July 2, 2009

Restoration of fort a battle with nature in northern Manitoba

Building season on $5 million job limited to two frost-free months

Prince of Wales, Manitoba

For something that was supposed to be destroyed by the invading French military 227 years ago, and abandoned for most of the time since, the Prince of Wales Fort in northern Manitoba has proven remarkably resilient.

But even the sturdiest structures eventually need a little TLC, so Parks Canada is in the midst of a 10-year, $5-million effort to stabilize the massive stone walls of the fort, which once served as an icy militarized outpost of the fur trade in the northwest.

It’s a mammoth undertaking. The walls of the fort run about one kilometre in length.

They are made up of huge stones that weigh up to 2,700 kilograms each, stacked six metres high and a whopping 12 metres thick.

Complicating matters is the fact that the repair work can only be done during the two-month period when the area near Churchill is frost-free, to prevent new mortar from freezing as its sets.

“We’re dealing with some significant challenges here ... the stones are massive,” says Cam Elliott, Parks Canada’s superintendent of northern national historic sites.

The fort was built, starting in 1731, by the Hudson’s Bay Company as tensions grew between England and France over the resources of the New World.

The star-shaped structure with 42 cannons was supposed to protect the mouth of the Churchill River and draw Inuit, Cree and Chipweyan from the northern region into the fur trade.

Conditions were harsh. In the sub-arctic tundra, above the tree line, temperatures were frigid and supplies were sometimes scarce. The fort itself seemed secure. But that security didn’t last.

“The irony of this immensely defensible post is that it was easily captured,” says Gerald Friesen, a history professor at the University of Manitoba who specializes in the development of the fur trade.

In a 1782 battle that has gone down in history for its brevity, three French warships took the fort without firing a single shot when they sailed to the mouth of the Churchill River.

The fort’s governor, Samuel Hearne, decided the handful of men inside were no match for the hundreds of attackers and surrendered.

The French tried to destroy the fort, burning the interior buildings and exploding charges in the cannons, but the walls remained. As decades turned to centuries, the fort was largely forgotten but remained intact. Officials figure the frigid climate helped preserve the mortar over many decades.

In the 1930s the federal government took a renewed interest in the site. In recent years, experts realized much of the mortar was disintegrating and the massive stones were starting to move.

“The mortar has really just turned to sand and dust, and the stones, there’s nothing holding them together,” Elliot says.

Now stonemasons are taking apart and rebuilding sections of the massive walls, one at a time, using some of the same techniques used during the fort’s construction.

“We have the benefits of modern steel and aluminum scaffolding to put up against a section, and to move stones, we’ve got electric winches ... but in terms of building a stone wall today or repairing a stone wall today, it’s exactly the same methods used in the 18th century,” Elliott says.

If all goes according to plan, the scaffolding will be gone and the stone will be back in place in 2014.

Canadian Press

Print | Email | Comment