The Prince Albert Historical Society celebrated Archives Week by opening the vault and dusting off the shelves so members of the public could have an inside look at the Bill Smiley Archives on Friday.
Archives week from Feb. 2 to 8. On Friday, Historical Society member Fred Payton and archives volunteer Ken Guedo offered tours of the Archives in the Prince Albert Historical Museum’s basement, as well as a pair of presentations by Payton on his popular Museum Musings column in the Rural Roots edition of the Daily Herald. Payton discussed the origins of the column and took questions.
The talk had to be moved to another room in the basement because of the number of people who came for the tour.
“I have people come up to me and tell me or e-mail me or phone me and say ‘please don’t stop,’” Payton said.
“I’m going to start about talking about how it came to be, and then I’m going to move into why.”
Payton said the column in the Feb. 6 edition sprang from a conversation with the YWCA’s Donna Brooks during one of the city’s homeless shelter consultations. Brooks asked Payton if he was still involved with the Society and said she had a bunch of photos and yearbooks from her family.
“It just clicked with me, ‘you mean RD Brooks, Brooks Airways?’ (She said,) ‘yeah, that was my family.’ Researching RD Brooks, Donna reminds me of him—the tenacity (and) everything. It is just amazing how it’s come down through the generations.”
Payton’s column can deal with many subjects from families to buildings. He said it helped explore the interesting history of Prince Albert.
“It’s really funny because on Wednesday I got a phone call just at supper time from a fellow who’s almost 100 years old. I’ve known him all my life and he said ‘you don’t mention Brooks Motors in your column. Well, I didn’t know there was a Brooks Motors. He said,’ Oh yes’, and then he proceeded to give me all kinds of history that I didn’t have,” Payton said.
His process usually involves talking to someone or someone having a question for him to research, like with Brooks. Another example he gave was Joanne Fournier.
“Talking to Joanne Fournier in the parking lot up at the mall, she said, ‘oh, we live in the Ninth Street school. That was great. I mean, I’ve known Joanne for years. Her dad was my Supervisor at the penitentiary. Her husband I’ve known even longer than her. I used to supervise him at the penitentiary,” Payton said.
Then he journeys to the basement of the museum and the Bill Smiley Archives
“I started digging (into) The Hendersons, newspapers, photos, just (asking) ‘what do we have on these things?’ (Looking at) the booklets that we have on a history of schools in Prince Albert. That’s what I do. I get an idea and then I start digging and I and I turn to Ken and I say ‘do we have a picture? Do we have a file?’”
Then Guedo takes over the next step.
“Then I will look on the computer. Type in the name that Fred is looking for and. Yes, we have some pictures of this subject and yeah, we have some information on it in the archives. Go and dig it out,” Guedo said.
The tour also involved a discussion of the Bill Smiley Archive.
“Fred and I are going to be in here Fred’s going give his presentation and nd if anybody, comes and they come wandering in here and I’ll explain what we do and what all these things,” Guedo said.
“We may have to take people in the other room and talk to them there. That’s as far as I’m going walk,” Payton said.
Both Payton and Guedo said that they are so focused in the archives they are not even aware of what is happening with renovations on the second floor.
“There’s enough down here to keep busy,” Payton said.
Guedo, who is a longtime volunteer in the Archives, said that Archives Week is important for a couple of reasons.
“It’s like the old saying from Winston Churchill: ‘How do you know where you’re going if you don’t know where you have been ?’What used to be here? Why is this here? What happened here? And not everybody is interested in it, but obviously a lot of people are,” Guedo said.
Payton said that Archives Week is important to him because archives are important.
“I like to try to connect people to people and to places,” Payton said.
Payton explained that he has been receiving a number of requests from retired Architectural Archivist Frank Kovvemaker. Korvemaker has had a number of requests about buildings in Prince Albert in July, October and December
“In December, he got in touch with me about what he thought was a building in Prince Albert and I said ‘no you are way off.’ Through the research I’ve been doing, and I’m still working on it, I’ve come around and believed that he’s right. He had a request (that) was submitted in 1912, by the Marion brothers, to have a four-storey brick hotel built in Prince Albert and it was called the New Windsor,” Payton said.
According to his initial research there was no such hotel in 1912 but there was one with that name in 1919.
“It was a three Storey brick hotel. Most people in Prince Albert would know it as the Lincoln…. It was the Marion brothers who asked the architect to draw up the plans. There was no further reference to the Marion brothers except for with respect to one other hotel in Prince Albert. That was the Windsor Hotel and it was a wooden hotel and it burnt down in December of 1916,” Payton said.
In digging through the archives he discovered a woman named Isabelle Marion married a man named John Leonard.
“The write up about the wedding said that they were going to live in the New Windsor Hotel and reopen it,” he said.
After further research he discovered that Isabelle Marion left Prince Albert in 1917 to live with her son.
“Whoever Isabel Marion was, who married this John Leonard, they moved into the hotel when they got married. They reopened the hotel a few days later and they ran the hotel as the New Windsor for a number of years.
“It’s been a real task and it’s taken me two months to get to this point. But is it brings me in here in the morning and as I’m going along, I’m learning across all kinds of other interesting little things as well, like the Empress Hotel was a mortgage sale in May of 1917,” he said.
Another thing that he has been researching is related to a glass plaque in St. Alban’s Cathedral, the church that Payton attends. The plaque is dedicated to Eleanor Barber.
“I discovered that she was married to a man by the name of Sydney Barber. This couple, Eleanor and Sydney Barber, when they got married they moved into 633 21st Street West that was the house I was married from,” Payton said.
