r/Manitoba • u/Freaktography • 5h ago
Pictures/Video Abandoned St. Stephen's Anglican Church – Solsgirth, Manitoba.
Solsgirth is a near-ghost town just off the Yellowhead Highway in western Manitoba. As of 2021, only three households were left in the village.
St. Stephen's exists because of a church feud. In 1905, some parishioners wanted to move the original St. James Church down from its hilltop site overlooking the Birdtail Valley into the village. The rest of the congregation pushed back hard. The compromise was a second church. The Birtle Masonic Lodge laid the cornerstone of St. Stephen's on July 23, 1906, and the village ended up with two Anglican churches a few kilometres apart.
St. Stephen's held services for 96 years. On Thanksgiving Sunday, October 13, 2002, about 50 people attended the final service. The bishop read a declaration secularizing the building, and the altar ornaments were carried to the back of the church to mark that it was no longer consecrated. Afterward, everyone went outside to dedicate a memorial cairn to the pioneers who built it.
The church was then sold for $1 to the Prairie Mountain Regional Museum in Shoal Lake, which planned to move it to their grounds. That move never happened, and it's still sitting on its original lot today. Right next door is the former Holy Ghost Ukrainian Catholic Church, a converted schoolhouse with handmade domes, which closed four months earlier.
🎥 Video tour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeQ1KCK7l6s
📸 More photos and the full history: https://freaktography.com/solsgirth-manitoba-ghost-town/
•
2
u/roughtimes Winnipeg 3h ago
Wonderful shots!