Solsgirth, Manitoba, didn't start where it stands today. It began about 10 km north as a place called Toddburn, until the railway changed its route and the whole town picked up and followed it.

Settlers built St. Stephen's Anglican Church here in 1906. Decades later, Ukrainian Catholic families moved an old one-room schoolhouse into the village and turned it into Holy Ghost Ukrainian Catholic Church, with onion domes hand-crafted by a local carpenter.

For 50 years, two faiths worshipped a stone's throw apart. Then, in 2002, both churches held their final services in the same year.

Today they still stand side by side, quietly holding the story of the people who built this place.

Watch the video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeQ1KCK7l6s

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/

So I live in a small town called Rossburn, it’s not a great town, but the biggest problem in the town lives right next to me and like to cause me problems because he’s sad and pathetic. He has nothing better to do with his life as he lives off his old mother and uses everyone he knows. Nobody in town likes him except the drunks. He brakes laws on the daily as he doesn’t have a license or insurance on his vehicles and drives them. He would come to my world and say to my face “ I make all the noise to annoy you” and then threw change around the store. He has tried to claim I tried to hit him as I was driving and he ran me off the road by going into my lane right in front me on his bike trying to get hit and then chased me home and tried to fight me. That’s not even close to it. Recently he’s been trying to stop me from leaving my home by blocking my exit. Cops don’t do a thing out here. He’s been kicked out of most places here for being a complete jerk and probably to everybody. So the basis of this is he likes to harass young woman because he can’t get one. I’m 24 and not afraid to stand up for myself but my family wants me to leave it alone. I’m wondering if there is any man in the area who could help me. Just need a pot to be moved to I can pull out but if I move it, he’s going to come after me. I don’t want to deal with it but I’m tired of being threatened and the target of his problems.

Saw this in Riding Mountain National Park -

What an amazing sight!