The Mossbank Museum owns several unique historical items, artifacts and art pieces, but this winter, these valuables will remain stored in a compact room, still waiting to be transferred into the museum’s main building in the future. Volunteers at the museum hope these wonderful objects from Mossbank’s history will be repositioned in the central exhibit area by 2021.
“Probably next year, we’ll be starting to set up the displays in the new building,” said a Mossbank and District Museum volunteer, Ken Kirkpatrick.
Originally from Mossbank, Kirkpatrick had been living in southern Alberta. He served as a radio operator in the Canadian military, retiring as a sergeant. Kirkpatrick returned to his hometown of Mossbank a few years ago and became an active volunteer for the town’s museum. The Mossbank he’d known as a child had experienced several changes since he left in the late 1950s, but the town’s population remained steady and relatively unchanged in the years following the Second World War. “When I was a kid, the population was 300 and now it’s 300,” he said. But during the 1940s, the town experienced a short-lived population boom, as this area became an important training ground for the pilots of the British Commonwealth.
Consequently, much of Mossbank’s preserved history contained in the storage area pertained to the era of the Second World War, when the British Commonwealth Air Training Program (BCATP) maintained a Bombing and Gunnery School outside of Mossbank. From 1940-1944, 6241 military personnel were trained at the Mossbank airbase, which was one of 11 Bombing and Gunnery Schools in Canada. A mural in the storage area showed the base as it existed circa 1943.
The museum also had a drone from the Second World War used for training exercises at the air force school and base four miles east of town. A local farmer discovered the drone on his property and gave the historical curiosity to the museum. Drones in the 1940s were primitive in contrast to the unmanned aerial vehicles known today and were mostly used for target practice.
One of the most remarkable objects in the museum’s storage was a hand-built plane by Cecil Goddard. Kirkpatrick noted the plane wouldn’t pass regulations today, as he spun one of the craft’s tiny landing wheels by hand. Goddard served as a pilot in the Second World War. After the war, he became a crop duster. He was also a cottage-based aviation designer and plane builder. Goddard conceived and created 10 planes, which took about 1000 hours each to build.
Also, the museum had several woodcarvings of birds by Bernie Smith, a CN station agent. Smith was inspired by the wildfowl flying over Old Wives Lake. He sold these remarkable and life-like carvings of birds in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Europe, which the artist mailed from his Mossbank-based workshop.
