Hamton SK: only memories and ashes remain

The village of Hamton is like many Saskatchewan communities between Yorkton and Canora… still on the map, but not really there anymore. 

But to say there is nothing left of Hamton is a mis-statement. It looks that way from the intersection of the grid roads to the west and south, since the triangle that was the village, between those two roads and the old rail line, is overgrown with tall weeds, shrubbery, and a few trees. Until 2018, there were buildings still standing, but abandoned and unused. Then one weekend in early May of 2018, whatever was left of the village of Hamton burned to the ground. Gone. 

Was caused the fire? Mother nature? A grass fire? A controlled fire set by someone that got out of hand? Somebody must know. Yet it remains a mystery.

Transcript

Dick DeRyk 0:00

The village of Hamton -- spelled without the usual P in that common name – is like many Saskatchewan communities between Yorkton and Canora… still on the map, but not really there anymore. Nestled between Highway 9 North and the rail line from Yorkton to Canora, Ebenezer and Gorlitz have survived. They are not what they once were, but they are still there. But trying to find anything resembling Mehan just north of the Yorkton airport and east of the highway, or Burgis north of the Whitesand River where the highway takes a bend, is futile. Long gone. That Yorkton to Canora rail line, by the way, was built by Doukhobor work crews in the early 1900s for the Grand Trunk and Pacific Railroad and is now operated by Canadian National. It is a story in itself. Look a little further to the east, and the maps, Google included, still show Hamton and Donwell. You might also see Mazeppa and Dneiper (knee-per). All of them had businesses and post offices and family homes, perhaps schools, and certainly grain elevators if they were on a rail line, as Hamton was – on a busy line that came up from Manitoba through MacNutt, Calder, Wroxton, Stornoway, Rhein and Hamton, and turned straight west just north of Hamton to join the Grand Trunk/CN line to Canora. On Google maps, the line shows up in portions although it is long gone; on the ground it may still show up as a right-of-way in places, although the rails were removed in the early 2000s. There are other landmarks of life, and death, from the early 1900 in the area… the Krepakevich family cemetery a mile east of Hamton, the Holy Trinity Cemetery, also known as Palibroda’s church cemetery just north of there, the Ukrainian Pioneer Cemetery, a few miles north-east of Gorlitz. To say that there is nothing left of Hamton, though, is a mis-statement. It looks that way from the intersection of the grid roads to the west and south, since the triangle that was the village, between those two roads and the old rail line, is overgrown with tall weeds, shrubbery, and a few trees. But seen from above, as you can on Google maps and Google Earth from satellite imagery from 2023, the remnants of buildings are still visible. Zoom in and Google maps will tell you there were four streets – Railway Avenue, Main Street, First Street and First Avenue. Until 2018, those buildings were standing but abandoned and unused, except for the old community hall, in which some young people had built skateboard ramps. Many of the lots, however, were still privately owned and some were used to grow vegetables. And the owners of the lots paid taxes to the rural municipality of Sliding Hills, as little as 73 cents a year until the provincial government allowed a minimum property tax to be set by bylaw, which Sliding Hills set as $30, causing many of the owners to give up their title. Then one weekend in early May of 2018, whatever was left of the village of Hamton burned to the ground. Abandoned cars, an abandoned school bus, all the buildings still standing, the grass just emerging from the ground, all gone. Was it caused by mother nature? Was it a grass fire or a controlled fire set by someone that got out of control? Obviously somebody knows. But the cause of the fire that took down what was left of Hamton, Saskatchewan, remains a mystery. Ed Keyowski, who farms just west of the village, saw the smoke, as he recalls in our conversation. It was a Sunday morning as he, his wife and family from Saskatoon were getting in their vehicles to go to Yorkton for a Ukrainian dance festival. He had been the rural municipality counsellor for the RM of Sliding Hills from 1992 to 2008, had retired and wasn’t on council at the time of the fire. He was elected again as the Division 3 councillor in 2022, and who set the fire was one of the first questions he asked when he was back on council. Randy Hudema lived in Hamton as a youngster and provided us with photos he took of what was left of the village in 2011, which are on our website at yorktonstories.ca. While the main fire was the first weekend of May 2018, Randy remains convinced that there were more fires – on at least one other weekend, maybe two, that month. Chris Attrell is a photographer in Shaunavon, Saskatchewan, who specializes in photographing old landmarks and abandoned buildings across the prairies. He had been in Hamton in 2006 to make photos of the buildings that were still standing at the time. He came back in July of 2018 to make a video of the burn shot from a drone, interspersed with some of the still photos taken 12 years previously, a short but poignant look at before and after. The video can still be seen on his Facebook page called Forgotten Saskatchewan, and with Chris’ permission can also be viewed, along with his photos from 2006, on our website. Hamton was established in 1910, named after either Charlie Hammond, who made hay near the townsite, according to Bill Barry’s authoritative Dictionary of Saskatchewan Place Names, or after Thomas Hammon, who homesteaded on the section and donated the townsite; that according to a history of the village prepared by Hamton school students, Barry points out. In 1911, the Ross Junction rail line from Canora through Hamton to Wroxton was completed, which resulted in a post office being opened in Hamton. It was run throughout its 59 years of existence out of the village’s general store, for the last 10 years by John and Josie Gorchynski, until it was closed in 1970. Over those years, the mail was delivered from Canora to the post office by ox cart, horse and wagon, railway, and in the last half decade by truck. Ed Keyowski farms a mile west of Hamton. We talk to him about Hamton history, about the Pelly Trail and the Doukhobor halfway house which was on what is now his land, and about the fire.

