Bergenham
  Bergenhan Photo  
 

In the spring of 1893, since leaving Sweden the year before, John Bergenham found work as a CPR section man in Golden for $1.25 for a ten-hour day. That October, John’s wife Britta, four children and two brothers-in-law arrived from Sweden and the family spent the winter in the larger room of a shared cabin, eventually moving in to a log cabin that had been built by Walter Moberly and his survey crew.

Lew Bergenham, son of Frederick - the youngest of John and Britta’s nine children - is holding a family photo of his Uncle Johnny, Grandmother Britta

 

and Aunt Caroline on the family homestead that bordered both sides of the present Trans-Canada in the Hartley and Moberly School Rd. area. All three lived to be 105.

Local homesteaders of mostly Scandinavian descent built the one room Moberly School in 1915 drawing students, travelling by foot or skis, from up to three miles away. Johnny and Caroline later became active as school trustees and provided a library service for the Moberly residents by operating a mini ‘Book Mobile’ with books circulated from Golden. In 1973,

 

Johnny appeared on the popular Front Page Challenge television show, after he and Caroline had donated the 493 acres of the family homestead to the provincial government as a wildlife refuge.

The image behind Lew is one of the earliest in the exhibit taken in the late 1870s of Moberly House, first constructed to give shelter to the supplies needed by Walter Moberly’s crews when he was surveying the route for the CPR mainline. Yes, the man sitting on the right is holding a baby.