The pale yellow paint, protected from the elements for decades under plywood letters, is fading on the 90-year-old weathered gray dairy barn at the southern end of Winnipeg.
The Riverbend dairy barn and the neighboring two-story house will soon be bulldozed and developed.
“You know, it’s progress, so you have to accept it,” said Lillian Gober, the family matriarch who has lived on the St. Mary Road property for 68 years until she was forced to leave in May 2021.
Built in 1932, the farm has been a rural outpost for many years, surrounded by several other farms and market gardens.
Now the city approached the farm, and the River Park South faced him.
For safety reasons, due to the increased traffic in the area, the nearby intersection of Marianski Road and Perimeter Highway gets a new junction.
Once a completely rural property, it is located on Sveta Maria Street and the Perimeter highway, where the city now has to build a junction. (Pat Kaniuga / CBC)
Now the farm is an obstacle and the property is expropriated.
“I was taken away because of the new extension,” said Gober, 87, who now lives a few miles east of the old mansion.
She moved to the farm in 1954, when she was 19, after marrying R. George Gobert. They raised four children – three sons and a daughter – while entertaining school groups on field trips, customers buying milk and packs from relatives and friends.
“I’ve always loved people stopping by and having a cup of tea, lunch or whatever. It was like a main train station and a lot of people were just stopping by, ”Gober said.
Much of the property was shrouded in trees, creating a paradise behind this green screen where children Gober and their cousins and friends played, rode dirty bicycles and lived around animals.
There was even a grass landing strip just north of the farm called Gobert’s Field, which R. George used to harvest.
The barn’s plywood cut honors Rockwood Romarnuk, a Gobert bull that won numerous award ribbons, including one at the 1955 Royal Winter Fair in Toronto. (Submitted by April Gober)
“When the dairy was designed, they had a landscape architect who designed the yard and it was gorgeous,” said April Gober, the single daughter.
It was full of country life, and the city was far away.
“My earliest memory is that the first set of lights was in Dakota,” April said.
This is where St. Mary now crosses Dakota Street and Dunkirk Drive, about five miles north of the dairy farm.
“I was in high school in Dakota [Collegiate]. “People wouldn’t take me home because it was too far away,” April said.
Cattle across the River Heights
The farm was started by April’s grandfather, also named George, one of seven boys from Belgium. Everyone eventually starts their own dairy.
The first was on Brock Street in River Heights when the area was still rural. After George bought the property in St. Mary’s, he took some cattle and went with them to St. Vital.
He walked the animals from Brock to Elm Park Bridge, past Kingston Crescent to St. Mary’s Road, and south.
“My grandmother was going to tell this story and she said they left some presents for the people in Kingston,” April said. “It was a high-end neighborhood, so I got some free manure.”
Over the years, other calves and bulls have come from the Trappist convent in St. Norbert. As a woman, Gober was not allowed in, so she waited on the road for one of the monks to carry the purchase in a sack of weapons.
One of these bulls, named Rockwood Romarnuk, won numerous awards, including at the 1955 Royal Winter Fair in Toronto. In honor of his achievements, his plywood cut was erected near the top of the barn in the 1960s.
The house and other buildings on the property have been used by scooters and coupons since Lillian Robert was due to move out in May 2021 (Randall McKenzie / CBC)
1975 marked a major change for Gobert. The dairy business closed and the land was sold to Qualico Developments, which began work on River Park South.
This community is growing and includes more than 8,000 homes and businesses, a community center, a library, a shopping center, eight schools, parks, sports fields, playgrounds and three lakes.
Paradise lost
The Gobert family continued to live on the property, renting it from Cualico and running a grain farm until he retired in 2008. R. George died in 2012.
Although it has not functioned for 10 years, the farm remains a fortified part of St. Vital’s fabric. People always recognize the name Gober and pass on their own memories, April said.
Now everything is slowly being erased. The trees are gone, cut down in late March to make room for equipment.
“It was like an auger bulldozer in the front and it just mowed them down,” April said.
As Gober “talks to me” to prepare for the demolition, April can’t wait to see it all go. After Gober moved out, the buildings became a haven for squatters and parties.
April Gober posed for a 1993 wedding photo near the sign she had corrected years earlier to add the word daughter. (Submitted by April Gober)
“The property and buildings here were not respected. It was difficult when I saw that the house was being lived in and people were stealing wood from the barn, wood from the elevator,” April said.
“It seems insulting how much they took care of this yard and its buildings and what they mean to my family.
In a sense, the demolition of buildings will preserve the past as she wants to remember it.
“The buildings will disappear, but they do not keep the memories. It was a great place, “April said.
One of those memories is the time when April, 16, used black paint to add a “daughter” to a barn sign that read “George Robert and Sons.” She also drew an R in front of George to clarify the change of owners.
She later took wedding photos of him.
Since then, both editions have been deleted.
An aerial image of the Riverbend dairy farm shows that the River Park South is colliding with it. (Google Maps)
The elevator at the back of the property went down on Tuesday while April and Robert watched.
“And it was good. We sat there applauding him,” April said.
The demolition of the barn and the house was delayed because lead paint was found on the walls.
“It’s a matter of permission, because it’s dangerous material right now,” April said, but she and Robert will probably be there again when it’s time to go down.
And if they want to reconsider something more than a memory, a number of things were donated by Gober to the Historical Society and Museum “St. Vital ”, including an old wall phone with a crank and a piece of Rockwood plywood.
“They did a great job of repainting it and it’s beautiful in the museum,” Gober said.
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