© 2024, Christian Cassidy
Often I will see an old photo or ad and spend some time digging into its back story. Sometimes I find a great story, sometimes not. Either way, I learn a few things about the city's history. Here's my latest attempt:
March 21, 1936, Winnipeg Free Press
While researching my latest Free Press Community Review column
on the history of Winnipeg's civic clocks, I came across a creepy story
about the presence of a long-dead goat in the clock tower of the old 'gingerbread' city hall. Where did it come from and how did it get up there? Here's a look back at mentions of the goat over the decades.
The
first mention I can find of the goat skeleton comes in the March 21,
1936 edition of the Winnipeg Free Press. Photographer and columnist
Nicholas Morant led some of his Free Press colleagues up the tower to
show them the “mysterious city hall goat”. It is likely him who took
the photo shown above.
Morant asked around at city hall about
the origins of what he presumed was a mountain goat and found that it
“definitely has been there for more than 15 years” and was possibly the
remains of a stuffed exhibit from a "natural history society" operating
in city hall around 1900. (This was likely the Historical and Scientific
Society of Manitoba, forerunner to the Manitoba Historical Society,
that had a reading room and display area at city hall until they were
asked to move the Carnegie Library when it opened in 1905.)
Dead or alive, getting the goat into the tower would have been a challenge.
Piecing
together the makeup of the tower using various newspaper articles finds
that it could be accessed from the top of floor of city hall using a
narrow staircase.
The tower itself had three floors. The first
two had a large room in the centre, presumably for storage, that could
be closed off with a door. Leading up from the second floor was a curved
staircase or ladder that went to the top level where the bell and clock
works were. There were 67 stairs in total from the top of city hall to
the top of the tower.
According to Morant, the goat's remains were in the tower's second floor storage room.
July 14, 1934, Winnipeg Tribune
The
next mention of the goat skeleton comes courtesy of Winnipeg Tribune
municipal editor A. V. Thomas in a July 1934 story celebrating the 50th
anniversary of the laying of the building's cornerstone.
Thomas
wrote glowingly of the building but said of the goat: "... it is enough
to make anyone pause and shudder to come suddenly across a skeleton
lying amid the dust and dirt. What's more, the head has been severed and
lies a few feet away." (The head was likely moved during that Free
Press visit of 1932.)
Thomas was told a similar story that it
was thought to have been part of a museum display at city hall. he
added, "Whether the stuffing shifted with age or whether the goat
degenerated
from another causes, it was deemed advisable to put it away. Just how it
got into the upper precincts of the city hall is a mystery."
The skeleton had never been removed, Thomas was told, because of the difficulty of get something that large down
the narrow staircase.
October 9, 1948. Windsor Star
The goat's presence would be recounted in a story about city hall every few years.
A
September 1948 Free Press article described how local jeweller William
T. "Bill" Muirhead had been the unofficial caretaker of the clock for
over 20 years and had made the journey to visit it hundreds of times.
It noted that one of the things he has to pass is the goat: "It must have been a massive creature in life and just how it
came to its death chamber remains a mystery of the city hall. No one
goes near the skeleton for the floor is shakey and the room is locked."
The wire story was picked up by at least one other Canadian newspaper, prompting the above headline in the Windsor Star.
Looking east from clock tower, September 1900. (City of Winnipeg Archives)
The legend of the goat grew in the late 1950s.
According
to an unnamed Free Press reporter writing a retrospective of the
building in April 1960, Mayor George Sharpe started his "famous clock
tower tours" in 1954 by taking "... guileless visitors up the winding
wooden starts to the very top
of the clock tower."
Points of interest along the way were
"crude drawings on the walls" and the goat, noting that "the goat's
skeleton, still a mystery, lies on the floor
area declared unsafe so it cannot be retrieved."
May 17, 1957, Winnipeg Free Press
Mayor
Stephen Juba continued the tours when he took over as mayor in 1957,
though the purpose of his visits was not to show off its history or
views. He had long pushed for a new city hall building for Winnipeg and
took reporters and other officials up to show the poor condition of the
tower. (Since the early 1950s there was talk of removing the tower
portion the building due to its sagging fllors and numerous large
cracks.)
One Free Press reporter who went on a May 1957 tour
noted, "among the sights of the tour were the mouldering bones ... of a
goat's body left there years ago by pranksters." This first mention of
"pranksters", Juba's take on how the bones got there, would be repeated
in Free Press stories for years to come.
Demolition in 1961, U of M Digital Collections, Winnipeg Tribune Photograph Index
The old city hall was demolished starting in April 1962.
Al Barnes of the Free Press wrote a feature called "The Saga of Old City Hall" after it came down. He wrote that the story behind the the bones was never fully and that "Winnipeg is probably the only metropolis in the world whose city hall literally had a skeleton in its closet."
More about the tower from my blogs:
Selkirk Avenue's Bell Tower - West End Dumplings
Winnipeg's Civic Clock - Winnipeg Places
More "Behind the Photo'
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