I love learning about history, cultures and what life was like in the past and have been fascinated by it since I was around 8 years old. I have always enjoyed learning about what food was eaten and how it grew, what the settlers daily chores were, how they lived, how they grew and preserved food and about their life in general. So I was excited when we came to the Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village for their Harvest the Past festival. This was my first time here so I could hardly wait to learn!
The Ukrainian Heritage Cultural Village (we grew up just calling it the Ukrainian Village) has historic buildings from around Alberta that depicts what life was like between 1892 to 1930. It illustrates life from those times in Ukrainian, Galician and Bukovynian rural communities and towns around central Alberta. It is about 35 minutes East of Edmonton and sees many visitors every year, especially for the different celebrations and festivals. The Ukrainian Village educates us about the struggles these early settlers faced and all the hard work that went into everyday life back then and how important God and religion was to them.
Harvest the Past festival teaches us what the settlers did during harvest. Harvest was a very important time of year, and still is. Working together was the framework of the harvest season, and of course weather played an important part. Field crops and gardens were harvested, picked, preserved and stored properly for the winter so families would have food to eat through our harsh Alberta winters.
We had so much fun learning about what Eastern European settlers did each fall time. Our heritage is of Eastern European decent (along with a few others) so I enjoy learning about that culture. Luckily I grew up in a time where my dad helped my uncle and grampa during harvest, so I understand how crucial it is to get the crops off before winter. We even got to purchase beets, carrots and pumpkins that grew in the gardens which helps to raise money for this living history museum. We learned so many things like how to make kapusta (pronouned ka-poos-tah which is homemade sauerkraut), what kids learned in school in the 1930’s and what was expected of them, flailing grain, how to grind flour by hand and when to know the flour was ready to be used, preserving food for the winter, drying flowers & herbs, harvest & threshing, and the importance of community as early settlers new to the area and how they all worked together. We also learned just how important bread was and the ability to cook 20 loaves in the stone oven to feed the crews and families working together to harvest, I thought was quite amazing!!
It’s such a wonderful experience that taught us a lot… exactly what I needed to remind myself of why I created Our City Homestead — bring a bit of that hard working settler life to the modern city home and focus on what is essential in life.
Here is a map of the Village and the buildings we could see. There is definitely a lot of walking, so good shoes are needed. I brought good walking shoes and then forgot to change them since it was such a hot day. Luckily it was a little breezy, but walking through the trees on the dirt trails reminded me just how fortunate we really are today with all of our modern conveniences.
We began our tour looking at the Pylypow House. Iwan Pylypow was one of the first Ukrainian settlers to arrive in Canada in 1891 and he became a prosperous farmer by the 1920’s. This was his family’s third house and was built in 1906 and depicts life from 1923 to 1929. This log house is built in a more traditional Ukrainian style but is still influenced by Canadian architecture like using milled lumber to build the second story showing the success of this farm of that time. There is just something about this house that I love… and I could see myself gardening, tending to chickens and other animals, cleaning and cooking on such a farm as this.
In the Old Country, clay ovens (called a pich) were built inside but in Canada they were built outside as iron cookstoves became more readily available. The clay oven was used for weekly bread baking as well as large meals during harvest and the holidays. Some communities had these clay oven so many families could use them and bake bread for the week. Sheds were often built around the clay ovens to help protect them from the weather.
When we entered the Pylypow House, it felt warm and cozy, like I was walking into a baba’s kitchen. Here, they are making kapusta which is homemade sauerkraut to preserve for the winter. Large families would have several of these large crocks of sauerkraut to feed the family for the winter while a small family would have perhaps just one.
Kapusta is easy enough to make too and these lovely ladies explained it all. Slice cabbage and place it in a large basin. Sprinkle with salt. In this large basin that she is mixing the cabbage in, she used about 1/4 cup of salt. Then squeeze the cabbage. Keep squeezing, mixing and pressing the cabbage with your hands. This step takes a while but the cabbage will turn color and there will be liquid in the basin. The more liquid, the better because this is what is going to preserve the cabbage. Once ready, dump into the crock and place a clean large rock over top, then cover the crock. We need to be sure the kapusta is submerged in the liquid so it does not spoil. It will ferment over time much like sourdough starter from microbes in the air. If the kapusta turns color or becomes slimy, the batch needs to be tossed.
I share here how we made kapusta at home. It really is simple to do and worth all the effort!