Dick DeRyk 0:00

You came to spend time around Hamton back in the mid-60s.

Ed Keyowski 8:19

Yes.

Dick DeRyk 8:19

You were from Canora. What brought you to Hamton when you were a teenager?

Ed Keyowski 8:24

A nice, beautiful girl. We have 52 years of a good marriage, raised two good kids, now we got four good grandchildren. I love the area. And I still love putting Hamton on the map. I did a line locate the other day, and the guy asked me where about? Sorry, I say, Hamton. But I say Hamton might not be on a map anymore. And the guy looks back and said, Oh yeah, it's on the map. But whenever I put down where I'm from is Hamton, because I like it being on the map.

Dick DeRyk 8:54

What was in Hamton when you first started coming here?

Ed Keyowski 8:58

Well, there were four elevators. There was four elevator houses for agents living in Hamton. I know two families that were still living there, right? There was the store, post office was still there, and the garage, the hall church was in there yet. That's about it. The old store was ran by Joe Petruskovich. The RM already had taken the pool room over and made it into a patrol for the greater park in there. But at that time, Joe Petruskovich had the general store there. He sold gas to gas pumps. And between the pool room and the store, he had a roof built in there, and that was sort of his warehouse. That's where he had his ice box in there. '77, I took the store apart for the log building, which I used as firewood in my old shop, and to heat my house at the time.

Dick DeRyk 9:58

Was there a school there at the time?

Ed Keyowski 10:00

School was moved to Canora. There was no school here. School grounds is still there, it hasn't been touched. But the school was moved to Canora, and because they called it the cottage school, and there's about three of them moved in Canora, and they used to use it, use them for music room and stuff like that, special classes. And now those are disappeared out of there too.

Dick DeRyk 10:19

When I look at old maps of Hamton, there seems to be kind of two streets. They run on an angle along the railway.

Ed Keyowski 10:24

The one ran along the elevator on the north side of the traffic, that was the elevator road, and then the other one ran at an angle, main street in Hamton. There was a house of ill repute across the railroad track. And I got lumber out of that. The bar I built out of the Doukhobor Halfway House that was here, when I took the barn apart, it was all built with tamarack logs, like power poles. It was a shame to cut them up. And when I took that barn apart, inside there was an area for their chickens, they had an area for their pigs. It was a huge barn. And there was an area in there, I don't know what it was for, but there was a lot of interesting writing on those walls. And some of that lumber I did save with some of the names on there, which I will never mention. But it was quite interesting reading the walls. And I took apart that store, I wasn't interested in any antiques or anything at that time, but I sold the glass displays to Salt coats and stuff like that for 20 bucks. What an idiot. And he had a homemade cash register, like a drawer. Because when I removed it, I shook it like this. And I think it was 16 silver dimes fell out. The town started to decline when the schools shut down. Because the post office was pretty new. The school started, because as soon as people quit coming into the school, it was on a decline before the elevator shut down. Because the elevator shut down in '85.

Dick DeRyk 12:01

As in many rural villages back in the mid to late 1900s, the Hamton Community Hall was a hub of activity. But it died a slow death for reasons Ed talks about. It took money to operate the hall, but it became increasingly difficult to raise money from an aging population, and young people who had left the village weren't coming back. It became harder and harder to raise money through raffles without big prizes to attract buyers, Ed recalls.

Ed Keyowski 12:36

When I became the fire chief of the RM of Sliding Hills in 1985, we had a raffle of 15 different things once every month. And the money we made for our fire equipment was unreal. You know, it was something because people were interested in buying stuff like that.

Dick DeRyk 12:51

Was the hall active?

