The Icelandic Canadian - 01.04.2009, Page 28

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THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Vol. 62 #2
Big Projects - Small Community
by Bill Birse
And the sons become the fathers and the daughters will be wives
As the torch is passed from hand to hand and we struggle through our lives
Though the generations wander, the lineage survives
And all of us, from dust to dust
We all become forefathers by and by
- song “Forefathers” by Dan Fogelberg
“Well, we may not be big, but dontcha’
ever think we ponder small.” Andy
Fergussen, Markerville’s great dane was sit-
ting on a park bench on the banks of the
Medicine, deep in conversation with Nels
Borg, keeper of the Huldufolk garden in
Markerville.
“Yah,” said Nels. “T’was ever so.
Those Icelanders that thought they found
paradise here back in 1888 knew this was
the end of the road. There was no more
travellin’ on. They couldn’t go back and
they had nowhere else to go to so they
were forced to stay.”
“They figured they needed a way to
make some money so they built the cream-
ery. Supposed to be a big investment,” said
Andy. “Hah! All they got back was a
cream cheque every month.”
“Yah, but t’was enough to keep ‘em
going. Paid some bills. Let ‘em build their
farms,” Nels added.
“They worked hard—those people.
But they were smart enough to know they
had to stop every once in a while so they
could have a little frivolity. If Tindastoll
was to have any heart, it had to have a gath-
ering place. So then they built a hall.”
“Then, a few years later, they built a
church. They had no money. Their farms
weren’t finished. But they built a hall and
built a church” added Nels.
“I was married in that church,” Andy
said sombrely. “We got married and then
we all walked down to the hall and had the
lunch. There was no room for tables so
people ate their lunch on their laps.”
“I learned how to dance in the hall,”
Nels replied. “My folks took us all, bun-
dled us up in the wagon and off we’d go.
When the little ones got too tired, they just
buried themselves in the pile of coats and
went to sleep.”
“Those were the days,” Andy replied
slowly with a far-away look in his eyes.
“Yep! Those were the days!”
It is hard to fathom with that sort of
history, the sons and daughters two gener-
ations removed could bring themselves to
the point of throwing up their hands and
saying the land was more valuable than the
buildings and should just be sold off to
some outsider who wanted to build a nice
house in a quiet hamlet.
So, if the land wasn’t going to be sold
off, something had to be done to the build-
ings before they fell in on themselves like
the proverbial house of cards.
It became a no brainer!
The buildings would need to be
restored.
And, as Andy says “We may not be big
but dontcha’ ever think we ponder small.”
This is the way it all got started!
In 1889, Stephan G. Stephansson
immigrated to the Markerville area
(Tindastoll, as it was known back then) and
proceeded to build a homestead. Although
he was in what was then known as the
Northwest Territories, his passion and his
heart remained in Iceland. And how he dis-
played that passion was through his poetry.
As a matter of fact, he became the poet lau-
reate of Iceland. As Andy once said,