GIMLI Heritage Cottages

11Then he tacked the cards to his bedroom wall at the family cottage in Gimli.If that was at home in Winnipeg, those Beatle bubble gum cards would have been gone eons ago. Because it's the cottage, they're still up on the wall 45 years later.

Cottages seem to accumulate history like dust. Now, the province's historic resources branch has taken notice.

With some cottages approaching the century mark or more, there's a movement to change how we think about those old places. A heritage committee has started compiling an inventory of heritage cottages along the west side of Lake Winnipeg, starting with Gimli. It has also organized an open house of historic cottages in Gimli for July 11.

The province appreciates its work.

"People forget in Manitoba, cottage life is important," said David Butterfield, the province's architectural historian who co-authored with wife Maureen the book, If Walls Could Talk: Manitoba's Best Buildings Explored and Explained.

"It's a whole aspect to our recreational heritage that we would like to explore with communities like Gimli," Butterfield said.

That hasn't been the cottage way. In most parts of Manitoba, old cottages aren't called heritage buildings. They're called tear-downs. They're waiting for the owner, or the next owner, to bulldoze the joint and put up a modern 1,400-square-foot winterized home.

But that's not for everyone. Documentary filmmaker Andy Blicq, who is part of the Gimli heritage committee, is one of those smitten with the older cottages.

He and wife Cindy purchased their Gimli cottage in 1997 and people just assumed they would tear it down and start again. The cottage was built in 1918 and "was in pretty rough shape," Andy said.

However, the Blicqs had other plans. "We just loved it and wanted to restore it," he said. (It figures. Blicq was the director behind the reality series classic, Pioneer Quest, where two couples spend a year in the Interlake trying to survive just like homesteaders a century ago.)

So, the couple sought the advice of Leo Kristjanson, who was part of a group that restored old buildings in Gimli before he died in 2005. He told the Blicqs that while the cottage needed work, it was structurally sound.

That launched a 10-year restoration project. The couple stripped down and refinished the Douglas fir floor, replaced the footings, removed the plywood from the walls and buffalo board from the ceiling and the rotted windows, and replaced them with materials salvaged from other cottages being demolished. They even used material from the former fish shack at Gimli Harbour.

"There's a bit of the town everywhere in the place," said Blicq.

The result is a humble, functional and well-preserved cottage.

It has an interesting, semi-circular layout. "With Andy's cottage, there is a centre core and then you can close doors throughout, sliding doors and multiple-folding doors, and thereby close off the core in inclement weather so you have less space to warm," Butterfield said.

It's not large, by any means. The original was about 500 square feet. That included the wraparound veranda. It's larger now with the addition of indoor plumbing but not by that much.

"That's what has changed so much (with newer cottages), is the space," Blicq said. New cottages are often three times the size of the old cottages that were built with hand tools, before electricity was widely available.

Blicq dug into the history of his cottage. It was originally owned by Stefan Thorson, one of Gimli's first mayors and the father of Charlie Thorson, the illustrator credited with creating Walt Disney's Snow White.

It was built by Hjalmar (that means "builder" in Icelandic) Thorsteinson, a well-known bachelor carpenter in the area a century ago, Blicq said. A woman who once lived in the cottage used to hand out candy to children who knocked on her door and showed her good grades on their report cards.

There are other heritage lovers. The streets of Gimli are a mixture of modernized four-season homes next to small shanties, some of which look like old fishermen's shacks. It's part of the character of the community.

Margaret Goodman Wolstencroft and her husband have an eight-bedroom house in Winnipeg. Their cottage? It's 600 square feet. It was built in 1914. She's the fourth generation in her family of Goodmans to own it.

"I just can't stand changing something that means so much to our family," she explained. "I thought about adding on to it, but I like it the way it is. It's what I grew up on."

The cottage was built by her great-grandfather, Carl Goodman, a Winnipeg tradesman, who built four Gimli cottages, all in the same design. Three are still standing.

