Check out these abandoned places around Manitoba, and the stories behind them
Local historian Gordon Goldsborough has spent the last few months gathering more stories of Manitoba's abandoned places, exploring forgotten treasures in tucked away in rural areas.
Winnipeg historian publishes 2nd collection of forgotten sites
CBC News ·
The farmer who built this barn near Emerson would have used its tower to monitor the success of breeding among his captive 'herd' of wild foxes. It is one of the many abandoned places Manitoba historian Gordon Goldsborough explored for his book, More Abandoned Manitoba. (Submitted by Gordon Goldsborough)
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Local historian Gordon Goldsborough has spent the last few months gathering more stories of Manitoba's abandoned places, exploring forgotten treasures in tucked away in rural areas.
And now, he's releasing a second, 280-page book full of abandoned sites around the province.
More Abandoned Manitoba builds on the premise of Goldsborough's first book.
But this time, he says he wanted to dig more into the backstory of these sites and more rural areas.
A swimming pool now filled with vegetation and assorted trash was once touted as the 'largest in the west.' It's part of the remains at Camp Hughes, a First World War training facility west of Carberry. (Submitted by Gordon Goldsborough)
"I'm a child of rural Manitoba. I love rural Manitoba, the places, the people." he said.
"And what bothers me is you encounter people, particularly here in Winnipeg, who think the known universe ends at the Perimeter Highway."
A stone granary in an abandoned farmyard northwest of Virden was built by James Scallion, a founder of the United Farmers of Manitoba who pushed more farmers to get into politics. (Submitted by Gordon Goldsborough)
"I think if they see all the wonderful things you can see in rural Manitoba, and the interesting things, they may want to see it for themselves," he said.
A grid of concrete piles protruding from the ground are the remains from a game of 'corporate chicken' played in the 1960s, when local businessmen threatened to establish a 3rd cement manufacturing plant on Sturgeon Road in the Rural Municipality of Rosser, just northwest of Winnipeg. (Submitted by Gordon Goldsborough)
Northern Manitoba is disproportionately littered with abandoned facilities such as this gymnasium floor at the 1980s construction camp for Manitoba Hydro's Limestone Generating Station on the Nelson River downstream of Gillam. (Submitted by Gordon Goldsborough)
Goldsborough is holding events in small towns and cities throughout Manitoba, such as Dauphin and Gimli.
Trees stand beside a concrete mount for a machine that was once inside a large building at an abandoned granite quarry near East Braintree. (Submitted by Gordon Goldsborough)
The right-of-way of the Canadian Pacific Railway's Varcoe Subdivision, abandoned in the 1970s, runs straight through a small lake in farmland south of Minnedosa. (Submitted by Gordon Goldsborough)
More Abandoned Manitoba officially launches Thursday at McNally Robinson Grant Park.
An innovative system of piles and insulated floors allowed the main building of a Cold War surveillance post near Churchill to stand on shifting or melting permafrost. (Submitted by Gordon Goldsborough)
