Letter: Kipling Street: A family’s sacred ground

By Letter to the Editor on December 28, 2022.

Dear editor,

The land on Kipling Street that’s being re-zoned as residential and repurposed for affordable-housing, was where my family’s home once stood.

My maternal grandparents, Edward and Annie Gargett leased the land. In 1924, Annie bought the house for fifty dollars and had it brought down to the lot on Kipling Street, from where it stood on the hill, on a flatbed pulled by a team of horses.

They farmed the land and made a good life there. It’s where my mother, her sister and four brothers, as well as me and my two siblings, lived and grew up. It was like the best kept secret. Close to nature, in the middle of the city, yet so remote.

With Seven Persons Creek just across the street, generations enjoyed skating in winter, when the ice was thick enough, and fishing and catching frogs in summer. Deer and fox made their homes in our vast yard and were always a delight to see. We tobogganed down Third Avenue hill and enjoyed hikes to Kin Coulee in every season.

We were lucky. It was an idyllic place to grow up. The area was zoned as light industrial land when my parents, Ted and Ethel Helgeson, and my aunt and uncle, Walter and Kathy Gargett, who owned the house on the adjacent lot, which is now inhabited by my cousin James, were residents.

The city made an offer to buy my folks out and they accepted under certain terms. The old Success Automatic building was torn down, and the bus barn and Canada Post buildings gradually rose up. After my dad passed away in May 2003, my mom was left alone in the home she lived in for seventy-nine years, with just old familiar ghosts to keep her company.

By July, she had the cash from the city in hand and moved into an assisted-living facility. The house and detached garage were slowly destroyed. The structures were used by the fire department for simulations before they were finally demolished a year after my mom moved.

I remember sitting in my car in front of the old garage, staring at the claw marks in the metal door, made by some ravenous beast of a machine, and weeping at the sacrilege. It felt as though the memories of four generations of my family, meant nothing.

My mom always said, if they ever excavated that land they’d find a mass graveyard. A collection of bones from horses, cattle, and family pets, that died and were buried there over the decades.

For me and my family, it will always be sacred ground.

Catherine Helgeson

Sherwood Park

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