It was built around a large, heavy oak table. That's no mistake. The table's hollowed-out pedestal was once the secret hiding place for the family's cash. "Icelanders never liked to use banks so they found other places to store their money," Wolstencroft explained.

The caragana hedge around the house is also almost a century old. Inside the hedge is a low, wire fence with wooden posts. "Caragana hedges with a wire fence, that's an Icelandic thing. And the caragana never dies," she said. One theory is the wire fences were built to keep out roaming cattle.

The musty smell of the aged wood -- solid Douglas fir imported from British Columbia a century ago -- is pronounced in John Whiteway's cottage. That's because the walls, except for in the kitchen, have never been painted. The exposed wood maintains its aroma and orange patina.

The Whiteway cottage was built around 1920. He still uses an icebox manufactured in 1931. Pots and pans hang from nails. There is an old wood stove and kerosene lanterns. (All three cottages visited had kerosene lanterns with kerosene still in them.) The main living area has a large linoleum square in the centre of the floor that looks like a laminated area rug.

"(The cottage) is kind of the family museum. I feel like the curator of the family museum," Whiteway said.

There are old pennants on the wall, and Icelandic Festival ribbons dating back to 1933. Like all three cottages visited, Whiteway's has exposed rafters. On one wall are oval portraitures of Whiteway's great-grandparents, who arrived from Devon, England, at the turn of the previous century. Whiteway's grandfather, a railway worker, built the cottage.

Winnipeg Beach was likely the first cottage development within Manitoba. The Canadian Pacific Rail line reached there first in 1903. Development at Grand Beach followed, when the Canadian Northern rail line arrived. CPR reached Gimli in 1906. Most Gimli cottages were built between the turn of the century and the 1940s.

The Gimli heritage committee has identified 33 heritage cottages in Gimli so far, and there are still more to visit. Committee chairman, Wally Johannson, a Winnipeg NDP MLA from 1969-77, hopes committee efforts will encourage other cottage communities to follow. He plans to continue making an inventory of heritage cottages for Sandy Hook, Winnipeg Beach, Whytewold and Matlock, too. Victoria Beach, with its vehicle ban, is another area rich in heritage cottages.

The heritage committee is also appealing to the public for help. It believes a kit or catalogue plan was used to build many of the Gimli-area cottages, likely from a lumber company. They have checked Eaton's and Aladdin kit plans but none of the building plans match those in Gimli.

"That's the missing piece of the history," Blicq said.

111"Whether you're talking about a stamp collection or a large architectural gem, it isn't about the object 100 per cent but the information and stories that go with it. That object's just a marker in time, whether it's a building or a stamp," Rick Lair, the committee's building structures expert, said.

A lot of the pressure on heritage buildings is that people want all-season cottages, Lair said. But some people have modified their cottages in such a way as to maintain the essence of their heritage. "That's really what we're looking to encourage."

Ultimately, the committee's goal isn't about forming committees or handing out medals to people who preserve older cottages or even designating heritage sites. It's about getting people to see that the cottage experience "is the whole package," Lair said.

"On the lake side of Loni Beach (on Gimli's northern edge), there's still a good smattering of older, original cottages. And so you take the cottages as an element on that landscape, and then you take the narrow little curving roads with no sidewalks and lots of big, mature trees and the tennis courts and the beach and the public right-of-ways and you get a nice ambience of an old, at-the-beach, at-the-cottage, warm, fuzzy feeling," Lair said.

"It evokes a sense of a time gone past, that remains. That's what really attracts people to that place."

Margaret Wolstencroft can identify with that.

"I came down here before I was born (in her mother's womb), and I have been coming here ever since. I don't know what I'd do in summer if I didn't have Gimli," she said.

No cottages have been designated heritage buildings yet and such a designation would be completely voluntary on the part of the owner. John Whiteway has already agreed to have his cottage designated a heritage building because he doesn't want it to ever be appreciably changed.

bill.redekop@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition June 14, 2009 B1