Ernest Fiset's Saskatchewan Barn
Another chapter in the story I'm writing about my great-grandfather, Ernest Fiset.
“Hi Karen. Have you been to Wood Mountain lately? [We] are in Swift Current right now and were thinking of going to LaFleche and Wood Mountain tomorrow to see Grandpa Fiset’s barn. I don’t want to go to Wood Mountain if the barn is no longer standing.”[1]
The Facebook message popped up on my phone screen in August 2020, a message from my mom’s cousin, Charmagne. We had made the journey to Wood Mountain the year before, so directions to find the barn were fresh in my mind and I sent a quick reply. Over the years, though, the theme has been the same: going to see a glimpse of Great-Grandpa’s barn is a pilgrimage for his BC descendants who make the long road trip east. The barn seems almost a part of the family.
Barns were at the hub of farm life, “the first place the farmer went in the morning, the last place he went before bed.”[2] Folk in southern Saskatchewan used to joke that driving around the countryside you could tell whether it was the husband or wife who wielded the most power in the family simply by comparing the size of the house to the barn. One resident recalled, “If they had a big barn and a small house, the man was the boss, and if you had a big house and a small barn, the woman was the boss!”[3] On the Ernest Fiset homestead, the big barn would have dwarfed their small, one-storey square house.
Building the barn was a huge endeavour. First, Ernest chose a large flat area not far from the house. He cleared the area, then had a large concrete pad poured. Ernest’s dreams of breeding and training horses required a large space for horses and to store the hay through the winter. He brought the lumber from about forty miles away and painted all the boards by hand to protect the wood from the fierce prairie winds, beating sun, and freezing snow.[4] But there was a bit of aesthetics to it as well. The barn was red “Yeah, and the corners and around the windows was white,” Ernest proudly explained.”[5] It was a twelve-horse barn, one that acted as a way finder to the homestead and a signal of Ernest’s success and ambitions. Not only did Ernest have ideas, but he was willing to work hard to make them happen.
In a 1982 interview, my mom Beverly asked, "Did somebody help you do it?"
Grandpa replied, "Oh yes, oh I couldn’t have built a barn like that by myself. I had money at that time! And it cost me… I don't know how much. I wanted a biggest barn."
He had a team of work horses, the key to his livelihood, as well as his riding horse and the horses he bred and trained. Morning and evening, Ernest would go to the barn to feed the cows and horses hay and grain. Horses were groomed, hooves checked, tack cleaned and hung, ready to fit the next morning for work.[6]
And so, 1926 was a good year for thirty-year-old Ernest: he enjoyed a healthy bank balance, marriage to Deveta Collins in February, the birth of his first child, Floyd, in September, and the building of a large barn that has stood the test of time.
The grand old gambrel barn was bought and moved in the 1970s to its present location on the edge of Wood Mountain and now it is weatherbeaten and has a dark green metal roof. Ernest explained, “They moved it to Wood Mountain. I don't know how much it cost them it was too wide to go on the road, they had to go on the field. Of course they moved it in the fall when the crop was off. But they had to fix a fence that they tear.”
Building a barn like this was the action of a man with a vision, with plans to stay and accomplish his goals. Instead, within five years, Ernest would lose his farm, and for the next decade be forced to eke out a living a variety of jobs to provide for his young family. His plans were a casualty of his ambition, alongside the drought and crop failures that accompanied the Great Depression, impacting him and all his neighbours.
Sources:
[1] Charmagne Fiset Klassen to author, 15 August 2020, via Facebook Messenger.
[2] Kristin Catherwood, “Every Place Had a Barn”: The Barn as a Symbol of the Family Farm in Southern Saskatchewan (MA thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2015), 4.
[3] Catherwood, “Every Place Had a Barn,” 64, quoting interview with Stafford McGrath, November 25, 2013.
[4] Floyd Fiset to Beverly Honeyman Inkster, August 1982, Lumby, BC.
[5] Ernest Fiset interview by Beverly Honeyman Inkster, August 1982, Lumby, BC.
[6] Catherwood, “Every Place Had a Barn,” 62.
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