Ed Keyowski 12:52

We had weddings, anniversaries, parties, stag parties, stuff like that there. We redid that hall inside, bingos, just all kinds of different things, fall Supper. And that went on till probably Fall Suppers went on to damn near 1990. So it was good. But then again, you're losing the women that were cooking, doing all this stuff.

Dick DeRyk 13:17

It was all volunteers, right?

Ed Keyowski 13:18

Well, definitely, yeah. Nobody's getting paid for none of that. It was just to get together and party time, you know, like that was good. It was nice. Put in running water at that time. We had to haul water, naturally, but we had indoor toilets, that was really good. That brought in a lot of people. People still get together, and there's not many left around to talk about it.

Dick DeRyk 13:40

I remember one of the falls suppers that was big around here was Mazeppa Hall.

Ed Keyowski 13:46

Yeah.

Dick DeRyk 13:47

I have never seen so much home-baked pie in one place than I had at that fall supper.

Ed Keyowski 13:54

And there's the cabbage rolls and the pierogies and the roast ham. That's all gone, right? That's all gone.

Dick DeRyk 14:05

In the very early 1900s, there was a well-used trail, the Pelly Trail, from Fort Pelly and from the Key Indian Reservation, as it was then called, and from the Doukhobor settlements around Veregin down to Yorkton. It was used extensively by those going to the larger town to the south to buy goods and supplies. But that trek was a day-long journey each way, and the horses needed to rest part way through. The Doukhobor community bought a farm just west of Hamton and established a communal settlement called Burtsevo. From 1907 to 1918, it was the stopping point for Doukhobor wagon teams traveling the Pelly Trail. It consisted of a house, a store, barn, and brick-lined wells to draw water for the horses and travelers. The halfway house was on land eventually owned by Ed Keyowski. The only map of the trail we have found was hand drawn and likely not to scale, and of obvious questionable accuracy as to the location of towns and villages. It shows the trail east of Hamton, but Ed says the trail was still visible when he started farming, and it ran right through the middle of what is now his farmyard at home, right through the large shop where he and I talked, a mile west of Hamton. He convinced the RM Council to make road signs designating the historic Pelly Trail, which can be seen on the grid roads in the area, although little, if anything, is left to be seen of the trail itself. The research I did, and this is from Doukhobor History Science, said that the halfway house had a couple of wells, brick-lined wells dug by the Doukhobors. Are they still there?

Ed Keyowski 16:07

We farmed around them. There's the ice house, just two wells. We farmed around them in that area in the drier years, and then when the water came high again, it was all underwater. Back in '95, we were going to the lake, and I stepped into the hotel to pick up some beer for the lake. And it was about six, seven Doukhobors from Veregin, Kamsack sitting there having a beer. And one guy called me over and asked me, he said, Own that land there. And I said, Yeah. And he said, are the building's still there. And I said, Well, the house, the store is still there. I took apart the barn. He tells me, You don't touch that house. And I said, Who are you to tell me what I could do on my land? And he says, Well, there was a 17-year-old girl murdered there, and she's buried just south of the house. And he said, there was a nice house, and she's buried there, and her grave is surrounded by that. I don't know if you remember back in the day if you guys had any of that really fancy twisted wire, and you had around the garden usually, and he says she's buried there. Now, the Oystreck family, when they lived in that house, they claimed they would see her in her nightgown with her nightcap with one of those candle holders going up that stairwell. That house was kind of, it was way different. On the stairwell, when it changed directions, when you're sitting on this one landing, there was a plug-in wall. You take the plug out, and you can see right outside to the south, right between those maple trees now. What that was all about, I don't know. You know, we're talking about this in a bar. And this one Doukhobor there, he said, you know, like a Doukhobor can't spend the night there. What are you gonna pay me? The guy said, I'll give you a 1000 dollars if you can spend one night. He says, I'll spend a week. He says, Pete, you're gonna be dead the first night. He said why and he said, that girl is gonna kill you. And these guys had such a strong belief in that, and I said, This is all bullshit, right? Shortly after that, when Jonathan got a hold of me, and he wanted to go visit that place. So I told him that story. Then it was about a year later, they brought one of the elders from Canora, Fred Petroff, and Gorkoff from Kamsack, and they came down and they asked if he could go see it. And we went down and took a look at the place. And then when the Doukhobors had this 100 and some year celebration, then you had six tour buses go there, and they stopped on the road by the bridge, and they had to walk all the way around, probably three-quarters of a mile, to go around alongside the crop to get to the buildings. I know where they used to have their manure piles from the cows and all that, till today, because I could tell guys when I got canola there, I say, how's it going to go? And I says, 112 bushels an acre, only on 10 acres. You know, because it just grows, everything grows wild in there because there's years and years of manure in that.

