ELK POINT – So many schools have booked tours of Fort George and Buckingham House Provincial Historic Site this year that “We have opened extra days for May and June to fit more in,” program coordinator Suzanna Wagner told the Friends of the Forts at last week’s meeting. She also introduced this year’s interpreters, Al Dilger, Micah Urquhart and Casey Urquhart, and her new area supervisor Chris Weber.
Even after adding Tuesdays to the schedule until the end of the school year, “We already have a waiting list for 2025.”
The school tours include “lots of Grade 7s and Grade 4s,” she noted, adding that visits to the fur trade era site fit in with the curriculum for those grades, “and we will have 281 Grade 1s coming for bison hunts,” where the little visitors fashion paper spears and head out to track down an interpreter in bison costume.
With the overload of school tours, the site’s website indicates that the staff are unable to conduct guided tours while the school visitors are on site, and others wishing for a tour are asked to arrive after 2:30 p.m. on school days, or visit the site on Saturdays or Sundays until the end of June.
Fort George and Buckingham House will return to their usual 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Wednesday through Sunday schedule when schools close for the summer, and will once again offer special events on the weekends through July and August.
Those programs will offer visitors to learn more about what life was like for ‘The People of Fort George and Buckingham House’ on the first weekends of July and August, and on the second weekends, learn more about the archaeological digs of the past and how they were conducted on the second weekends, including having the opportunity to do a little digging themselves in the bins previously reserved for students.
‘The Bounty of the Land,’ on the third weekends, will offer visitors the opportunity to taste freshly made pemmican, which back in the 1790s was the portable food that fuelled the fur brigades as they paddled their loads of furs down the river to eastern Canada markets, and the boats they used on those river voyages, from York boats to canoes, will be the theme of the final weekends of each month.
