Little treasure on the Prairies Now a museum in the Dauphin area, the Negrych Homestead is a living snapshot in Manitoba history By: Gordon Goldsborough Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Friday, Oct. 19, 2018

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 18/10/2018 (2263 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The people who settled in Manitoba in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were tough, both physically and mentally. They had to be. They were driven by a desire to create a new life of freedom in Western Canada, and to make opportunities for their descendants.

Their homes provided few of the creature comforts that we take for granted today: primitive heating in winter using wood or coal, no cooling in summer, a toilet in a stinky and mosquito-filled outhouse in the yard, no hot and cold running water at the turn of a tap, no electrically-powered lights and appliances, no communication with the outside world at the lift of a handset, and certainly no big-screen television and internet access.

We assume that these wonderful conveniences came about gradually through the 20th century so, by the 1980s, most Manitobans lived a life of ease compared to their parents and grandparents. Therefore, it is curious to think that, as recently as 1990 in a relatively developed part of the province, some people eschewed a life of comfort to live essentially as their forebears had done.

This is the story of a remarkable site that is considered by heritage advocates to be the most complete and best-preserved pioneer homestead in Canada, and possibly all of North America. I am referring to the Negrych Homestead, located about 40 kilometres by road northwest of Dauphin or 20 kilometres northeast of Gilbert Plains. Operated today as a community museum, I tried several times over a period of years to visit it, always arriving when it was closed, until I finally managed to get there in the spring of 2017. I must say that it was one of the most moving experiences I have had during my decade on the road in search of historic places. Walking into the site seemed as though I had used a time-machine to jump back over a century, to see a log house almost exactly as it would have appeared when it was built in 1899.

In 1897, Wasyl (Basil or William in English) and Anna Negrych, accompanied by their seven children ranging in age from nine months to 19 years, left their home in the highlands of western Ukraine and boarded a sailing ship in the German port of Hamburg, bound for Quebec City. The trip was gruelling and at least two of the 788 passengers died in transit.

On arriving in Canada, the Negrychs travelled by train to Winnipeg then, after a brief stay, continued on to Dauphin, where 53-year-old Wasyl bought a quarter-section of land for $10. Thirty-three-year-old Anna and the younger children stayed in an immigration shed at Dauphin while Wasyl and the older children investigated their new homestead. Wasyl and his brothers Anton and Jan, and his cousin Iwan, had purchased the four quarter-sections of one square mile. Unlike settlers who typically built homes near the outer edge of their land, near a “road allowance,” the Negrychs built on the inner corners of their quarter-sections, along an old “colonization trail” that ran southeast-northwest through the property. The families created, in effect, a small Ukrainian village for themselves.

Initially, the families built “buddas,” temporary A-frame structures made of locally sourced poplar poles covered in cowhides bought in Dauphin. In 1899, after his initial home was destroyed in a massive prairie fire that swept through the region, Wasyl Negrych built another one, in a style typical of ones in the Carpathian mountains of eastern Europe. It still stands today. The 15-foot by 35-foot structure is made almost entirely of wood with minimal metal hardware. Its walls are squared tamarack logs covered inside and outside, along with the interior ceiling, with homemade mud-plaster — made by mixing clay, straw, cow manure, and water — made strikingly white by adding laundry bluing to the wetmixture prior to application.

Unlike some such buildings, where the roof would be covered in thatching, the home’s roof was covered with wood shingles. Following a floorplan popular in their Ukrainian homeland, the Negrych home had three rooms, all with wooden floors. The main entrance led into a central room that served as a kitchen, with an iron cook-stove, shelves, and a washstand. Beneath the kitchen was a root cellar excavated into the ground for storing vegetables through the winter. A small room off one side of the kitchen was used as a pantry. The largest room to the other side was a combined bedroom and sitting room containing “two iron beds, a rocking chair, extension dining room table, a treadle sewing machine, a small box heater and a coal oil lamp.”

