Historic elevator museum a tourism draw for Val Marie

For many of the 20,000 annual visitors to the Grasslands National Park, the small nearby village of Val Marie is a popular stop for tourists. The rich and intriguing histories found in small communities, such as those shared at the Val Marie Elevator Museum, are often an added bonus for visitors to the many parks in the province.

The Val Marie Elevator Museum is a volunteer-run organization that interprets the history and workings of a 1927 country grain elevator. Working closely with its partners, the Prairie Wind & Silver Sage EcoMuseum, it entices park visitors to visit the community and enjoy some memorable cultural experiences.

Alex McPhee, chair, Val Marie Heritage, Culture, and Youth Elevator Committee, believes it is important to encourage as many people as possible to explore small-town Saskatchewan life and history during their visits. McPhee says that “Val Marie is lucky” for having a community that has supported and maintained the grain elevator building over the years, appreciating its contribution to the village.

“For the last couple decades that the grain elevator has been a heritage project, it has been very well supported,” McPhee says. “The preservation was totally driven by the locals for years and years,” she adds, “a bunch of hard-working volunteers who fundraised to save the building.”

McPhee notes that quite often, “A lot of people who are inbound to the park will stop at the visitor centre and then turn around and go straight to the park, out of town.” The community noticed that “diverting more of that park traffic, and encouraging people to … stop at our stores”, was a helpful strategy.

To achieve this, the elevator museum and the eco-museum worked together to direct tourists to one another, encouraging them to walk through the village in the process — the two museums are in opposite corners of the community. Through this partnership and some new signage, the elevator saw tourist traffic increase to 200 visitors in the summer of 2023 — a significant influx for the small community. Without these efforts, the Val Marie community would miss out on a lot of tourist traffic, McPhee says.

Thanks to their efforts, the museum has grown to now offer guided tours, movie nights, and, recently, school tours and a concert. Hosting new types of activities is a way to revitalize the museum, McPhee says, and to attract bigger, more diverse crowds. When the museum hosted its first concert this year, for example, the elevator reached its full capacity of 90 people. That day, McPhee adds that, there were more people inside the elevator than there were normally in the entirety of Val Marie.

As one of the interpreter guides, McPhee sees first-hand how much the building means to people across the province. The museum receives many visitors within Saskatchewan — often, it is grandparents bringing their family to share a part of their history with them. “The emotional connection that people in Saskatchewan feel to these buildings still surprises me — I am always amazed at the power that heritage has,” McPhee says.

The museum’s volunteers plan to keep it growing and reaching as many people as possible in Val Marie and beyond. “We can do more to bring all this history to everybody in Saskatchewan,” says McPhee.

“It makes me so energetic to feel like we are adding things that weren’t there before. Everything we are doing adds to the totality of what Val Marie is like.”

The Val Marie Museum Elevator was supported for the first time this past year through SaskCulture’s Museum Grant Program (MGP), with funding from the Sask Lotteries Trust Fund.