COLUMN: Carillon Flashback July 18, 1957 – Canada’s been good to us say Gardenton pioneers

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 07/10/2024 (289 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A Ukrainian immigrant couple, who say this country has dispersed its bounty in generous measure, paused to give thanks on the occasion of their 60th wedding anniversary.

Theodosy and Anna Wachna of Gardenton, came to Canada as unknown and uneducated young immigrants, scarcely out of their teens and poorer, if possible, than the proverbial church mice. They marked their 60th wedding anniversary as two distinguished citizens of the province, who have raised 15 children, all of them guests for the celebration at Gardenton.

Telegrams poured in congratulating the Wachnas from Her Majesty the Queen, from Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, from leading citizens all over Canada, from Bishop Isidore Borecky, head of the Ukrainian Catholic Church in Canada, and from their children and grandchildren, many of whom are lawyers, doctors and journalists in their own right.

“Canada has been good to us,” sums up the Wachnas’ feeling after 60 years of a remarkably successful married life. What makes their situation unique is the fact that all 15 children have gone on to educate and distinguish themselves in their turn. All of them came home for their parents’ anniversary celebrations.

Many of their grandchildren came too, and those who couldn’t, sent messages expressing their love and gratitude to the parents and grandparents, to whose sacrifice and interest they attribute to their own successes.

When Theodosy Wachna left the steppes of the Russian Ukraine back in 1894, he was a peasant boy with a few rubles in his pocket and only the clothes on his back. But in young Theo were bottled up a heritage of ambition and talent, repressed and undeveloped for generations. In the new world he found scope at last for these gifts.

Although he knew no English on his arrival, he learned well in a rural school while working in a Pennsylvania mine by day. When he came to Canada two years later, he landed a job as an interpreter with the immigration department.

The correspondence of an immigration official at that time described him as “young, tall, handsome, full of vigor, with an honest look in his brown eyes, and very broadminded, with wry humour and business tact.”

Wachna’s children say that he has always possessed a tremendous capacity for work, as well as a keen mind with which to direct his energies. Consequently, when the first big migration of 1,000 Ukrainian settlers into the Southeast took place in 1896, Theo Wachna was the man chosen to act as their leader, although he was himself then only 22 years old.

Versatile is the only word which can describe the accomplishments of Theo Wachna, a farmer, a Justice of the Peace, a Notary Public, an issuer of marriage licenses, as well as a road and bridge builder. He also was a builder of churches and schools, was a school district organizer, and a municipal reeve.

He put all his own children right through high school, and some of them farther, at a time when most of his neighbours’ children were considered remarkable if they made it to Grade eight. Five of his children became teachers, one a doctor, and two dentists.

Mrs Wachna was the former Anna Prygrocky and was one of the immigrant daughters in the group over which Theo had charge. He fell in love with her the first time they met and married her shortly after. Anna was only 15 then, but that was the accepted marrying age among the Ukrainian people at that time.

Wachna is now 83 and his wife 75. Part of the celebration included the unveiling of a memorial to the pioneers of the area, at the Holy Trinity Ukrainian Catholic Church at Stuartbuirn.

The memorial is a full-sized statue of the Sacred Heart of Jesus on a pedestal, with a plaque commemorating the Ukrainian pioneers who settled at Stuartburn from 1896 to 1956.

The inscription reads, “God is our Refuge, donated by Theodosy and Anna Wachna.”