A tight-knit rural community outside of Morden gathered Sunday for an annual event that brings people together at a historical site.
The community picnic was held at the Dunston United Church, which is the last remaining building from what long ago was the community of Nelsonville.
“Nelsonville was at approximately 1,000 to 1500 people when the railway came through … but the railway went and bought land at Morden and put the railway through there,” said committee chairperson Grant Spencer. “So after that, the majority of the buildings got moved to Morden … and there was other buildings that even got moved to Miami.
“So this building has got a lot of memories to it, and it has been kind of a centre for the Dunston community.”
The spring picnic often draws upwards of 100 community members, but people can use the site year round as well.
“We now have a baseball diamond … the land’s been donated to us by Miller Farms, and in August we’re going to put up a backstop in there, so people can come and enjoy it at other times, other than the picnic time,” Spencer shared. “Families can come in here and have a picnic and have a baseball game and enjoy it.”
And the Dunston community is now raising funds to do a vital project for the upkeep of the building.
“We’ve done a bunch of fundraising to be able to lift the church off its old foundation,” said Spencer. “It was built in 1895, and the foundation was fieldstone, so we’re in the process of having that lifted off, and a new foundation will be put underneath it, and there’ll be a new step and a wheelchair ramp, and then the building will be scraped and painted and be fresh and ready to go again.
“It’s a fairly major project,” he observed. “It’s about a $55,000 job, and we had $20,000 from the community, from the local people in the community raised, and then between other government programs, we had $7,000 from the Miami and Area Foundation; we had $10,000 from the community builders program, RM of Thompson, and we had $2,500 that we just received from the Morden Thrift Store.
“We’re quite, quite excited to get that support, and then we had a heritage foundation step up and we’re getting a grant for $23,000 from them, so we have the funds in place,” he continued. “The work is going to start on July 6. They’re going to lift the building off and start working on the foundation.”
Spencer noted there are a lot of families in the area with strong connections to the site.
“My dad had 11 siblings in his family, and all of them went to church here, so it means a lot to our family,” he said. “Our family’s been farming here for 130 years or so, and most of the people that are coming here are families that were settled in here, so this matters a lot to people in this area.”
“And we knew we needed to do something about the foundation, so we took it upon ourselves get working on that.”
Spencer and others are motivated to keep up the building and the site.
“It is important to me … and that’s why we want to make sure that the building stays structurally sound,” he said. “Seven or eight years ago, we put brand new shingles on the roof, and we want to keep the church in good shape.”
And there are some more plans in the works.
“Next year, we hope to have a veterans memorial site in here,” Spencer said. “Right now, I’ve got four flags from the Morden Legion from members that lived here … and next year we hope to have a memorial. We hope to have that all inside the church next year.
“This is important. It’s a wonderful spot.”
