By RENEE FRANCOEUR
Advocate staff
A new community project from the Heritage Department at the City of Red Deer wants to put a face — or faces — to the city’s past through cartography.
Heritage has marked plenty of old buildings as ones of historical significance, but bricks and mortar don’t exactly scream out fascinating and relatable stories, said Janet Pennington, heritage community development co-ordinator.
The freshly-launched Community Heritage Mapping Project, spearheaded by Pennington and a group of volunteers, plans to solve this. In fact, it’s a project that Pennington thinks will breathe life back into Red Deer’s past.
“In 2007 and 2008, we conducted a heritage site survey and from this we identified 640 sites but every single one was a building,” said Pennington.
“It’s the descendants of these old buildings who I want to hear from now. Plus, I want to know about sites of importance that are not buildings — the parks, spots on the river, places with old memories.”
Revealed for the first time to the public in late April, the mapping project features 21 massive aerial maps, all of different neighbourhoods in Red Deer.
Due to people’s feedback, Pennington has ordered 14 more that include the areas surrounding the city — those places that had wide open fields where as adolescents, people remember getting into trouble and such, she said.
Everyone and anyone can scribble down their memories on these maps.
For example, one comment in red describes how after exploring the woods, a family would relax and throw sticks into the creek from a little bridge in the Parkvale area.
Another reminisces about the widespread popularity of an old tube-type slide called the rocket, long since removed from playground equipment.
Pennington said she hopes to secure more detailed stories when she takes the maps to the Golden Circle Senior Resource Centre on June 15 and seniors’ residences throughout the summer.
The project will also consist of an online questionnaire where residents can describe in more detail their fondest Red Deer memories.
The department has already received one, which details what it was like to grow up in Red Deer during the depression in the 1930s.
“This person talks about wearing flour sacks as clothes. . . . The ‘hobo jungles’ set up in the city centre where his mother would take leftover food,” said Pennington.
The mapping project is also a unique way for First Nation memories of certain areas of land to be acknowledged and shared, she said.
All these comments will be reviewed and added to the database the department is developing that will be available to the public.
The maps will not only be a great resource to see if the heritage site survey missed anything, but will also help the city develop ideas for new walking and biking tours, and stories to tell on those tours throughout Red Deer.
Pennington said she hopes to include recorded oral histories and video, as found through this project, on the website down the road.
“When you read a history book, it’s so far removed from the everyday citizens’ lives,” said Pennington. “These are stories that can appeal to everyone . . . that celebrate ordinary people and events so that we can look at it and say ‘That’s where we came from,’ and reflect on where we want to go.”
The website for the mapping project and corresponding questionnaire will be up sometime late next week. It can be accessed through www.reddeer.ca/heritage.
Pennington expects the project to run for about a year.
rfrancoeur@www.reddeeradvocate.com