COLUMN: Viewpoint – The story of the stone

Have you seen the large rock that looks almost like a loaf of bread at the Mennonite Heritage Village Museum? The memorial is decorated on each side with bronze plaques that show pioneer women milking cows, rocking babies, doing laundry, baking, teaching children, and stooking wheat.

On Mother’s Day, in 1991, I was invited to give a speech at the memorial and tell the story of how it came to be located at the museum. In the photo The Carillon featured of the event I’m standing beside Olga Friesen. She was the woman who first proposed the idea of a memorial to women and raised a majority of the funds to make its creation a reality.

On a trip to South Africa Olga visited a museum in Pretoria where she saw a bronze monument built to honor the pioneer women of that country. The statue made Olga think about the women who had first settled in the Steinbach area. They had lived in sod houses with dirt floors. They were almost always pregnant, and many died in childbirth. Diphtheria and other epidemics swept through their villages with devastating consequences.

There were no daycare centres. Sometimes women were forced to tie their toddlers to the legs of the kitchen table while they went out to plow and plant with their husbands. They gardened, cooked, sewed, cleaned, canned, nursed, raised chickens, butchered pigs and milked cows.

“I was determined to recognize their work,” Olga Friesen told me. “Their contributions could not be forgotten. When Olga approached the board of the Steinbach Heritage Village Museum about a memorial they suggested a small flower garden with a commemorative plaque. “Not good enough!” Olga told them. “We need something big and solid. Something people can’t overlook. Something that suggests the strength of pioneer women.”

Olga shared her dreams with the museum’s Women’s Auxiliary and the members conceived of the large monument that is just outside the main building of the museum today. When the auxiliary investigated the cost of their proposed project it was $16,000. They did a whole variety of fundraisers but that only brought $4,000 to their coffers.

One night, when Olga was thinking about how she could raise more money for the memorial, she looked at her husband and thought, “Why he is the grandson of one of those hardworking women who first came to southeastern Manitoba from Ukraine in 1874. It’s he and other men like him who should donate money for the memorial.”

Together with her husband, Olga made a list of all the men in Steinbach whose grandmothers had been part of the 1874 migration. Perhaps not surprisingly, considering the work ethic and determination they had inherited from their grandmothers, many of them owned businesses on Steinbach’s Main Street. So Olga started making her way down the street stopping at each business to tell the pioneer women’s story and asking for money. Not a single business owner turned her down and by the time she had made her way to the end of Main Street she had more money than she needed.

And that’s the story of how the stone designed and illustrated by artist Alvin Pauls, came to be at the museum.

This coming Sunday Aug. 18, I will be telling the story of the stone in a special event at the Mennonite Heritage Village Museum called Tapestry of Women. I’ll be joined by other presenters, author Eleanor Chornoboy and artist Margruite Krahn and members of the museum’s Women’s Auxiliary. The event includes a faspa. You can find more details on the museum website. Hope to see you there!