MOUNTAIN VIEW COUNTY — Finding clues and putting together historical puzzle pieces on the path to uncovering a portion of the province’s heritage is what drove a Bergen-area author to become an archeologist.
“It’s like a puzzle that you just kind of get sucked into because there’s all these little clues and hints, and using genealogy, historic documents, maps, photos, you get all these different clues and you put them together,” said Shari Peyerl, who has recently been busy with a number of book launch events, including one in July at the Sundre Municipal Library that involved a visual slideshow presentation.
“It’s kind of like a detective game,” Peyerl told the Albertan, explaining how finding answers to questions often leads to even more questions.
“And you never quite get to the end because you never know where the end is,” she said, laughing.
“That’s the beauty of it, is the research kind of leads you wherever it wants to,” she said. “I guess what I’m saying is I became obsessed. That’s how I ended up on this path.”
In 2009, she began to volunteer at Glenbow Ranch Provincial Park, located near Calgary along the north bank of the Bow River in Rocky View County.
In a nutshell, her field of study as an archeologist revolves primarily around Alberta’s heritage pioneer settler days.
“That would be the summary of it,” she said, adding much of her attention has been focused on the late 1800s as well as earlier 1900s and the arrival of Canadian Pacific Railway that paved the way for the development of ranches around the turn of the last century.
“And then you get more settlers coming in and then you get industry developing with the development of the quarry,” she said, referring to the Glenbow sandstone quarry that in part inspired the title of her book.
Alberta's Cornerstone
“It’s called Alberta’s Cornerstone because the focus of the book is the Glenbow quarry – the sandstone quarry,” she explained. “The Glenbow sandstone quarry provided the stone for so many really important government buildings in Alberta.”
To name just a few examples, she said rock hewn from the quarry was used in the construction of the Alberta legislature building, Government House as well as the original Calgary city hall.
“Glenbow Quarry is, in my mind, the cornerstone of Alberta – it built the structures of the government,” she said.
Yet there is a sort of double entendre behind her book’s title.
“The secondary reason is, because part of my excavation was to search for a particular cornerstone at Glenbow Village,” she said, adding the book recounts her experience of being involved in a 2017 project to rediscover and unearth a small piece of history that had been all but lost to time.
“It was a complicated story,” she said.
Retracing past steps
In 1973, a photograph of the stone at the old townsite was taken during the first archeological survey that was conducted by a group of aspiring archeologists who simply walked across the land.
“You have to remember that in ’73, the archeology department at the U of C was just starting up,” she said. “So, it was students who were walking and doing this survey.”
They took a photograph and wrote on the back of the print that the image was of the cornerstone, but neglected to include one critical detail for future archeologists who might wish to retrace their steps.
“They didn’t say exactly where it was,” she said.
Using the photograph as a starting point and branching out from there to dive into archives of aerial photographs, satellite imagery, land titles and historical documents, she “combined all these clues.” Yet the stone’s location remained elusive.
“I couldn’t find the stone on its own,” she said.
Finding the missing pieces
However, names engraved on the stone yielded more clues to chase after, leading her down another path that enabled her to find the missing puzzle pieces to figure out what building the cornerstone originally belonged to.
Equipped with that knowledge, she was then able to track down the people who were involved with the structure, and from their used land title documents with a map to “figure out exactly where it is,” she said.
The stone was rediscovered in 2017.
“The day that we went out to walk over the land, we knew where we should walk to and I looked down and there it was,” she said. “You couldn’t actually tell right way because the writing had been so damaged.”
But the stone was in the location they expected to find it, and a fragment of the surface with writing on it was found during the excavation.
Bouncing up and down with enthusiasm upon making the discovery, she said with a hearty laughter when asked if it was better than winning the lottery, “I would say it’s a more personal accomplishment than you would get when you buy a ticket.”
After all, winning the lottery is a random luck of the draw, she said.
Discovery a culmination of work
“But this was my culmination of a whole bunch of research all coming together, and then you’re able to say I figured out the puzzle,” she said.
The Glenbow townsite, where the last person left in 1927, is now mostly a bareland ghost town with people walking along nearby pathways largely unable to physically see any signs there had once been a settlement there.
“The only standing structure that the general public sees is in the commercial area,” she said, referring to an old general store and post office that now remains in ruins built out of wood.
“But in the townsite itself, all of the buildings were either taken away, salvaged for lumber or burned down at the end the village,” she said, adding the book also summarizes the history of the Glenbow Ranch Provincial Park area.
“There were some people that I researched for the Glenbow project that could be an entire book in themselves,” she said.
“It is definitely settler-focused as opposed to Indigenous, although I do mention in the book that there are indigenous sites in the park and people have been there from time immemorial. So, I’m not negating that in any way – I want to celebrate that as well and make sure that people know that those things are there.”
Peyerl went on to explain that while she knows how to analyze archeological remains, she nevertheless does not feel like qualified voice to speak on behalf of another culture.
Prior to the pandemic, Peyerl – who holds both a bachelor of science as well as a masters degree from the University of Calgary – was living part-time in a Bergen-area home she bought in 2011. But she has over the past couple of years been spending more time there.
“We love our place in Bergen,” she said. “When the pandemic hit, we essentially evacuated the city.”
