Last summer I found a dilapidated farm house while biking.
Not surprising. I find lots of abandoned farm yards, houses, and occasionally churches, and even one-room school houses while biking. This is a fact of gravel-biking* through farmlands of homestead properties. The advancement of mechanized farm technology means fewer people needed to do farm work. Thus fewer people need to live in farm lands. Thus numerous abandoned structures averaging 100 years old.
Unlike the travel destination bike trips, this farm house was within biking distance from my town of Fort Qu’Appelle.
My biking partner Paul** and I have passed by this spot once or twice. We missed this house both times because we biked by it coming from the south, where a large tree patch kept it well hidden. But last summer I went on a solo ride and came from the North. I discovered, if you’re watching closely, you will catch a glimpse of the roof for about 3 seconds at bike cruise speed
Not surprising, this house was on land filled with sloughs***. The farmlands surrounding Fort Qu’Appelle are chock full of sloughs, due to prehistoric glacier melt that created the valley I live in.
Slough-filled farmland is tough land to farm. With less yield and more obstacles than the farmland on the flat open prairies.
People that lived and farmed the slough-filled lands were poor. Paul, who grew up farming and currently co-manages his parent’s farm, taught me this while explaining the soil quality of slough areas versus fertile open areas near creek runoffs.
Makes sense. We have always found abandoned stone mansions and similar large fancy houses in the Pheasant Creek area. But in the slough farmlands, only wooden built, one-room shacks remain, if anything is still standing.
100-140 years ago, these farmers were homesteaders. Meaning, the Canadian government gave them a free quarter section of land in hopes of building up the Canadian population across the Midwest****.
I often wondered if the homesteaders on the slough-filled lands just lost the homesteading lotto. Congratulations. You get crappy land that will make you work twice as hard for little or nothing.
This house I found not far from town was a tiny two-story. A proud home for someone in these parts. As expected, the house was nearly disintegrated by time, nature, and neglect. I’ve visited dozens of these.
But one upstairs room hinted at the humanity that once dwelled here.
Ragged scraps of wallpaper clung to the wall of one of the two upstairs rooms. This wallpaper had cartoonish images of cowboys on it. Sweet and innocent cowboys. The kind of cowboys that would have decorated a little boy’s room.
I wondered who lived there.
I wonder who the descendants are.
I wondered how likely it was that I’ve walked among these descendants on the streets of Fort Qu’Appelle.