ELK POINT – Fifty years ago, at a public meeting on Sept. 4, 1975 at F. G. Miller High School, a resolution was passed to pursue the goal of forming a Historical or Heritage Association or Society.
On Oct. 14 of that year, according to Sid Holthe, who would become the group’s chairman, “it was definitely decided that we would form a society,” and with 70 years of settlement already behind them, it was agreed that a history book “should become an established fact immediately, we will have lost our resource people who were actually alive in the pioneer era.”
The original directors of the Elk Point Historical Society who oversaw the creation of Reflections were Myrna Fedorus, Anna Mae Warren, Paul Stepa, Martin Aarbo, Sherry Milholland, Lawrence Modin, Ila Borowsky, Lawrence Sumpton, Sid Holthe and Mabel Dumont, of whom only Fedorus and Milholland remain.
Over the five decades that followed, those directors and a series of dedicated volunteers who followed in their tracks have accomplished an endless series of projects that have preserved our community’s past from the fur trade days of the 1790s to the current time and continue to dig deeper into the past to make sure no part of the history of Elk Point and surrounding areas is forgotten.
The newly formed Elk Point Historical Society, led by Sid Holthe, started off their quest with the massive task of creating ‘Reflections – A History of Elk Point and District’ that was published in 1977 after months of research, writing, editing and searching for grants and donations, with Mary Bennett as its editor.
The result was so well received by the community that work immediately started on a supplement to Reflections, which was published just a year later.
The pair of history books was only a beginning to the society’s ways of keeping history alive, although no additional books went to print for more than two decades, with a new group of members at that time including Marvin Bjornstad, who started the new lineup of publications with Steve Andrishak’s ‘Our Past’ columns that for years were printed in the Elk Point Review being preserved in book form, and Gabe Heffernan’s ‘Echoes from WW1’. Another 11 books have been published in the last 25 years.
History, however, was far from taking a back seat, with the society commissioning the creation of the 100-foot historical mural by Billie Milholland to mark the 80th anniversary of settlement in 1987, followed by the celebration of the Bicentennial of Fort George and Buckingham House in 1992, with the forts’ interpretive centre opened that spring, and the creation of the Friends of the Forts society as another branch of history preservation.
Another big change came six years later with the creation of the Historical Society’s first website, elkpointhistory.ca, which has grown substantially ever since.
Minor projects such as calendars, fur trade rendezvous events and signage on the deck at the river park also occurred over the years, but more recently, two large projects got underway with Ray Hellquist and Amy Bullock taking on the One Room School Project, with maps of northeast Alberta school districts, school registers, school board files, photos and more. Meanwhile, Bjornstad embarked on a community records projects, creating searchable PDFs of minutes of organizations. He has also been scanning 1,912 history books for use in research.
