The old stumping grounds

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/09/2015 (3762 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A famous local landmark is being saved from demolition, but it’s going to lose its home of half a century.

Got you stumped?

It’s the giant stump. Every small community has its giant road statue, but this statue belonged to everyone.

The giant stump was built by the province in the 1960s as a pedestal for a Smokey the Bear statue, along the proposed route for the Trans-Canada Highway east of Winnipeg, which was being twinned at the time. The forests there had been destroyed by a raging fire in 1955, and the replanted trees were still mere saplings.

Two summer hires built the giant stump, which is more than three metres across and about stomach-high on an average adult. It’s made of concrete and perhaps some fibreglass composite for its exterior bark.

But then engineers changed their plans and built the Trans-Canada about 100 metres farther north. The province abandoned its plans to erect Smokey the Bear and just left the stump in the bush.

There’s an old logging trail to the giant stump. People have been visiting the stump for picnics, to show visitors, or just as a meeting place — a sort of Timothy Eaton statue of the woods — for half a century. It’s also a popular geocache site.

But earlier this year, Manitoba Infrastructure and Transportation gave permission to a local contractor, Chabot Construction, to quarry sand and gravel from beneath the giant stump. The department wants the gravel to fill in the highway shoulder along the Trans-Canada so the speed limit can be raised to 110 kilometres per hour. The pit the contractor planned to quarry had become flooded, so the province awarded the site with the giant stump.

“It’s a hidden gem,” said Glenn Peterson, co-ordinator with the Manitoba Forestry Association, of the stump. “The guy who issued the permit might not have known about the stump.”

Peterson, who is in charge of the forestry association’s Sandilands Forest Discovery Centre, petitioned the province to save the giant stump. Negotiations ensued and the province agreed to move the landmark to the Sandilands Forest Discovery Centre, about 35 kilometres down the highway. It’s already been removed from its site and is lying off to the side.

That’s not such a pleasing outcome to many people. Jenny Dupas, regional co-ordinator with the Eastman Tourism Association, said much of the fun was just going out and trying to find the monument. “Now it will be in an obvious place.”

The stump’s home was east of Richer where forest starts to flank the Trans-Canada Highway.

“It has a whimsy to it, you know what I mean?” Dupas said. The stump, she said, was not only an ideal picnic spot but “big enough for whole families to sit on.”

“Everybody has a different story about it, speculating what it was and why it was there. Initially, some people thought it was real.”

Another visitor likened it to “a shrine.”

“It really upset us seeing the clear cut (the forest around the giant stump has been levelled),” said Lori Monastyrski, in an email.

“It is not a construction area, more like a destruction, with little regard tothe few things left to enjoy that don’t cost us to visit.Destroy a landmark to make a gravel pit. Everyone enjoys one of those.”

Dupas hopes the province can still be persuaded to change its mind. “I think (the giant stump) should stay where it is,” or be moved over but remain in the bush.

It may be too late. The province has told Peterson the stump is to be moved on a flat-bed truck this week. The stump will become part of the outdoor collection being amassed by Sandilands Forest Discovery Centre, which includes old logging equipment and the replica fire tower that used to be at the tourism centre at The Forks. The centre is at the end of Highway 11, about half a kilometre south of the Trans-Canada.

bill.redekop@freepress.mb.ca