The Minchau Blacksmithing Shop
8108 101st Street
Constructed: 1925
Demolished: 2020
Alberta became an “important destination for erstwhile Germans.” Like other ethnicities, they were lured by the promises of the “last best west.” Austria, Poland, Ukraine, and Russia were the places these German-speakers had once called home. Most arrived in the newly formed province through Calgary via the Canadian Pacific Railway. Often their destinations lay elsewhere. For many, Strathcona was their Mecca, a final stopping place before heading off to “Bruderheim and Josephburg to the north, [or] Fredericksheim and Hoffnungsau (Stoney Plain) to the south and west.”
Yet, seeing the opportunities that lay at the end of the Calgary & Edmonton Railway track caused some to reconsider their farming futures. Many stayed and by the Great War Germans formed the Edmonton-region’s third-largest ethnic group. Names like Tegler, Vogel, Köermann, Krankenhagen, and Deggendorfer occupied prominent positions as businessmen, newspaper moguls, and architects. One name that would soon join was Adolf Minchau.
Born in 1889 as the son of Volga Germans, Minchau answered the call of his uncle, August, an Alberta homesteader. Gaining success in the meat and grain industries, August and his wife Carolina had “decided it was time to advertise to their relatives back in Europe. They would sponsor anyone who wanted to come and join them in Canada.
Shortly after arriving in Strathcona, the eighteen year old Adolf gained employment at John Walter’s sawmill where he learned the millwright’s trade. While there “he apprenticed as a blacksmith and practiced the skills of forge and anvil.” In 1912, learning all he could under Walter, Adolf decided to open his own business. The young man purchased a plot of land in the east-end of Strathcona, at 7711 99th Street, and set to work.
Adolf remained close to August and attended a German-language church, St. Paul’s Lutheran, near his uncle’s farmstead in Ellerslie. At mass he met Bertha Schiewe, a local Polish-German, and the two married on January 6th, 1913. Soon after “the couple established a home at 9862 77 Avenue, which served as a hostel for relatives and friends traveling through the area.” It featured one of Strathcona’s first bathtubs and telephones. “After World War I broke out in 1914 and then, soon after, the flu epidemic struck, the Minchau home was pressed into use as a kind of community hospital, since so many friends and relatives were affected.”
In 1920 the Minchaus purchased a more suitable lot for the business. It was a corner property dead centre in a light industrial area just to the east of the Canadian Pacific Railway Station. As Les Faulkner explains, “they built a larger shop and moved a family farmhouse to [the] larger lot… With the arrival of more European immigrants, and with their country relatives still needing a place to stay in Strathcona, they needed yet more room to satisfy their booming needs. They enlarged the house to twice its original size and, in 1925, erected a large brick shop on the same site to accommodate the increase in business.”
Mister and Misses Minchau became active members of Strathcona’s budding German community. Not wishing to travel outside the city for service, they help found Trinity Lutheran Church. Bertha served as its treasurer for twenty-five years. Adolf was a noted member of German Canadian Club, and in time became a branch president for the Canadian Society for German Culture. In addition to his blacksmithing efforts, Adolf was a respected landlord who owned several notable Whyte Avenue properties, including the Ross Block.
Following the outbreak of the Second World War, the Minchaus allegiance was put into question. Author Tom Monto writes: “During the first summer of World War II, two days after France’s surrender to German invaders, the provincial government established a “volunteer home defence corps” to assist the RCMP and city police forces in detecting and stopping ‘enemy aliens’ engaged in ‘fifth column’ activities.” Adolf graciously provided the assembly hall of the Ross Block to be used by the South Edmonton Battalion of the Veteran’s Volunteer Reserve. “Within a short time, however, the government put Minchau in a prisoner camp due to doubts of his loyalty.” His assets, including the Ross Block and his blacksmithing business, were seized.
Following the war, Minchau regained his business, which he tended to until his retirement in 1955. His sons, Fred and Stanley, carried on the family firm. Fred, the elder son, acted as manager, while Stanley became the secretary-treasurer. In the months following, Bertha became ill and Adolf watched her for the last years of her life. She passed on February 28th, 1960. Adolf followed on March 14th, 1971.
Stan and Fred maintained the business until early 1980 when both decided to jointly retire. “Fred was blunt when asked why he and his brother have decided to close the firm,” the Edmonton Journal reported. “‘We’re fed up. When I have to work harder now than five years ago it’s time to get out.’ The problem is simple. They just can’t get good help. ‘We should be running twelve men, but we’re down to five,’ he says.” At the time the Minchau shop was purportedly the last traditional blacksmith shop operating in Edmonton. Fred bemoaned that people would have to travel to Onoway for service instead. A number of their antique crafting tools — many once Adolf’s — along with two wooden doors were donated to the Provincial Museum.
