By Lisa Schick

VIDEO: Museum destroyed by fire in village of Pelly

Jun 15, 2015 | 7:00 AM

The village of Pelly has lost its history after a fire devastated the Fort Pelly-Livingstone Museum on Saturday afternoon.

All that’s left of the biggest building in Pelly is ash and a few broken brick walls. Some residents said the Fort Pelly-Livingstone Museum looked like a fortress in the town. Originally it was a school, but in the 1970s it was converted into a museum. 

Clifton Abrahamson is the president of the museum board. He said he was at the museum a little over an hour before the fire started, and everything looked fine. But, around 3 p.m. some people went past and saw smoke coming from the train car next to the museum. 

“So they got other people in there and they started taking stuff out of the museum so it wouldn’t be in danger,” said Abrahamson. 

But only a few pieces were saved. 

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Thanks to the high wind the flames caught from the train car onto the window frames on the museum, the climbed up the wall, and got into the cedar shingles.

Abrahamson said the roof was quickly on fire, and within three hours the building was “flattened” to the ground. 

“At the present time it just makes a person feel like, ‘Well I should go to bed and sleep this off,’ (because) it’s an impossible situation.”

He said there were thousands of artifacts in the museum, including scale models of Fort Pelly and Fort Livingstone, a mock grocery store, and a mock doctor’s office. 

Abrahamson has been the president of the board for six years, so he knows the artifacts well, and said many of them are very dear to him. 

“(Saturday) night when I went to bed I could hardly get to sleep thinking of this thing, and of that thing and … all gone. Things I’ve worked on, trying to refurbish to make them look like they used to do … all gone.”

The board had just finished some extensive renovations to the building that totaled about $30,000. 

Abrahamson said he didn’t know about rebuilding yet, especially since they’d had trouble raising money for the renovations. 

“How do you rebuild artifacts that are 100 years old or so, eh? You can’t bring back those things.”

As of Sunday night, the cause of the fire was still under investigation.

panews@jpbg.ca

On Twitter: @LMSchickler