After we learned about kapusta we took a walk looking around at the other farmhouses. I simply love taking a gander at old farmhouses. We saw the Stelmach house next. The Stelmachs arrived in 1898 as part of the first wave of Ukrainian immigrant settlers to Alberta. They spent the first few years living in a burdei (sod house) on their farm where they raised cows, poultry, sold cream, eggs, oats and wheat while clearing the land for their homestead. Construction began on this house in 1915 and was completed in 1918. Building materials and tools had to be shipped by train from Edmonton and then carried by horse and wagon the rest of the way and was built using poplar trees from the area.
After the house was brought to the Ukrainian Village, it was fully restored — even the original hardwood floors can be seen right to the original plaster, which I think is so neat. The Stelmachs are the grandparents to Alberta’s former Premier, Ed Stelmach who donated the family home to the Ukrainian Village. The house is filled with artifacts from the late 1800’s including the family’s table from 1915. Is that not amazing?!? I love all these historic tidbits.
And here is the original Stelmach House back in 1915. Picture courtesy of the Ukrainian Village.
And not far up the trail was the Hawreliak House. The Hawreliak family came from Bukovyna. This house was built in 1919 and reflects their prosperous farm in the 1920’s. This house had more modern features like electricity, indoor water pump (they collected rainwater to use in the kitchen) and a wood and coal furnace along with 5 bedrooms and housed 11 people by 1928. That’s amazing!
Then we walked through the visitor centre, through a nice wooded area, over the causeway where we could see Goose Lake and into the main part of the village. It feels like we really stepped back in time into a small country town.
Here is the train station from Bellis built in the mid-1910’s. Bellis was founded in 1898 by a Ukrainian settler. My mom actually played in this train station when she was a little girl, growing up in Bellis in the 1960’s, which I thought was pretty cool! The Bellis Canadian National Railway Station was both a passenger and freight station and had a passenger waiting room, an office with a telegraph and a freight shed. The station agent and his family would have lived in the back of the building and upstairs on the second floor. The railway also brought in goods for purchase by those living in these smaller communities and allowed farmers to ship goods to market that they produced which helped them earn money. In the background is the grain elevator that I grew up seeing everywhere across the prairies.
Here is the the Bellis Home Grain Company Elevator. It was built in 1922 and has been restored to its 1929 appearance. Grain elevators were an important part of country towns. It allowed farmers to sell their grain and the elevator was able to manage pricing, ship grain, promote the sale of grain and they could manage the quality of the grain by protecting it against waste and spoilage. Grain elevators helped villages and towns to prosper and was vital to farmers.
Then we walked over to the 1930’s schoolhouse. This was a two room schoolhouse where elementary aged kids were in one side and the older senior high school students on the other side. It also had a basement where the kids would have gym when it was too cold to go outside. They would get their hands checked to be sure their hands were not dirty and nails were clean. The boys sat on the left side and the girls sat on the right side of the classroom. The highschool teacher was often a male and was also the principal. The children would learn breathing exercises so when they spoke they would not have to take deep breaths in between sentences. This is a breathing exercise that was shared with us — and we even did the actions just as the children would have done. The children would follow the teachers words by doing the actions: “Imagine you are a bird, flying through the sky. Take a deep breath in, with your arms out to the side. Flap your wings as you exhale, soaring through the sky.”
We had lots of fun learning different things in the 1930’s classroom! It was definitely a lot different and much more strict than classrooms today.
We walked through the woods on a dirt road and discovered a burdei home. Burdei homes were built by new immigrants which were shelters dug out of the ground or into the side of a hill and were common homes on early farms. They were temporary shelters that were quite small, having an area to sleep, eat and prepare food only. There was a stone oven to help heat the home and they often had an outdoor kitchen.
An outdoor cook area and a large garden area next to the burdei home.
And here is a grain field that has not yet been harvested.
This area shows later life of Bukovynian settlers between 1918 and 1919. There’s barns here, granary and a house and of course a beautiful garden. I could see myself gardening in this garden! I aspire to have such a lovely garden as this! It was quite hot, but so very peaceful.
This is the Hlus House, part of a few buildings showing the Galician Settlers of 1918 to 1919. When you entered this house, you could go to the right or to the left. The larger family would have been living in the larger side to the right and the smaller family or the grandparents to the left. Here, they were making sausage and onions with garlic and potatoes — it smelled absolutely amazing!