In the decades following, the Minchau’s shop sat without much purpose. Intermittently a new business would take up the space, but they rarely lasted. Finally on March 23rd, 2018, some news came. The building’s owners, Cejay Ventures, wanted it gone. It was an unfortunate turn of events. Sadly, records revealed the City had approved an upzoning in 1987 that allowed for a twelve storey building. Paula Simons noted “it’s a zoning virtually no other site in the neighbourhood has. That makes the property remarkably valuable.”
For three years prior to the news, the City had been wrangling with Cejay. They wanted elements of the structure incorporated into a new development — Cejay declined. Even an unprecedented “generous financial package” — estimated to cover fifty percent of projected restoration costs — wasn’t enough to sway them, Robert Geldart, the City's Senior Heritage Planner, told C.B.C. News. Scott Ashe, Principal Heritage Planner, noted the property owner, “in good faith, looked at the options to retain it… This is the end of a long road exploring things.”
The City’s hands were tied. As part of the Alberta Historic Resources Act they would be forced to pay the “lost development value” of the site if they forcibly applied a Municipal Historic Resource designation. “That can be very costly,” Geldart informed the C.B.C. “It's very challenging for the city to designate against the owner's wishes.” It’s “unlike legislation in most other provinces” the National Trust for Canada lamented, which listed the building on their nation-wide survey of top ten endangered historic sites.
Then the Province stepped in. A motion put forward by City Council appealed to them to try and assist. A historic resource impact assessment was ordered by the highest level, and any demolition plans were temporarily halted. The report aimed at detailing the building’s cultural and architectural significance, condition, and the feasibility of incorporating it into a new development.
Two years later the report came back. It revealed that the building was beyond salvage and demolition was soon approved. Over the night of September 14th and 15th, 2020, ninety-five years of history was brought down by an excavator.
It’s easy to write off Adolf’s building as nothing important, too boring, too young, or just one of many blacksmiths that once lined city streets. While Minchau’s blacksmithing shop may not have been anything significant architecturally, it was significant for the place it held within the city’s cultural history. Minchau’s shop spoke to the history of Edmonton’s Germanic community and the trials it faced. It spoke to the history of a man, representative of many who came seeking opportunity. It spoke to a field which has long lost its prominence in society. It spoke to the history of development in Edmonton’s Southside.
As Alex Abboud, chair of the Edmonton Heritage Council, remarked, the revulsion around its demolition isn’t “just about the building itself… it’s about how a building tells a story of who we are as a city… They form a tapestry. They tell a story of Edmonton and how we've developed as a city in its settlement era.”
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Sources:
“Pioneer Area Resident Dies,” Edmonton Journal, February 29, 1960.
“Pioneer Blacksmith Dies at 81,” Edmonton Journal, March 17, 1971.
“Last Blacksmith Shop Calls it Quits,” Edmonton Journal, December 7, 1979.
“Blacksmith Shop Closed,” Edmonton Journal, April 5, 1980.
Brent Wittmeier, “Exploring Our German Connection,” Edmonton Journal, September 21, 2013.
Paula Simons, “New Tools Needed to Keep Old Edmonton From Crumbling Around Us,” Edmonton Journal, April 7, 2018.
Natasha Riebe, “Historic Blacksmith Shop in Old Strathcona Could be Lost to Wrecking Ball,” C.B.C. News Edmonton, March 28, 2018,
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/edmonton-heritage-buildings-1.4596178.
Hina Alam, “Blacksmith Shop Makes Endangered List,” Edmonton Journal, May 24, 2018.
Les Faulkner, “Adolf Minchau Blacksmith,” The Strathcona Plaindealer Vol. XXI Issue 1 (Summer, 1997).
Tom Monto and Randy Lawrence, Old Strathcona — Edmonton’s Southside Roots, 2nd ed. (Edmonton: Alhambra Books, 2011), 116, 118, 304.
Henderson’s Edmonton City Directory, (1915) s.v. “Minchau,” pg. 502.
“List of Entires,” Germans in Alberta, accessed on September 14, 2020,
Emily Mertz, “Historic A. Minchau Blacksmith Shop in Edmonton Torn Down,” Global News Edmonton, September 14, 2020,
https://globalnews.ca/news/7334268/historic-a-minchau-blacksmith-shop-old-strathcona-demolition/.
“A. Minchau Blacksmith Shop,” National Trust for Canada, accessed September 14, 2020,
https://nationaltrustcanada.ca/nt-endangered-places/a-minchau-blacksmith-shop.
