My name is Mylizza Baer. I was born in a Hutterite Colony near Portage la Prairie in 1970. Around that time the Colony needed to expand and they bought the remains of the old airfield at Macdonald Manitoba. The airfield had been closed since 1959 but there were still many houses and other buildings that remained as well as the runways and some of the airplane hangars.
I was one year old when our family moved to Macdonald. Our family had seven children at that time and we had two sets of twin girls, of which I was of the younger set. The family continued to grow when we were at Macdonald and we eventually had 6 boys and 5 girls. Initially, there were 8 families with a total of about 40 people that made the move to Macdonald. There were so many homes at Macdonald that each family was able to move into a house that fit the size of their family.
As you can imagine there was no end of things to do and places for the children to play. My earliest memories are of playing on the foundations across the road from our house and going to school right next door. I loved playing baseball in the summer and hockey in the winter. We went digging though the snow drifts in the winter months and climbing to the roof tops of the houses where the snow had piled up. There were not a lot of trees those days but there sure was a lot of snow. In the summer we would ride our bikes endlessly on the paved roads and go far and wide through all the old buildings and hangers. In the hotter months of the summer we’d go around from house to house and beg for someone to take us to Delta Beach to swim. The young people played volleyball in the old church building where we set up a volleyball net.
I went to school until I was 15 years old. This was the age when you got out of school and the children’s dining room and joined the adult work force. Work was mostly garden work of which there was a lot of. The land around the base was and still is the best land in Manitoba. When we walked through the garden after it was freshly plowed, our feet would sink down in the cool soft earth. We grew every kind of vegetable that you can imagine and spent the summer canning and preserving them. Whatever vegetables we didn’t need, were taken to town and sold in exchange for next years seeds. We had loads of work but still plenty of time to enjoy ourselves. My dad worked as the cow boss for a few years and my older brothers helped with the milking and making the hay and later they were put in charge of the chicken barn. My sisters and brothers spent many hours helping with the gathering the eggs, taping the eggs boxes and grading the eggs.
Most buildings that could be of use to us got used for agricultural purposes. #1 hangar was filled with bails for the cows. #2 hangar was used for the turkeys until in the late 80’s when a replacement building was constructed. #3 hangar was the cow barn till a new one was built on a stretch of runway. #4 hangar was used for the pigs and #5 hangar, where the lookout tower was located, was used for storage. #6 hangar was used for the machinery storage. #7 hangar also had pigs in it. There was a two story H-shaped building that was used for raising the pullets. Most of the other buildings were sold and given to other Colony’s. It was quite expensive to maintain the original hangars. Making use of new technology, it was a better investment for the Colony the build new barns than to mend and patch the old hangars, and through the years as they could afford it. New buildings were built and most of the original hangars were eventually demolished and torn down. When I was a little girl some of the hangars were already in bad shape and getting to be a dangerous place to play in. With the snow and rain coming through all those broken windows and no money to fix them up, they slowly rotted away through the years. I still remember the sad day when they tore down the steps of the lookout tower because it was getting too dangerous for us kids to play in.
As you can see in the aerial photo (1973) of the domestic site, some of the houses had already been moved. We used the crescent of houses on the lower left. There were eight families at that time but there were a few more in the later years as the young men got married. There were no more than 15 families there, even today. My home was the very first one from the left. My mom said that there used to be a big sign bolted to the side that said OFFICE. We lived there for maybe 15 years, then we moved into a another house.
The building right beside us was used for the school. There were eight children that attended school in the early 1970s and there were never more than 25 to 30 at any time. It was a one room school house with grades one to nine. In the back of that building were benches used for church services. The fifth building was used for the kitchen. In the 1980’s a new kitchen was built and that building was then used for the church and kindergarden.
The old RCAF Station at Macdonald is still occupied by the Hutterites although there is not very much left that can tell it was once a military training base. Of all of the original hangars only #6 hangar remains. It was smaller than the others and they did provide some siding in an attempt to maintain this building. There are only four houses and what we called the "H-School" left. The tarmac was broken up and the gravel sold. I moved to another Colony in 1993, at the age of 23, having spent a total of 22 years at Macdonald. The original Hutterites, who moved there in 1971, still live there today.
Courtesy of Mylizza Baer - March 2005
Updated: April 26, 2005