Exploring Beausejour's Pioneer Village!

Hello!

I’m pretending to sell tickets to Andrew at the Beausejour train station.

For once, I am writing and posting on the actual day that I did the thing. Yes really. Today, Saturday, August 10th, 2024, Andrew and I went to Beausejour to visit the Pioneer Village Museum, which is also called the Broken Beau Museum, because it’s in the Rural Municipality of Brokenhead, and operated by the Broken Beau Historical Society.

I rather like the name they’ve come up with. I think Broken Beau is a lot better than Pioneer Village because that could be anywhere. But I think most Manitobans who see “Broken Beau” will think “Beausejour in the RM of Brokenhead” — I like the alliteration, uniqueness, and its catchy, macabre quality.

The place was a-buzz with volunteer activity, as they prepare for their Annual Heritage Day tomorrow, Sunday, August 11th, 2024. You should go! We could see them preparing the snack booth, setting up tents, a stage for entertainment, a dance floor, and what looks like a log-cutting contest. They were shining up implements and raking up gravel. The doors to everything were wide open and inviting, so we started exploring!

Looking at the village from the upstairs window of the log house.

Stepping into the teacher’s cottage, we found this interesting artefact:

It’s a notice announcing a referendum to determine which school divisions should be established! This was when Hanover School Division was born! It’s listed as number 15 on the list with a Mr. J.K. Schellenberg, Box 1234 (lol sounds fake but okay) of Steinbach, Manitoba as a returning officer who would then take the vote on trustees if the school division were established. (Which obviously it was.)

We had fun exploring the different buildings. It was neat to observe that many of these were moved here from their original locations in Beausejour. So instead of tearing down old buildings, they were moved to the museum grounds.

I don’t know if I should write this here but I guess you’re used to a certain level of unprofessionalism and carelessness from me, so I’ll just say that when I explored the upstairs of this general store — and realized Andrew declined to follow me up the stairs and had in fact left me alone in the building, because he wasn’t sure we were allowed to go up there — and in hindsight seems like he was right — and I was looking into each of the maze of rooms and tiny secret doors (the kind old buildings always tend to have), I did get the creeps. Big time. Which I guess is exactly why some people like looking at old stuff — the creepy factor. So, that’s that:

Are the curtains on those upstairs windows hiding secrets?

Moving along to the Holy Trinity Ukrainian Church and its lovely interior:

And back out onto the village street once more…

We were then found by one of the volunteers, who wanted to make sure we wouldn’t miss out on some of the neat things people would get to see tomorrow for Heritage Day…

Here he is chatting with Andrew while I hang back to take a secret picture.

Like this car! I think it’ll look swell in the sunlight tomorrow.

Reminds me of the Steinbach Rolls Royce in front of Superstore. Maybe that’s an ignorant comment. (I’m not really a car-person, so)

And then, Ed Schreyer’s house!

Feels like this was the original location of the Schreyer home, and the museum grew up around it!

Confession: I did not know who Ed Schreyer was until I heard him speak at the MHV’s spring fundraising gala earlier this year. (He was the 22nd Governor General of Canada!) He said some terrific things about Steinbach and museums… I did not realize he was so closely associated with the museum in his hometown of Beausejour. I did not realize he was FROM Beausejour, either.

There was a lot of Ed Schreyer memorabilia inside the house. It was like a time capsule. Pretty atmospheric.

Inside the house, I had my first look at the Mennonite stamp from 1974 honouring the centenary of Mennonite settlement in Manitoba!

(Andrew tells me this can also be seen in the new exhibit at the Mennonite Heritage Village which I have not yet seen, because it opened last weekend for but it was Pioneer Days and I was selling candy and making waffles and walking in the commemorative Red River cart walk but I should save all that for a different post.)

And thus concluded our quick little visit to the Broken Beau Pioneer Village in Beausejour! I strongly recommend you visit tomorrow for their Heritage Day. You can find details on their Facebook page.

As we were walking back to our car we passed a lot of vintage vehicles, including this ambulance that looks like the Ghostbusters car: