Category: Exploring History

If we had but a single word, one word only to describe today’s subject, it’d be “funky”. We present to you the “dome home”, south of Calgary and perhaps the strangest dwelling we’ve ever documented. No shortage of personality here! A guarantee – every single person driving past it on...

This location is remote. Blinkin’ remote. Middle of nowhere, there’s nothing around for miles, the nearest living person is in another time zone remote. We visited the area and the population doubled. You get it…right? It’s isolated! At some out-of-the-way crossroads and today acting as a community hall for those...

There’s an impressive wood-framed trestle along the abandoned rail line at Waskatenau Alberta. Built of massive beams it’s been here for close to a century and spans a little water course just outside town. The rail’s still in place across it, but it’s been many years since they’ve been polished...

The community hall was heart of any small town, village or region, its social centre. Anywhere there was a population you’d find one of these structures. Typically long and rectangular, usually plain and unassuming, they were located somewhere close to “downtown”, or at some important crossroads intersection in more rural...

As old-school wood grain elevators go, this one, found in the town of Bentley Alberta is a relative youngster. Still, it follows a very traditional design and in construction, layout, function, so pretty much everything, albeit in a somewhat more massive form, it’s not all that dissimilar from ones much,...

The one room school. At one time, long ago, there were thousands of these little learning institutions scattered across rural Alberta. There was so many in fact, I doubt an accurate count is even possible. Often located along some remote middle-of-nowhere backroad, every so-many clicks or so and depending on...

There are three very interesting bridges spanning the mighty Columbia River all a stone’s throw from downtown Trail British Columbia. One is over a hundred years old and not long for this world, it’s going soon, further upstream and under construction is a structure that will replace the former. A...

A barn is a barn is a barn. In most minds one is the same as the next. It’s a rectangular-ish shaped building, usually, used for agricultural purposes sitting in a farm yard, more likely than not painted red and with a distinctive “barn roof”. It’s the latter, a multi-pitched...

Located next to bustling MacLeod Trail, tiny St Paul’s Anglican Church ranks as Calgary’s oldest. In fact, when built, it wasn’t even within the borders of the city (well then, a town) and was well south, the community eventually growing around it over time. Ir dates back some hundred and...

Almost every last town, village or hamlet across the vast Canadian Prairies was at one time home to a building much like the one we’ll be looking at today. Towering over everything, the flat expanse of the land, the community itself, they were always located in a prominent spot usually...

Victoria Park, just southeast of and across the tracks from downtown Calgary was for much of its history a working class neighbourhood. One of the city’s earlier communities, almost all the many homes that once stood within its borders are long gone, replaced by endless parking lots in support of...

Gravitas: a work of sculpture by Keith Harder. Located in a farmer’s field in Southern Alberta, it’s made of bits and pieces of vintage World War Two Anson aircraft. From the ground it looks like a scrap pile with no order or layout. Just a jumble of old planes forgotten...

Today we visit the lone grain elevator in Flaxcombe Saskatchewan. In the past there were a number of such structures in the community, but this is the last one. It’s a rare beast, here, and especially so when taken in the scope of the entire province – it’s one of...

The home, the barn, everything seen in this yard once served a rather unique and special purpose. Operating as a fully functioning “demonstration farm”, near Vulcan Alberta, and tied to the Canadian Pacific Railway, it was a show piece from a century ago promoting the region’s agricultural potential. Come, see...

Saying a handful of people live in Esther Alberta might be a stretch. There’s not many here. Even at the peak, long ago, it was never a populous place. It’s a tiny dot on the map, always has been, on some lonely back road, middle of nowhere stuff, seen and...

In the first few decades of the twentieth century a huge number of railway branch lines were built across the Western Canadian plains. Look at any old time map and see. It was a messy spaghetti-bowl of track, running this way and that with reckless abandon, to near every town...

The always on the go BIGDoer.com crew are in the tiny burg of Marengo Saskatchewan to document the Providence Grain facility located there. Join us for a tour of this working grain elevator. It’s a bit different and is not one of the those high-throughput concrete super terminals common today,...

British Columbia! Endless forests, precipitous peaks, bears, lumberjacks, bears eating lumberjacks, raging rivers, a moose, a squirrel, all things wild. No arguments here! But what’s this in Creston? Grain elevators, aka “prairie sentinels”…here in the mountains – emphasis on mountains? What the? Aren’t these associated with the vast (and very...

Under powder blue skies and wispy white clouds, amid endless fields of yellow, we find ourselves at the door of St Peter and Paul Church. Quaint, charming and oh so picturesque it can be found on a lonely Alberta crossroads. We’ve come to explore it, photograph it, learn something about...

The final count is thought to be somewhere between three and five thousand (reports vary) of them. That’s the approximate number of one room schools that were once located in Alberta. The first opened in the 1800s (some say 1860s, others 1880s), the last closing a scant dozen or so...

The history obsessed crew at BIGDoer.com pays a visit to British Columbia where we’ll explore the remains of the historic Yankee Girl Mine overlooking the tiny community of Ymir. There’s the mine dumps where non-ore bearing material was discarded, some collapsed buildings, bits from a tramway, rails, metal, who knows...

Railway history time! And today’s subject, what’s left of Troup Junction along the shores of Kootenay Lake near Nelson BC. The former line, going back to the late nineteenth century, has been abandoned for decades. On a small jut of land, they managed to fit in an amazing array of...

Here we look at the bridges of Waneta British Columbia. One, the elder of the pair, historically far more interesting and oh so photogenic, dates from the 1890s and once carried trains, It’s now used by highway traffic and is the oldest such span in this service in the province....

Here’s an undeniably rare find, an original standing-where-built railway water tower that was once used fill the boilers of steam locomotives. Way back when there used to be literately thousands of these across the country in strategic places up and down every main or branch line (steamers required a lot...

Bridges, we love bridges! In fact, we can’t get enough of them! The fine bit of engineering we’ll be looking at today was a mighty one, approaching three quarters of a kilometre in length from end to end (fractions with metric, shame on me). About a century old, it once...

As recently as a few decades ago there was something close to a thousand wood-cribbed grain elevators in Alberta. Most of theses buildings, dating from the early 1900s to the mid-1980s, are gone now, having been replaced by newer, larger and more efficient “grain terminals” made of concrete or steel....

Come along with us as we wander the remains of the old surface plant connected to the Hillcrest Collieries Mine in the Crowsnest Pass of Alberta. Closed down some seventy five years ago, a couple concrete buildings can be found at the site, all well overgrown, along with some bits...

Today we document the remains of a forgotten Monastery connected to the Orthodox Church, found in a remote corner of Northern Alberta. Deep in a wooded grove along a lonely back road, this unassuming cluster of small cobbled-together buildings are in varying states of advanced decay and most likely won’t...