Lower Fort Garry one of top 10 historic sites

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This article was published 08/02/2011 (5657 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

High praise for the lower fort: A Manitoba site can now brag it’s one of the top historic spots in the country.

Canada’s History magazine officially named Lower Fort Garry to its list of Canada’s top 10 national historic sites today. The sturdy old fur-trade fort, located about 20 kilometres north of Winnipeg, got the nod for its busy slate of activities, according to the magazine’s senior editor.

“Initially, I thought, ‘Lower Fort Garry?’ because I live here,” chuckled Nelle Oosterom on Monday afternoon. “But I realized that Lower Fort Garry has really amazing programming, more than I had expected… It’s a historical site that’s held a lot of different stories from different times in Rupertsland’s history. There’s a lot going on there.”

They have to keep things fresh for the 40,000 or so visitors who flock to the site each year. Organizers try to have something new and different each day, said Lower Fort Garry visitor experience manager Ken Green, whether that means getting school kids to do some fur-trade “work” or holding tours focused on china patterns of the 19th century or the architecture of the buildings that have stood at the site for 180 years.

“Authenticity (is) one of the key things we have here,” Green said of the site, which is believed to be the country’s oldest standing fur-trade fort.

“We have visual records, sketches, photographs that date right back to the 1840s. We have almost 50 years of research on the buildings that exist, on the artifacts and people associated with the site. We are extremely fortunate that we have such an extensive pool of resources to draw from.”

The fort folks are in good company on the list. Among the other sites chosen from approximately 140 managed by Parks Canada are a haunting Haida village in B.C., the site of Louis Riel’s last stand in Batoche, Sask., and the centuries-old fortress walls that still stand in Quebec City.

The magazine called its list the “definitive bucket list” for Canadian tourism. It launched the project to celebrate Parks Canada’s centennial and Oosterom did most of the research. She was careful to balance the top 10 picks to represent history hot spots across Canada, as well as historic contributions by aboriginal and European communities.

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca