Historian Maps the Forgotten Places of Manitoba

The older you get, the more interested in history you become. Manitoba Historical Society (MHS) Head Researcher Gordon Goldsborough and interviewer Dave Bennet agree on that right off the bat. By profession, Goldsborough is a professor of biology at the University of Manitoba, specialising in wetland ecology, but he’s found his other passion in hunting down and researching the history of Manitoba.

The MHS was founded in 1879, just nine years after Manitoba entered Confederation, and many of the earliest documents and artifacts it collected have been donated to places such as the Manitoba legislative archives and the Manitoba Museum. Today the organisation publishes a magazine called Prairie History (formerly Manitoba History) three times a year, and maintains an extensive website of thousands of pages documenting the history of the province.

Today’s trip out to the Neepawa area brought up several interesting bits of history that Goldsborough has dug up or is still hunting down. Several years ago local historial Allan Drysdale passed on some limited information about the location of the original Florence School, which Goldsborough is still seeking signs of. As well, Brookdale, which is about ten miles southwest of Neepawa, was the location of what is believed to be the last flat warehouse on the Prairies. Flat warehouses were used for grain storage before the advent of the grain elevator. It was recently moved to the site of the Manitoba Agricultural Museum to be restored.

War memorials are another area of interest for the MHS. Neepawa’s memorial celebrated its centennial this month, and Goldsborough was able to direct us to an MHS page listing not only the full name of everyone on the memorial, which shows only initials, but also their dates of birth and death, unit and rank, and occupation before enlisting. Additionally, he noted that one of the names on the memorial had been placed there by mistake and the gentleman in question actually passed away in Winnipeg in 1968. All of this research was conducted entirely by volunteers.

Goldsborough is probably best known for his radio series on CBC Radio One called “Abandoned Manitoba”, a weekly segment on the Weekend Morning Show he’s been doing for seven years, accumulating a whopping 352 episodes so far. When asked if he had enough to talk about for that many episodes, Goldsborough laughed and suggested he didn’t think he would ever run out of things to talk about when it came to the history of Manitoba.