FLEMING, Sask. – Doreen Banks’ home town doesn’t look the same anymore.
The 86-year-old had never known a time when Saskatchewan’s oldest existing grain elevator hadn’t dominated the skyline.
That all changed in the early morning of Feb. 9 when the 115-year-old prairie landmark burned to the ground.
Mayor Philip Hamm said the fire burned a big hole in this community of 75 residents.
“A lot of buildings have gone, but that was one big building in town that had stayed,” he said.
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“It was just like a Roman candle at 4:20 a.m. It lit up everything around. By 6:30 it was pretty well toast, pardon the pun.”
Firefighters focused much of their attention on the historic Windsor Hotel, built around 1890 across the road and south of the elevator.
“It was so hot that the fireman just touched the hotel and you couldn’t keep your hand on it,” Hamm said.
“They sprayed it down to cool it down.”
Hotel owner Fenton Martens was sleeping upstairs when the phone call came to get out.
“I ran downstairs and out the front door, but it was too hot so I ended up going out the back door. It was crazy. I was scared.”
Martens has childhood memories of delivering grain to the old elevator with his father around 1970.
The Fleming elevator received more than its 15 minutes of fame when it was featured on the back of Canada’s one dollar bill in the early 1950s.
The hotel can be seen on the dollar bill with help from a magnifying glass.
The elevator was owned by Fleming and the Fleming Historical Preservation Society, which was nearing the first phase of its restoration as a historical site. It was scheduled to open this summer.
The elevator was built in 1895 and owned by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company Ltd. It was originally used for buying and storing milling grain. Two horses on a turn belt initially powered the leg.
Agricore United operated the elevator until 1999, when it was slated for demolition in 2000. Residents formed the preservation society and saved the elevator with help from Agricore United and Canadian Pacific Railway.
“We knew it was old,” Hamm said.
“The style of it was different than any other elevator around, but we didn’t realize how significant it was, or how old it was.”
He said the provincial government’s heritage branch told the community that its elevator was not only the oldest in the province but possibly the oldest in Canada.
It was square shaped with a unique hip roof, built in one of the experimental stages of grain elevator development and long before the standard slope shouldered design became popular.
Hamm said events had been held since 2003 to raise money for the elevator’s cleanup and restoration.
RCMP are treating the fire as suspicious.
Hamm said the building had no electricity or source of heat.
“There was a set of footsteps leading from the highway into the elevator and back out.”
Hamm said he saw a lot of grief on the faces of residents who gathered to watch the smoldering ruins.
“People saying, ‘why would something like this happen?’ We were getting so close to having this open and all the potential that we saw. The community had a lot of pride on it.”
