Tramping Lake church is 100 years old
By Joan Janzen
The village of Tramping Lake is home to St. Michael’s Church, a beautiful building constructed a century ago in 1922. Now the parishioners at St. Michael’s are busy planning a 100th-anniversary celebration which will take place on Saturday, June 11th. Mass will be celebrated at 4:00 p.m., followed by a short program and catered supper at 6:00 p.m. at the Tramping Lake Community Hall.
Christine Lang, the mayor of Tramping Lake, said there are approximately fifty residents in the village, although the number fluctuates. “When the church was built, there were about 300 people living in Tramping Lake and surrounding area, and we had three grocery stores,” she explained. Now the church and the community hall are the two remaining community facilities.
“The church is beautiful with its large stations of the cross, water fonts, statues and unique interior,” Joyce Borschneck commented in a post on social media.
The first Catholic settlers arrived in the Tramping Lake area in 1906. In that year, Father Joseph Laufer, OMI, celebrated the first Mass on Pentecost Sunday in a sod church. In 1910 a wooden church was built at the same site.
At that time, the St. Michael’s parish flourished, and plans were made for a new church to be built on the townsite. The first Mass was held in the present St. Michael’s building on Christmas Eve, 1922.
Christine said, back in the day, St. Michael’s Church was built by hand. “They didn’t have a contractor; the men and boys came together and built the church. It cost somewhere around $48,000.” The exterior of the building is done in brick and stucco.
The men dug the basement using horses and a scraper, which was basically a scoop pulled by two horses. “Someone had said it rained after they had finished digging,” Christine said. “In those days, it rained for two to three days. There was so much water, they had to scoop it out, and the basement just got deeper.”
St. Michael’s Church in Tramping Lake is one of 99 church buildings in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Saskatoon. It holds about 650 people, although the choir loft and basement are no longer used. “We used to have movies and all kinds of things going on in the basement, so did a lot of the other parishes,” Christine said.
St. Michael’s parish currently holds Mass on Wednesday and Sunday mornings each week. It’s also a popular venue for wedding ceremonies. The most recent wedding ceremony held there was a Christmas wedding on December 18th, 2021, when the church was beautifully decorated for the festive season.
The year 2022 finds the St.Michael’s Parish dwindling. “We’re a very small community; we have about 30 families,” Christine said. “And the last few years, we haven’t been able to have our usual fundraisers or fall supper.”
But those challenges didn’t stop Lang from taking the initiative in 2020. She decided to do a fundraiser on her own by making homemade pasta, and raised the amazing total of $1700.00!
Last year she recruited four more ladies, who worked for three weeks making pasta. “The first year I did it in my house; last year we went to the hall and worked there every morning. We sold 220 bags of pasta and raised about $2500.00,” Mayor Lang said. “That was quite an amount of money to raise in a few short years.”
In spite of declining numbers, the community has managed to shingle the roof of the church, paint its interior and also spent a significant amount on repairing the tower, which was leaking. The 100th anniversary will be an opportunity to celebrate their efforts and community spirit.
The parish is selling 225 supper tickets, with people coming from Rosetown, North Battleford and other areas.
