to capture the worst of both worlds in terms of this photo. But it's a grain elevator, it's a photo of a grain elevator, it's a documentation shot to show what was there. I haven't been to Neidpath in probably seven or eight years since I was there. I understand from
other people in the area that the elevator is still there, or the elevators are still there, but I understand they're in quite bad shape. I believe even the cupola of the one has since fallen, so perhaps even both of them. Those elevators are not long for this world, and soon pictures hopefully better than this one will be all that we have left. So this is the next morning, and we started our day in Hodgeville, Saskatchewan. This grain elevator in Hodgeville, I believe, was demolished just two, maybe three years ago. The
last few years time has kind of changed, so this elevator, from my understanding, no longer exists. But again, not a great picture, but it's at least the picture and it exists. The picture does, not the elevator. Downtown Hodgeville, I like the contrast in this one of the sense of you have the classic wooden grain elevator in the front, and you have the concrete grain terminal in the back, so I always kind of feel sad seeing this one, you know, that the Hodgeville wooden elevator had to spend its last days looking down the track at its eventual successor. Next stop. Saint Boswell's. Saint Boswell's is a really interesting ghost town; there are no real buildings left at all, but what is left are all the concrete sidewalks. I'm just gonna show you here a little bit of history of the town from the sign that was at the gate. Basically, what I really like about this is
it shows the importance of the railways in those days. The town was in one spot when the railway came through; the railway was on a completely different side or area, so what do you do? You move the town to the new spot. Saint Boswell's was a thriving town from 1919 to 1929, then slowly started to diminish. That's the other thing about a lot of these towns: they had a fairly short history. They were booming for a short period of time, but the Dirty 30s and the Great Depression did a lot of them in, and Saint Boswell's is no exception to that. Saint Boswell's 1918 to
1975. The fascinating thing about it is Saint Boswell's is one of the few towns, I feel, of that era that actually had concrete sidewalks. So when you visit the town site of Saint Boswell's, the concrete sidewalks are still there. A lot of towns of that era just had wooden sidewalks which have rotted away or been pulled up. These sidewalks are still there, and there's a nice view of Saint Boswell's: a wooden sign, the sidewalk, the trees. When you visit Saint Boswell's, it's
quite possible to really see the grid of the town laid out because of those sidewalks. You can still see where the streets were and the tracks through the field here with the sidewalks on both sides. Another sidewalk goes through the trees, and there were still some foundations left. There were some places where you could still see the concrete steps that used to lead up to a house right next to the sidewalk. Of course, everything's long gone except the concrete. Yep, another shot there of one of the remaining sidewalks. Saint Boswell's is a great little town to visit to be able to walk
around and see the remnants of a town and see the grid and layout of it so quite interesting. Next stop was Bateman, Saskatchewan. Here's a shot of the classic railway sign in Bateman, and what I believe would be the corner of Railway and Main. In Bateman, the Bateman Historical Museum is housed in this false-fronted building. It wasn't open
when we were there, and I don't know if it's been open at any point in the last 30 years. So we didn't get a chance to see what was inside that building, but it's a neat building just by itself, even if it wasn't the Historical Museum. There were some grain cars still on the tracks, and from what I have heard and from what I can see on Google Earth, the tracks at Bateman have long since been pulled up. This was the highlight of Bateman, Saskatchewan. And this is an example, you know, instead of the wooden one-room schoolhouse, this is your more, you know, two-three room brick schoolhouse. And to me, this is really the sign of a prosperous area. If you scroll or you look in really close, the date on that school building is 1921, and so for a place to have a brick building of this size functioning as a school in the 1920s when most places were doing the one-room wooden schoolhouse, I think is really, really remarkable. And it was a
great looking building. Here's a shot from the inside. I don't know if this was a renovation project that was partway through and stopped or if this was the initial stages of demolition, like I said, I don't really know. But this was kind of the state of the interior of the school back in 2007. And when you would go to the back of the school, the entire rear half of the school had been demolished, and you know, it looks like they basically brought in some heavy equipment and just pushed the walls in into the foundation. So we were lucky we were there when we were because we
got to see part of the school still standing. In this shot here, you can really see how the back half of the school has been demolished. So, I suspect this was an addition, which is probably why it was the first part to get demolished. That entire school has long since been demolished.
Next up, Shamrock, Saskatchewan. This is just a documentation photo of classic early 20th-century Prairie architecture - the false-fronted building. This was the town's post office at the time we were there, presumably a general store. You can't really see it in this photo, but you'll see it in the next ones that are coming up. That building on the right on the false front of it says “pool hall”, from what I can tell. "So, if we zip ahead to the next one here, this is a Google Street View image. I was first of all amazed that Google had visited Shamrock, Saskatchewan.
