The Flin Flon Heritage Project got some time in the sun last week, presenting the group’s background and purpose at a public event.
The project got a chance to show off what it has found and preserved during a Culture Days event Sept. 26 at the Flin Flon Public Library, presented by project contributors Frank Fieber and Ken Pawlachuk.
The project is the community’s main online historical archive, with volunteers having preserved thousands and thousands of individual artifacts, photographs, news stories and the like and uploaded scans of those documents to a main website, accessible to anyone at flinflonheritageproject.com.
Doug Evans was the main driving force behind the project’s early years, beginning his obsession with Flin Flon’s past in order to learn more about his father, former Flin Flon Mayor George Wellington Evans. While working on a book about his dad, Doug and a group of local historians, including Don Peake and Gerry Clark began scanning and hosting historical documents online for free, for anyone to view.
More than 60,000 individual documents, ranging from photos, books, maps, correspondence and other items have been archived by the Heritage Project - many of the items are shared on the project’s website at flinflonheritageproject.com. Evans, Peake and Clark have each received the Lieutenant-Governor’s Historical Preservation and Promotion award in part for their work with the project.
Fieber’s involvement with the project began with the previous Flin Flon City archives - the physical archives used to be kept in the library building’s basement, but a flood damaged part of the archives, leading local historians to get creative.
“I started off with the archives downstairs here. We had a lot of stuff stored in here, but there were a couple of floods, and that's about the worst thing that can happen to an archive is water damage,” he said.
“They tried to build shelving down here and get something going to keep it here at the time, but it just wasn’t going to happen - so these four guys really got started, organized and started soliciting material from anybody who would send it to them.”
The project itself has gone well for a decade, but the original people behind the project are beginning to tire from the work - most are seniors and some do their work with the project through battles with health issues. As a result, since 2021, the City of Flin Flon has worked with the project to form an official archives board to help track down new documents and to ensure the project continues in the future.
“These guys even got to the point where some large maps were sent to them in Winnipeg. Doug is so ingenious that he laid these maps out on the floor of his house, then he took a drone and went over that and put these things together to form a digitized copy of the map. Imagine doing that at 94 years old, being that innovative and creative,” Fieber said.
Fieber and fellow archivist Ken Pawlachuk showed off several artifacts of Flin Flon’s history and shared stories that Pawlachuk includes on the tours he offers of uptown Flin Flon. The tours are held semi-regularly and took place twice earlier during Culture Days.