In their new home in Canada, the Negrychs had five more children, bringing their family to 12 children: six girls and six boys. They also built several other buildings on the site, including an earthen-floored bunkhouse (built in 1908 for the boys), cow barn, pigpen, chicken coop, three granaries (1898, 1908, 1940), and an icehouse, all made of logs. Inside the bunkhouse was a peech, a log-and-clay stove used for summer cooking. It also heated the bunkhouse in winter and provided smoke to cure meats in a lean-to beside the building. Surrounding the buildings was a vegetable, berry, and herb garden, an orchard (with plums, sour cherries, and six varieties of apples) enclosed with wooden rail fences, and small fields cut from the surrounding forest where the Negrychs grew grain and feed for their chickens, pigs, and cattle.

Wasyl Negrych died in February 1927, at the age of 83, and was buried in a little Ukrainian Orthodox cemetery a kilometre-and-a-half northwest of his home. Anna Negrych continued on until March 1944, when she joined her husband in the nearby cemetery. The youngest of their six daughters, Annie, born in 1907 and never married, continued to live in the original house into her 80s. Throughout her long life, Annie never had the house wired for electricity or a telephone. Lighting was provided by kerosene lamps, as they had years earlier, and heat was provided by a stove fuelled by wood. There was no running water. Instead, Annie would dip a bucket in the Drifting River that flowed about 30 metres away from her house. However, she did not lack for company. In 1968, her brother Stephen returned to the homestead to join her and their older brother Wasyl.

Born in 1903, Stephen Negrych had attended Wesley College in Winnipeg, then over the next 38 years until retirement, he was a teacher at a series of 10 one-room schools. Like he had done as a child, the old bachelor slept in a bunkhouse a few metres away from the main residence.

In 1983, Wasyl became ill and was moved to a personal-care home in Dauphin, where he died on Dec. 17, 1986. At that time, most of the farm machinery, animals, and building contents were sold at auction. With Bimbo, a small dog of indeterminate breeding, the two surviving Negrychs continued to live “off the grid” as their ancestors had done for generations, performing light chores during the day and reading in the evening by the light of a coal oil lamp. Occasionally, Stephen played his violin. Annie made meals on the old cookstove, fired by wood cut by Stephen in the surrounding forests.

Finally, in the spring of 1988, Annie Negrych moved into a seniors home in Gilbert Plains and she died there on Dec. 16, 1988. Stephen Negrych lived at the homestead until October 1990 when he moved into Dauphin. When he died at the Dauphin Hospital on June 23, 1992, he was the last of the pioneer Negrychs. He was buried in the same cemetery as his parents, along with Annie and many other members of his extended family.

The Negrych farm buildings, largely unaltered from their original appearance, survived far longer than most other pioneer farmsteads that were usually torn down when they were replaced by modern amenities.

Late in his life, Stephen Negrych is said to have hoped the homestead that his parents built would be preserved for its historical significance in commemoration of his parents’ pioneer spirit. In 1991, the local Lions Club began developing plans before he died. Initially, that would have entailed relocating the buildings to the Selo Ukraina Museum south of Dauphin, home of the National Ukrainian Festival. However, that would have destroyed the context for the buildings — the fact that each building sits in the same spot as when it was first built — which is their most unique feature. The move never happened and, instead, the Gilbert Plains and District Historical Society stepped forward with a commitment to protect and preserve the buildings where they stood. Consequently, the 120-year-old Negrych Homestead is the oldest-known Ukrainian-Canadian dwelling in Manitoba on its original site.

The Negrych Homestead began opening for public visits in 1994 and work continued through the 1990s with the refurbishing of old buildings and the construction of a few modern replacements, such as a piggery and an icehouse. Owned by the Municipality of Gilbert Plains, and leased to the Gilbert Plains and District Historical Society, it was designated as a provincial historic site in 1992, and as a national historic site in November 1996 (although the federal designation ceremony did not take place until August 2004). If you are interested in seeing this truly remarkable site, the Negrych Homestead is open daily in July and August, Tuesdays to Saturdays, from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., or at other times by appointment. When you arrive at the site, be reminded that it is almost kilometre from the nearest public road along a twisting, tree-encroached driveway. There are no flush toilets and cellphone reception is spotty. But I can think of no better place to imagine you have been transported back a century and experience the fortitude with which hardy Ukrainian settlers set down roots in this region of Manitoba.