Even more surprised they had visited Shamrock, Saskatchewan twice. This is the first image from 2009. You can see it's not a huge difference from when we were there in 2007. But if you jump ahead from 2009 to 2013, you can see the building has since been closed up. All the signage that indicated it was an active post office is gone. The little vending machines,
the newspaper machine, and things out front of the building are gone. The door has been boarded up, and the Lucky Dollar sign that was on the little building to the right is long gone. I really just wanted to get a close-up of that sign while it still existed. Hopefully, somebody saved it, and it's not or it wasn't lost to thieves. Hopefully, when the building was shut down, the owner took it
somewhere, and it still exists. Right next to the Lucky Dollar, or the Lucky Buck, I guess, is one of these classic playground metal horses. You can still find these occasionally across the Prairies. I absolutely love these. We had them in our playground in my hometown as a kid. They were
always a lot of fun, but I think anyone who grew up in a town that had one of these has one common memory, and that's burning the crap out of your legs when you sat on them on a hot summer day. You know, it's things like that that really make growing up in the era of the 1970s and the 1980s really special, actually. And I do feel sorry, and I know this sounds like such an old man comment, but I do feel really sorry for the kids of today who don't get to experience the things that we did. Whenever I see one of these on the Prairies, I make a special effort to take a picture of it because they hold a lot of sentimental importance for me, and they're great pieces. I don't know if
this one still exists, but they're still out there. So if you find them, give them a ride, take a picture of them, and let's keep that memory going. And of course, when it comes to pieces of infrastructure from the past, I'm a huge fan of old gas pumps. This one is what I would consider
a bit more modern of a gas pump. These are the gas pumps I remember growing up with, and my dad showing me how to pump gas or letting me pump gas. It usually had that little sight ball on the side with the little balls inside or the little spinner that would go around that I always found fascinating. This was a close-up of the other side of that pump. You can see this dates from the era when we still dispensed gasoline using gallons in Canada. If I'm reading this correctly, gas was 92 cents per gallon. So anybody out there who remembers buying gas in gallons and can tell me what that basically kind of time frame this would be from, I'm going to assume in gallons it's going to be the early to mid-70s. 92 cents a gallon, not sure when that would have been,
but it must have been right at the end of the gallon era before we converted to liters. Next shot here is another documentation shot of a grain elevator. As you can tell from the side here, Corderre, it's a pure Saskatchewan classic wooden grain elevator. John Deere tractor, what more do you want? Uh, this was on Main Street in Coderre. The building on the left is obviously the main subject of the photo - an old general store. I've heard from people that this is long gone, which doesn't surprise me. There wasn't much left of it when we were there,
but you can definitely see on the front of it where it clearly says General Store. Great building, sad that it's apparently no longer in existence. This was a shot taken through the window looking inside - still some of the old freezers and coolers and things that were inside.
This one here is really not a great photo at all, but it kind of captures why I like ghost towning. I mean, this is just a tricycle inside an abandoned building, but when you're exploring abandoned buildings, you get to put your own story together. Looking at something like this, I can't help but think of the child that was given this tricycle. Was this a Christmas present one year? Is this something that his or her parents saved up for months to be able to afford? What memories were created on this tricycle cycling around the town and exploring as a young child? Who did it belong to? There's a whole story there that no one will ever really know. And when you explore these places and see these things, you're free to make up your own stories and take your personal experiences and implant them into the objects that remain. So, you know that tricycle was some child's world most likely, and kind of, you know, it's kind of sad. It deserves a better fate than what it was left to.
Another one here, obviously taken 14 kilometers from Shamrock. This is very typical of the back roads in Saskatchewan. This is actually a Saskatchewan highway in a lot of cases. I kind of just threw this in. I have to laugh because there was very fresh oil on this road,
and this was 2007. I think I sold that truck in 2012 or 2013, so five or six years later I still had the oil from this road embedded on the wheel wells of my truck when I sold it. So I just included it there because it's very Southern Saskatchewan in a nutshell.
Another old truck. We're getting to the end here but another old truck. I captured this one, or included this one, again horribly exposed -- the sky is completely overexposed but I threw this in mainly for our American viewers because my understanding is that Mercury pickup trucks were a very Canadian phenomenon and that you really didn't see Mercury trucks in the U.S. You know, great patina on this one. This one here -- I mean, the glass is intact, this would be would be -- I say, I mean this is, you know, 15 years ago I took this photo but this truck as it sits there would be a great project for somebody. Here's my neighbor Don again, this is on our way home from Ghost Town Convention. So this is after Ghost Town Convention had wrapped up and we had
said goodbye to everybody else. Don was traveling with us. We stopped here, this was I believe his grandparents homestead in Saskatchewan so that he wanted to stop and see. This was near Braddock on our way home he wanted to stop and see where his grandparents farm was -- or what was left of it. And this was the remains of their home and that stone wall that you see there
I, you know, if I remember correctly, what Don was telling us at the time is that, you know, he helped his grandparents build that wall when he was a very young child. So there's another shot of the stone wall and Don kind of looking at the remnants of his grandparents place. And, yeah, that's kind of gonna wrap it up. I think, you know, I think we owe Mike Stobbs a huge debt of gratitude for coming up with the idea, for organizing it, making it happen, going out getting permission for us to visit these places and bringing together a group of individuals who otherwise probably never would have met each other. It would be at one
of the future ghost town conventions that I would actually meet Emily so, you know, it literally was a life-changing experience for me down the road. I'm not sure what else I can say. Like I said, I owe Mike a great debt of gratitude for setting this up. A lot of the people who were on that very first Ghost Town Convention -- I think there were 10 of us in total -- you know, a lot of us are still in contact today. Much easier now with social media and things than it was back in the day just communicating through forums and things but absolutely great experience.
Mike would run the Saskatchewan Ghost Town Convention for 10 years so we had our last one in 2016. I made it to nine of the ten that were held. Other people started the Alberta one that kind of took off and ran for a while until COVID hit. My friend Matt Tolton runs one in Manitoba that we haven't been able to get out to see because working in the business we do where summers are busy season it's kind of hard for us to take, you know, at least a couple days to drive to Manitoba, two days to do the event, two days to come back, one day to recover…kind of hard to take a week off in the summer so we haven't done Manitoba yet but we really hope to one day. So, anyway, thank you so much for watching. I don't know if I said this in the last video but we broke the 1000 subscriber mark thank you so much to the 1000 -- 1024 now, I think -- that are subscribed. We really appreciate your support and we'll see you in the next video.
2023-03-22 09:11
