Langbank United Church at 7:24 AM, June 29, 2012
A one night stop over in my hometown
Langbank, Monday,Jluy 9, 2012
Regular readers and visitors to Ensign will have noticed that we have been unable to update the site since late June. That wasn’t the plan but that’s how it turned out. For most of a year I have been struggling with the piece of software that I use to create Ensign with the goal of being able to update the site while on the road. This was something I have been able to do since the project began back in 1998 but this stuff has me in a corner. Unless I am sitting at my office desk the process just won’t take place. Somehow the software has got itself tied into my file server and it just won’t let go. I thought I had it licked but alas failure on June 24 when all I could do was access the office computer remotely.
We have been struggling with very nasty respiratory infections this past week and that prevented work on the site until today.
This year we are taking the Escape along on our travels. Minor modifications to the Escape make it towable and a slick hitch activates the vehicle’s braking system. This adds considerably to what we can plan or attempt. With the Kenosee Lake trip we left Regina on Thursday and headed east on the TransCanada to Whitewood then down highway nine to the little village where I was the paperboy and graduated from high school. For me, Langbank as it was in the 1950s will always be home.
At the top of the page is what always has been the centre of the community, the United Church. Up until the formation of the United Church of Canada it was a “congregational” church. With Langbank only four miles from Kennedy the two communities have always, and continue to share a minister. Langbank is on the CN line while Kennedy was on the CP “peanut” hence the reason the two communities are in such close proximity. Langbank has a church service every other Sunday and Sunday School on the alternative Sundays. For some year’s I was the secretary of the Sunday School. In reality, I was the front man, my mother looked after the chores and I took the credit.
The Church you see is pretty close to the little church that once stood there with a small bell tower over the South doorway. This facility was brought into replace it twenty-five years ago, long after I left Langbank when I graduated in 1962. On July first the community celebrated that anniversary.
The lush green field just east of the church was a hay field when I was a kid and now has a remarkable ball diamond. In the distance s the school buildings which include a community hall, artificial ice curling rink and a skating rink. The school has been closed for some years with Kennedy being the location of the school. When we lived in Langbank Kennedy was even in a different school jurisdiction than Langbank.
In grade six as the paperboy for the Winnipeg Free Press I knew every one of the eight villagers very well and only a few of the dogs made my work difficult. Today, there are probably less than half that many people who call Langbank home.
Our camp site on the electrified campground is on the location of the old curling rink and close to the well that suppled the village with water. I think it was ninety feet deep and the water was hard and very cold.
The Langbank Co-op is a going concern with plenty of capital and satellite operations in other communities in the area.
The Wheat Pool elevator and the National Grain elevator are long gone as are their agent’s homes. A grain terminal sits on the location of the railway foreman’s house where we lived and there is no sign of the station of the board walk sidewalk that went from the station past Jack Hurst’s shop to the Co-op.
There is a farm service supply company located where West’s garage used to be and the community is focused on the SeedHawk factory a few miles north of town, pretty much where the Porter farm used to be.
After sleeping in Langbank Thursday night we took the Escape and made our way the seven miles east to Vandura then seven more miles to Kelso where we lived until I was six. Kelso’s Greenbank School is used as a community hall in the summer time but looks like it could really use a coat of paint. It was here in this school I went to grade one and two with fifteen other baby boomers. At the time there were two students in most other grades.
We went into Wawota for lunch then back up to Langbank to hitch up and head down to the Lake.