Dick DeRyk 19:19

Another common tale about the Doukhobors in the area, Ed said, is that the women not only pulled the ploughs, of which there is ample evidence, but that they also pulled large tree stumps from the land when trees were cut down. Ed questions that, based quite simply, on the fact there were no trees in that entire area. It was flat and mainly barren land at the time, some shrubbery, but no trees. He heard it from an old timer, but it can also be seen on the website praire-towns.com, that's prairie and then hyphen and then towns.com, which has historic photos from various communities in the area. Even an aerial photo of Canora taken from the water tower in the 1950s, shows few, if any, trees in the town and the surrounding countryside.

Ed Keyowski 20:17

Talking with John Oystreck, and he said, This creek ran 12 months a year. Winter and summer, because of the springs up in the Wallace Creek up there. And I said, Okay, John, tell me, any trees here, he says, not a damn tree. He said, the first thing that started happening is the trees started growing along the creek. But he said, What happened is when the guys came here, ploughed up the prairie and started farming, and then when the dry years came, you didn't farm it, then the wet years came, the places were left, and that's when the poplar trees grew. Because he said, you know, when you look at some of the old photographs, you see there's no garn darn trees around like even in Canora around Canora, they took off the water tower years back. There were no trees there. And the beavers, there's no beavers here through the 30s, right? And they were brought in because Canora Courier had a 100-year newspaper, right? And he had an article from each year in there, right? But during the depression, when there was no dugouts and stuff like that, that's when the RM started building dugouts for guys. And the Saskatchewan, what I call fish cops now, went to Ontario and they brought the Canadian beaver to Saskatchewan. So I said, they're the ones that should pay for all this damage.

Dick DeRyk 21:41

The fires. There was a few buildings left.

Ed Keyowski 21:44

There was quite a few buildings. Then it burnt that Sunday morning. And I remember it was Sunday, I think the beginning of May. I was walking from the shop here, this Ukranian dance concert. Competitions were on in Yorkton at the Regional, and we were getting ready to go. And my daughter and son in law were from Saskatoon, and we met here on the lawn talking and it was windy. And I said, What in the hell is that? We drove up there and she was all toasty. Then it was a week later when John Phillip's burnt down, and that, so the RM had nothing to do with that. Because when I got back on council, that was one of the first questions I asked. And we would never, like me being on council, we'd never do that because that garage was there, it was still owned by Gorchynski's. There's a lot of people that still own properties.

Dick DeRyk 22:41

So who started the fires?

Ed Keyowski 22:43

Nobody knows. I don't know. I don't know.

Dick DeRyk 22:46

It wasn't a natural fire. Because the trees were okay, but the buildings were gone.

Ed Keyowski 22:52

It was a fast fire. I saw the fire. It was a fast fire and it was windy. Even the buildings weren't that close together, like some of them, right? Because I could see this block going all at once, but the ones on the other side, so intentional? Most likely. I don't know. Like what else would it be, right? Like or somebody started a fire there and it went away on them and everything went..

Dick DeRyk 23:20

Are the streets still there?

Ed Keyowski 23:21

Yeah, you could still drive. Yeah. Yeah.

Dick DeRyk 23:24

So it's basically a flat piece of land with some streets.

Ed Keyowski 23:27

And a bunch of garbage because nobody ever cleaned it up, right? Whatever burnt there, nobody ever cleaned it up.

Dick DeRyk 23:35

Chris Attrell's video of the aftermath of the fire on the Facebook page Forgotten Saskatchewan has been viewed more than 20,000 times and has drawn many comments, including from those who grew up in Hamton. From Brian Oystreck. Sad to see. I remember going to the store with grandpa and picking up some groceries and getting gas after unloading grain at the elevator. Carolyn Hesker wrote, My hometown, my mom and dad ran a garage, store, and post office. We came home to Yorkton on the night of the third of May. I told my husband that I wanted to go take the door off our house. I wanted to make a headboard for a bed. The very next night the town burned down. May 4th, 2018. Heartbreaking. I went to school in Hamton until grade five. Then it closed down, Jen Colloton wrote. I grew up on a farm about one mile from Hamton and lived there until I was 18. My mom and dad, Annie and Merlin Mroske, stayed on the farm until 1992 when they moved to Yorkton. It is very sad to see these pictures and learn that the village was burned down. Lots of good people live there, and I have many fond memories of trips to Hamton to get the mail, hauling grain, etc., with my dad, and visit the Gorchynski family pretty much on a daily basis. Gail Lee Christensen posted this. Gosh, that is making me cry. Old buildings are a bit like old people to me, made of good stuff. Nice to see that one green tree still standing almost as a tribute.