And of course you cannot attend a harvest of the past without watching the threshing machine at work. Crops grown in the area include oats, barley, rye, wheat, flax and canola among others. Harvesting crops were a lot of work and the community worked together. The grain had to be cut, tied together and placed in stooks, then left to dry. Once dried, the grain was either flailed or was tossed into the threshing machine. The threshing machine separates the straw and chaff from the grain a lot quicker than flailing by hand and was a very helpful machine in the early 1900’s. Sometimes farmers had to wait a while for a threshing machine to come since there were very few around, so everyone shared it when it did come. By the 1950’s combines began to take over and threshing machines were used less until they became obsolete.
Winter wheat was planted in the early fall so it could partially grow before winter came and then the following summer it would grow and by fall it was ready to be harvested.
There is a lot of dust that comes from the threshing machine and since I am allergic to grain dust, we watched from afar.
Up at the Slemko House, we watched the workhand grind wheat. Wheat would be placed inside and the stones grind the wheat into flour as he turns the handle. You can see the flour coming out of the spout. Wheat would have to be ground several times to be turned into a flour that could be used for bread. The first time it comes out, it is quite coarse, and becomes more fine the more times it is ground.
I learned a lot today about grinding flour the old fashioned way — the winter wheat would need to be ground several times to get a nice flour that could be used to bake bread with. I had no idea that when grinding flour, it needed to be done several times to get a nice flour. I once used stone ground flour to bake with, but had to use white flour with it because it was so coarse and resulted in a heavy product. I’m eager to give my small hand grinder a try now that I learned a few old fashioned tips!!
You can watch the grinding wheat video here: Grinding Wheat
In the Slemko House, we learned about the stone oven. This oven would heat the entire house and all the children liked sleeping behind the stove in their beds in the winter because it was so warm. During harvest, they would bake 20 loaves of bread and a large meal for the family and community of helpers that were assisting with harvest.
We also learned how to dry herbs and flowers. They were tied together at the bottom of the stems with yarn or thread and then hung to dry. Flowers and herbs were used for dying yarn and cloth, for medicinal purposes, as tea and had many other uses too. Lots of herbs were planted because herbs assist other plants like rosemary keeping slugs away from cabbage and mint kept mice away. Drying removes moisture to lessen the chances of mold and was an easy way to preserve for the winter.
As we came around the bend, and closer back “to town” we stopped for a moment to look at the threshing machine. They were on a break, which made me think of the settlers working in the blazing sun and I was reminded just how hard farmers work. Of course today we have a lot of workers subjected to all of our crazy weather conditions and we are thankful to all of those hard workers!
This Grocery Store from Luzan was not yet opened for us to see inside. These small stores served as a convenience store and helped the community get supplies they needed until they were able to get into the bigger cities. It also served as a meeting place for community members to socialize.
And here we are entering town from the opposite side. There was an old fashioned gas station, lumber yard and other buildings too. Sometimes I think about living in an old fashioned town like this where everyone in the community would have worked together to complete harvest. I would have enjoyed cooking to help feed all the workers and helpers. Plus growing a large garden to harvest and preserve for the winter for the entire family to eat is something I even work towards today, and share with you here at Our City Homestead what I know and have learned. I think that is part of community.
And that was our trip to the Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village. I will definitely be back. I enjoyed learning from all of the interpreters what life was once like. It reminds me just how important it is to do what we can for ourselves, even in a modern world of conveniences!
“Before the reward, there must be labor. You plant before you harvest. You sow in tears before you reap joy.”
– Ralph Ransom
We bought a couple pumpkins for Halloween along with some beets and carrots. The pumpkins I placed in the hot sun and brought them in every evening to help cure them. This will help them turn orange and curing helps so the pumpkins do not rot. They were very nice pumpkins.
My girls decided to carve the pumpkins we bought at the Ukrainian Village for Halloween. And the beets and carrots we enjoyed boiled (as separate veggie dishes) and then served with salt and pepper, dill and butter. There were a lot of large beets so I made a few pots of beet soup and chopped a bunch up to place in the freezer to enjoy over the winter. Find my recipe for beet soup here.
Hope you enjoyed our visit to the Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village with us! Have you been to the Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village? What was your favorite part? Share in the comments with us, we would love to know!
enjoy from Our City Homestead to yours