Johnnie Bachusky of Red Deer, writer, photographer and mourner for a host of ghost towns, has launched a new website called Noble Ghosts. In it, he journeys from one Western Canadian ghost town to another while plaintive music sounds a requiem for faded hopes and dreams. I know Johnnie. We have been fellow researchers in decayed villages and abandoned cemeteries. I share his sense of history.
For 60 years, settlement in Western Canada was the engine which drove the Canadian economy. The peak of the homesteading era came before the First World War, when a spreading network of railway branches spawned scores of small communities which gobbled up building materials at a headlong rate. Settlers in Saskatchewan made use of hardware, paints and floor coverings from the East, Portland cement from Alberta, lumber from B. C. and bricks from Medicine Hat and Claybank. This is only a sampling of what new settlers needed in building homes, churches, schools and business and institutional structures.
One of the saddest sights seen through the lens of Johnnie Bachusky's camera is the tumbled remains of a church at Laura, Saskatchewan. More than melancholy at the passing of an era, it heralds what might well be the eventual de-Christianization of Canada.
All the lifeless old buildings share in a greater use of organic materials than do the new structures of the present day. For example both interior and exterior sheathing of the un-insulated walls was usually made from unplaned cedar boards, wide and knot-free, the bounty of a rapacious harvest of first-growth forests in British Columbia. (During the Dirty Thirties, railway ties were still rectangular hunks of unblemished cedar, rather than the rough, creosoted timbers which appeared just before the Second World War.)
Flooring was narrow tongue-and-groove boards of fir or maple. Canvas-backed linoleum was made from flax. Glues were organic, produced mostly from the carcasses of horses. About the only toxic substances in the old houses were lead and arsenic. Lead was used in paints and for water pipes. Arsenical compounds were most often found in wallpapers used in the oldest of the houses.
After the Second World War, a witches' brew of chemicals invaded the construction industry. Traditional angled shiplap sheathing was replaced by various kinds of composition boards. Lath and plaster interiors gave way to gypsum board.
Canvas-backed linoleum was replaced by non-organic floor coverings. Wood chip insulation was replaced by fibreglass and rigid foam panels. The common denominator in all of this has been non-organic adhesives and bonding agents, some of which have proved to be highly toxic and have contaminated ground water.
Not only has the construction industry been responsible for environmental pollution, it has been instrumental in bringing about forms of both financial and societal pollution. We are building larger houses for smaller families, and effectively shutting low income families out of the housing market.
In the homesteading era, banks were prohibited from dealing in mortgages. Settlers built what they could afford, whether it was a business building thrown up overnight to get ahead of a threatening competitor, a graceful "catalogue house" or a grotesque creation of its owner's own devising. What was common to the industry as a whole was the avoidance of a heavy burden of ruinous, long-term debt.
In 2011, the whole Western world is in a financial crisis and governments are being destabilized by a virus which began with the deregulation of banks in the USA and the bursting of the insane sub-prime mortgage bubble. Some ghost towns south of the border are made up of handsome, untenanted houses, all of them almost new.
In the Canadian West, ghost towns generate feelings of nostalgia. In other places, the new ghost towns generate feelings of anger and unrest. We have something to learn from ghost towns, wherever they are.
