SASKATOON – Heritage defenders are making a final attempt to save the last grain elevator clinging to its toehold on the edge of downtown Regina.
If citizens can’t raise $200,000 by May 1, the elevator, which was built in 1906, will meet the wrecker’s ball, according to people trying to save it.
That would leave the centre of Regina without a single reminder of the strip of more than a dozen elevators that once rose proudly through the heart of the capital of the wheat province.
A group of Regina and Saskatchewan heritage groups, along with the Regina Exhibition Association and United Grain Growers, the owner of the building, cobbled together a scheme that would have moved the elevator about two kilometres down the train tracks to the city’s exhibition grounds. They planned to set it up as a working display. But the group failed to get a tax break from the federal government.
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According to Regina city councillor Bill Hutchinson, failing to get the tax break has collapsed the first effort.
“They see no other way to do it,” said Hutchinson about the heritage organizations and UGG. “They have come to the logical end of that road.”
Into the breach has stepped Regina resident and journalist Colleen Slater-Smith. She says if she can raise $200,000 by May 1, the elevator can be saved.
That’s what it will cost to move the elevator from the downtown core to the exhibition grounds, she said.
The elevator, built in 1906, was originally owned by the Regina Farmers Co-operative. It was rebuilt after the Regina cyclone and used as a mustard-cleaning facility until 1994. It is one of six pre-First World War elevators left in Saskatchewan.
