Historian Doug Evans has become the latest person with Flin Flon connections to receive a provincial award for preserving the community’s history.
Evans was one of four Manitobans who received the Lieutenant-Governor’s Historical Preservation and Promotion award May 18, being presented the award by Manitoba Lieutenant Governor Anita Neville.
Evans received the honour for his work with the Flin Flon Heritage Project, a community-sourced archive of photos, documents and other artifacts that tracks the history of the town from its early days as a mining tent camp through to the present day.
Evans is far from the only person credited with creating or continuing the project - one of the project’s main contributors, Don Peake, received the same award Evans did back in 2019, along with Flin Flon historian Gerry Clark. Evans is credited as one of the project’s creators and has maintained a role with the project since it began in the early 2000s.
“I was phoned with no forewarning by the Lieutenant Governor, who told me she was going to award me with a medal, but I wasn’t to tell anybody other than the six people I was entitled to invite,” Evans said.
“I was very honoured. It’s hard to describe the feeling of it, but if you do a lot of community work, after a while you get kind of hardened. Particularly with archives, you’re patiently building something that hardly anybody wants. It’s important to the community, but the number of people who ever go look at the archive doesn’t compare. To be phoned up and told, ‘We appreciate what you’ve done and we’re going to give you a medal,’ that’s a very heartening thing.”
For Evans, a retired sociologist by trade who has published books about the history and archaeology of Flin Flon and northern Manitoba, the spark for the project came from a desire to learn more about his father’s life. Evans’ father, George Wellington Evans, served as mayor of Flin Flon in the 1930s and was a community figure and frequent volunteer.
“I was working on a book about my dad’s life in Flin Flon. He played a big role in early Flin Flon - he was one of the people who made up the volunteer school board before there was a school division in Flin Flon, went around collecting money from all the local businesses in a paper bag to finance the school,” Evans said.
“He served a term as mayor, he was on the board of trade and commerce and the Rotary Club. I was writing this book and I thought, ‘I don’t know a heck of a lot here.’ I had heard rumours that he was on the board for the Bombers, but he wasn’t a hockey fan. He was on the board for the hospital at the time, there was a section where they tried to look after unemployed people before EI and he was on that.”
To do research for the book, Evans came up to Flin Flon from Winnipeg, where he lives, only to find out that the City’s official archives, located in the basement of the Centennial Building on Main Street, were flooded. Part of the archive was wrecked, some items beyond repair - the index system that showed which person was in which photo was also damaged.
“They were all wet,” Evans recalled.
Evans sat in on an archive meeting, during which Peake said he could scan items from the archive to preserve them as digital copies, even if the items were soaked. Those items needed a place to go - leading in part to the creation of the Heritage Project. Ken Penner created a website, Larry Brown helped maintain it, Richard Lyons created a Facebook page, Peake continued supplying items and Adams did a bit of everything to get the project moving.
Since then, the project has grown to thousands of items, ranging from a copy of the minutes of the first meeting of Flin Flon city council to photos of historic events, from Hudbay’s annual Northern Lights employee supplements to .PDF files of stories and articles from past newspapers, including copies of The Reminder.
“It’s been an exciting business. I’ve met a lot of interesting people in the process,” Evans said.
