The outside seems serene and quaint. There are flowers under the windowsill that make it seem like a cozy little cottage. Inside, however, there’s an inch of dust and cobwebs that pay homage to its hundred years. Two massive water tanks take up most of the tiny space inside, so there’s no doubt that this structure is the site of Humboldt’s one and only water tower.
“Pressure from the tower forced water into all the mains and all the taps in people’s homes in town, that was its purpose,” said Dan Steiner, a member of the Water Tower Committee that committed to saving the building in the mid 1990s. “Before that, people depended on water delivery door-to-door and from wells and things like that. The tower was a step towards getting an adequate water supply for the town.”
The water tower was built in 1915. This year, it’s turning 100 and the committee that’s protected, preserved, and restored it for the last two decades wants to throw it a party. They’re planning to have kids activities, entertainment, and tours inside the tower. Danish Oven will even be baking a cake for the event in the shape of a water tower.
“Come on down on Aug. 30 to have a look at it,” said Steiner. “We’re offering tours at the top, but they may be limited because we don’t know if we can accommodate everybody.”
Though the committee is offering tours now, the town actually discontinued use of the water tower in 1987 when they couldn’t keep enough water in it to supply the whole town. It was abandoned and left to rot away until they could find another use for it or tear it down. If it wasn’t being ignored or forgotten, it was being used as a dumping site for miscellaneous stuff that the City didn’t know what to do with.
By 1995, the City had finally come to a decision: they were going to tear it down. Were it not for the determined actions of a group of citizens, the city would have one less landmark heritage site.
“Nothing was being done with it; it was just standing there deteriorating,” said Steiner. “We thought it was a heritage building and Norman Duerr is passionate about heritage, so we got a meeting together.”
At that meeting, they invited someone from Heritage Saskatchewan to come down. With his advice, they were able to convince the City to give them a chance to restore it rather than ripping it down. To give it further protection, they were able to get the water tower designated as a municipal heritage site.
“(The man from Heritage Saskatchewan) said we had to maintain the character of the building and not change it too significantly,” said Steiner. “We had to keep it as near to its physical shape or purpose as when it was first constructed in 1915, but they did say it would be okay to go ahead and adaptively reuse it.”
The committee had agreed that the best way to invest life back into the tower would be by making it into a tourist site. They figured it was too small for anything else like a restaurant or a coffee shop, plus there wasn’t any furnace in there to heat it during the winter.
Once that decision was made, the real work began. The tower had been out of use nearly a decade by that point and needed some major fixing up. The siding on the outside had to be redone, as did the painting. The biggest job though, was inside ceiling above the water tank that acted as a floor for the upstairs room.
“There were holes in the roof where the pigeons got in and nested,” said Steiner. “The pigeon manure was two feet deep on the top of the tank and everywhere else. In order to clean it up, removing that was our first step.”
Four brave members from the newly formed water tower committee donned suits, masks, and gloves, slogged through that vile feces, and shoveled it all up. They attached a large plastic pipe to a truck outside, ran it up between the water tank and its wooden housing structure, and then shoveled the manure into it so it would go straight into the truck box. It took them about a week or two, but they finally managed to get it all.
Oh and by the way, that was done in the winter with pickaxes and shovels.
Once that was done, they were able to get a company from Manitoba to come in and do some of the legwork restorations (the company wouldn’t touch it until the bird poop was cleaned up). They took all the cedar siding on the outside off, sanded it, reapplied it, and painted it. Then they redid the top of the tower by replacing the cedar shingles and laid a concrete base on the floor around the tank since it was starting to fall apart.
More than $100,000 went into these repairs and refurbishment. Approximately $30,000 came from Heritage Saskatchewan while the City put in about $80,000 over the years. The first round of repairs and cleanup finished by 2004, but the tower required another facelift this year before the party.
They also made one other rather drastic change, which one might say is the crowning jewel of the committee’s accomplishments: the inside spiraling staircase that lead to the top of the tower.
“We decided to make ours into something reusable. There were all sorts of ideas: a restaurant at the top, a restaurant at the bottom, a coffeehouse on the top, but we settled on making it into a tourist attraction by putting a stairway in,” said Steiner. “People like climbing. All around the world, they go places, they climb stairs and they look at stuff. So we decided to do that.”
Once a person’s climbed 80 feet to the top of the tower, the view is breathtaking. The landing that encircles the top of the tower gives a person an unobstructed panoramic view of the entire area around Humboldt and beyond.
To get to that view, a person has to climb exactly 143 steps to get to the top. Steiner and two other volunteers, one of who was Hubert Possberg, put 10 years into building that staircase step by step. Two of them welded the whole thing together and Steiner installed all of the wooden steps.
To mark the importance of the staircase, Steiner said the committee has started selling each of the steps. Anyone who wants to commemorate a family member or friend can purchase a step and have a plaque with the engraved name attached to one of the steps.
At the bottom of the staircase, there will also be a book on a pedestal. Each page will be dedicated to a different step and include a write-up about the person being remembered. So far, Steiner says they have already sold almost 90 steps and they expect the nameplates to be installed by the time of the birthday party.
Despite how far they’ve managed to come, the committee’s project wasn’t always so well received or supported.
“It was an uphill battle, we had to change attitudes and ideas that people had. A lot of people at the time thought it was a piece of junk, that it should be torn down and leveled, and that it was an eyesore,” said Steiner. “We didn’t think of it that way; we thought of it as an old building, a heritage building and something that we should preserve and save so future generations could see what was done and how the city has progressed.”
Steiner, along with Duerr and the other committee members, believe it’s imperative that pieces of history like this be remembered. He said it’s important that people remember the story of how Humboldt began so they can see how far it’s progressed and that includes remembering how people obtained an adequate water supply.
Now that so much work and money has been put into it, he is fairly sure it won’t be too easy to tear it down, especially as it’s a heritage site. The only remaining concern is who’s going to take over responsibilities of the water tower in the next 10 or 20 years?
“We’re all getting very old. We’ve lost some people to death and some people moved away,” said Steiner. “I like to say that’s the only two ways you can get off the committee: if you die or move away.”
He may make jokes like that, but it’s true that the next generation will have to start stepping up and taking responsibility for preserving their heritage. Steiner said they’ve already got an enthusiastic student that comes to volunteer her time and efforts whenever possible.
As for the rest of the residents, people can also help out by making contributions.
“We could always use more money,” he said. “We have designated work to be done inside the building that’s beside it. It doesn’t look very good right now because we’ve had a couple of fires and the fire department has thrown lots of water into it and the ceiling collapsed on the floor. The walls were partially burnt up and they’ve been repaired, but we need lots of money to fix that up and make it presentable.”
For people who are curious or who haven’t been inside the water tower before, Steiner encourages them to come out on Aug. 30 to take a look around and take a tour to the top. The place will be fixed up and will wear its heritage status proudly.
“We’re all too much in a hurry to just rip down anything that’s old. We’ve lost our church, we’ve lost our school, and the railway station is up in the air,” said Steiner. “So this committee, headed by Norman Duerr, decided to make some kind of an effort to restore this building and I believe we’ve succeeded.”
