Home moves to museum
Stelmach family came to area in 1898
Former premier Ed Stelmach watched Wednesday morning as his grandparents’ home and a century’s worth of memories left his yard.
As the semi-truck hauling the weathered, two-storey house turned onto the highway for a 50-kilometre journey to a permanent place at the Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village, Stelmach recalled picking herbs in the pasture with his grandmother when he was a boy.
A neighbour remembered how Theodora Stelmach made the best cream puffs in the area, with farmfresh cream.
And neighbours and family alike admired the attention to detail that went into the home, which will be restored through a Ukrainian Canadian Congress-Alberta Provincial Council initiative to mark the 120th anniversary of Ukrainian settlement in Canada.
The house will be a valuable addition to the site, said Pam Trischuk, the Ukrainian Village’s head of interpretation.
Nykola and Theodora Stelmach moved to east-central Alberta in 1898 from the village of Zavydche. Their grandson became Alberta’s first premier of Ukrainian ancestry in 2006, a source of pride for the community.
“Continuing to tell the story about Ukrainian history in Alberta and Canada, premier Stelmach is an important figure in Ukrainian history now,” Trischuk said.
During his run for the PC leadership in 2006, Stelmach told the story of how his grandparents were supposed to get off the train in Saskatchewan, but changed their minds when they didn’t see any trees.
Instead, they disembarked in Strathcona and walked east to the Andrew area.
Stelmach and his wife, Marie, still farm the property and have lived just metres away from the old house for decades.
The house moved on Wednesday would have been the second or third home that Stelmach’s grandparents built, said Jim Nakonechny, a senior restoration officer with Alberta Culture, who is overseeing the move and restoration. Like most Ukrainian settlers, they started out living in a sod house or dugout.
The six-room home with gingerbread trim was built during the First World War by Ukrainian craftsmen originally from the same village as Stelmach’s grandparents, with vertical log construction on the first floor and horizontal log construction for the second floor. Those logs were then covered with a clay and straw plaster and finished with cedar siding on the outside.
The family lived in the home until the early 1950s. The fact that it was never modernized and contains most of the original features will help make restoration easier, Nakonechny said.
Moving the house required coordination with the movers, highway authorities and utility companies. Work started in early July to ready the house for the move. The two verandas were moved two weeks ago.
The crew from McConnell Building Movers lifted the approximately 10-metre-by-11-metre house from its foundation and onto a steel beam earlier this week.
The 45-tonne load took about four hours to make the trip from Stelmach’s Andrew-area farm, accompanied by flag crews and trucks warning of the wide load that took up two lanes of traffic.
The move and restoration is budgeted for about $250,000, said the congress’s provincial co-ordinator Slavka Shulakewych. “This was important to the congress to do something of a legacy for the 120th anniversary that could be preserved for future generations,” Shulakewych said.
Throughout the home’s journey, different family members checked on its progress. Stelmach talked about what it would mean to his grandparents to see their home secure a place in history.
“They’d be proud it was here, but I think the whole community is proud the house is here and it will be representative of dozens of families in the area,” he said.