KAYVILLE, Sask. – A dozen vehicles travel down dirt roads that likely haven’t seen such traffic in years.
It must be an unusual sight for the cattle grazing in this rolling country that was once home to many people but isn’t anymore.
That is the point of the third annual ghost town convention. It began in Kayville, a once thriving community now home to five people.
As recently as the 1990s, Kayville had an indoor swimming pool, Co-op, school and credit union. All are closed.
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Three dozen people gathered in the seniors’ centre July 10 to begin a two-day 450 kilometre trip to places that used to be.
Abandoned towns like Crystal Hill, Galillee and Dummer are on the itinerary. Other stops are like Kayville – still inhabited but shadows of their former selves.
Mike Stobbs, the convention organizer, is a history buff who has spent years photographing rural Saskatchewan.
The idea of the tour is not to see ghosts, but to preserve history.
“Saskatchewan has a lot of history that’s not pushed over yet,” he said. “The stuff I photograph is going to be gone.”
Some of it is already gone.
Stobbs often doesn’t reveal where some of his photographs were taken because he doesn’t want to incite looting or damage.
The first tour included the Hallonquist and Neidpath area near Swift Current and the second was based in Ardath near Saskatoon.
Stobbs likes to base the event around what he calls a “crown jewel.”
This year, that was Frank Thompson’s on-farm museum at Readlyn and evening photography at the Claybank Brick Plant.
Next year, Stobbs plans to take participants to southeastern Saskatchewan.
The tours attract an interesting mix of history buffs and photographers.
Only two Saskatchewan residents attended last year and three the previous year. Everyone else came from Alberta.
But this year, the attendees ranged in age from 16 to 50-plus and were from every western province and Ontario, with about half from Saskatchewan.
Glenn Dean, a Canadian Forces captain and air traffic controller, travelled from Ottawa to attend.
He was posted at Fifteen Wing Moose Jaw from 2002 to 2007, where he rekindled an interest in grain elevators.
In 1982, the native of Nova Scotia spent time in Bengough through a high school exchange program. He was shocked when he returned to the province 20 years later.
He lived in Harptree, which no longer appears on most maps. It had three elevators and a fourth was under construction.
When he returned, all were gone and so was the farm where he was billeted.
“I thought if they could tear down an elevator that was so modern, what else are they going to tear down,” Dean said.
Since then, he has travelled extensively in search of grain elevator photographs. He has been to about 600 sites in Canada and 700 in the United States.
“It’s an obsession,” he said. “At first it was just something to do but now I think of it as preserving history.”
Both Dean and Stobbs post their photographs in on-line galleries and hope they can one day convince a museum to accept them.
Stobbs said he would like to turn his over to provincial archives after making copies for his children.
