Aleshia Besplug wants Premier Roy Romanow to declare Saskatchewan’s wooden elevators heritage sites. Aleshia is the 11-year-old girl I wrote about several weeks ago after she sent a letter to the premier about the destruction of the province’s wooden elevators.
In a recent reply, Romanow said “your government shares your concern” about the effect of elevator closings on Saskatchewan’s rural communities.
The elimination of the Crow Benefit, rail-line abandonment and the closing of small elevators in favor of large, high-volume grain terminals “are posing a great challenge to rural Saskatchewan” the letter continued.
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“All North America is experiencing these problems.”
Aleshia told me last week that she has invited the premier to meet with her and her classmates to discuss making the elevators into heritage sites. She hopes the premier will travel to Kindersley, where she goes to school to meet with the class.
The premier was not the only one to write to Aleshia. She received many letters from others. An Alberta man sent her a fridge magnet made out of elevator wood worn into grooves by years of contact with prairie grain. Another sent her 100 pre-stamped envelopes.
A Saskatchewan woman wrote to say that more people should stand up for what they believe in. “I am sure,” she wrote, “that nobody will journey across Canada to see those concrete structures.”
A Saskatchewan farmer told her of trucking grain to a terminal 40 miles away where he sat in a lineup with 12 trucks ahead of him and 12 behind and waited two and a half hours to unload. “We did not gain anything with these Big Concrete Monstrosities,” he said.
Aleshia’s mother, Laurie, is also passionate about grain elevators. She supports her daughter in her efforts and echoes her sentiments, saying “We’re watching our history and our livelihoods being torched. There is so much family and community history going down with those elevators.”
Last week, I travelled to the nearby community of Lacadena where, for two days, I watched the tearing down of the Pioneer elevator which has been a feature of the landscape there for 72 years.
I didn’t go back a third time to see the final blows which felled the elevator.
I didn’t feel that I could see another elevator fall. Besides, I had to be home in Eston where they were tearing down our former elementary school. But that’s another story.
