Category: Projects

Sneak Preview of 2025 at the Grist Mill: Celebrating 40 Years of History and Community

Hello friends,

As I look back on 2024, I can’t help but feel deeply grateful. It’s been an incredible season, full of energy, enthusiasm, and community support. From sold-out concerts and packed long-table dinners to thriving workshops and memorable community events, 2024 has shown us just how much the Grist Mill and Gardens means to so many people. With your support, we’ve been able to grow in ways we hadn’t imagined, and it’s with that momentum that we’re planning an unforgettable 2025.

Next year, we’ll be celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Grist Mill as a heritage site. We’re pulling out all the stops to make it a year of even more engaging programs, community events, and unforgettable experiences. I’d like to give you a sneak peek into some of what’s coming up as we get ready for this special year.

Building on Success: Key Events and Dates for 2025

Our 2025 season will start off strong, with a mix of familiar traditions and exciting new additions:

  • April 20th: Community Easter Egg Hunt
    We’re thrilled to kick off the season with our Easter Egg Hunt, a beloved community event that brings families together for a day of fun and discovery.
  • April 25th: Official Opening Day
    Join us for our opening day as we welcome visitors back to the Grist Mill for the season! We’re eager to showcase some of the changes we’ve made to the grounds over the winter.
  • May 11th: Mother’s Day Tea
    Our Mother’s Day Tea has become a cherished tradition, and this year, we’re planning even more treats and lovely surprises to celebrate the special women in our lives.
  • June 15th: Father’s Day Pancake Breakfast
    A hearty breakfast is the perfect way to celebrate dads! We’re cooking up something special to make this Father’s Day extra memorable.
  • June 28th, July 26th, August 23rd: Night Markets
    Our Night Markets have become a true highlight of the summer season. These evenings will feature an expanded list of vendors, more entertainment, and the same magical, twinkling lights under the night sky.
  • July 12th: Teddy Bear Picnic
    This summer favorite is back and better than ever, with activities and crafts for the little ones and their beloved teddy bears.
  • July 7th to August 15th: Kids Day Camps
    After an enthusiastic response in 2024, our kids’ day camps will return, offering little adventurers six weeks of hands-on activities, crafts, and fun outdoor learning.
  • September 27th-28th: Heritage Fall Fair
    The Fall Fair will bring a weekend of heritage displays, contests, and family fun. We’ll have some exciting surprises lined up to make this year’s fair a real showstopper.

Special Anniversary Plans: Celebrating Our Heritage

To honor the Grist Mill’s 40th anniversary as a heritage site, we’re also introducing some special events and programs designed to celebrate our roots and bring our community together:

  • Our First-Ever Grist Mill Gala Event
    We’re looking forward to host our first formal gala, an evening of celebration with historical charm, a memorable meal, and live entertainment. This event will be a wonderful way to connect with friends and supporters of the mill and celebrate some of the incredible folks who’ve made this special place what it is today. More details will be available in the spring.
  • 40th Anniversary Exhibition
    We’re just starting work on a special anniversary exhibition that will feature a timeline of the Grist Mill’s evolution over 40 years, highlighting significant moments, key figures, and the impact of the community’s support.
  • Heritage Skills Festival
    Join us for a festival dedicated to traditional skills and trades. This weekend-long event will offer hands-on demonstrations in blacksmithing, weaving, and more, providing visitors a chance to learn about the crafts that were essential to daily life when the Grist Mill was first built.
  • Time Capsule Opening and Reburial
    We’re excited to open the Grist Mill time capsule, a cherished piece of our site’s history, and add new items to reflect the present day. We’ll then rebury the capsule to preserve our legacy for future generations.
  • Special Products and Souvenirs
    To commemorate our 40th anniversary, we’ll be offering limited-edition merchandise next season with a true vintage feel. These items will let you take a piece of the Grist Mill home with you!

We’re also starting work on a special project close to my heart: a book about the nearly 150-year history of Barrington Price’s grist mill. This book will capture stories of the site’s early days and its evolution, honoring the people and the community that have helped shape it.

2025: A Year to Celebrate Our Community

What truly makes the Grist Mill special is the community that surrounds it – and that means all of you. This past year, your support has allowed us to grow and evolve, and it’s what drives us forward as we look to 2025. I’m excited to see how we can continue building on this success, bringing more people together, and creating lasting memories for everyone who steps onto the Grist Mill grounds.

Thank you for making 2024 such a memorable year. We’re looking forward to welcoming you back in 2025 for our 40th anniversary celebrations – it’s going to be a year to remember!

Warmly,
Chris Mathieson
General Manager, Grist Mill and Gardens Historic Site

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Big Renovations Underway

New cabinets and concrete countertops in our kitchen.

Through the off-season, we’ve been busy with all sorts of improvement projects around the site, from kitchen renovations and washroom upgrades to plumbing and electrical improvements. We’re also significantly expanding the deck around our Visitor’s Centre, reorganizing all our gardens (and adding some new ones) and much, much more!

As difficult as COVID has been for us (since we rely on tourist visits and hosting large events), we’ve been really fortunate in finding grants and other supports that are allowing us to make some much-needed improvements on the site.

A new wrap-around deck for our Visitor’s Centre makes the perfect place to enjoy lunch in our garden

We’re now in the process of installing new site furniture (benches, garbage barrels) as well as updated informational signage. In fact, the Grist Mill Foundation volunteer group will soon be offering up dedication plaques on our new benches as a special fundraiser for their work. Make sure you subscribe to our newsletter to be among the first to hear about this unique opportunity to commemorate a loved one or special event on our spectacular grounds.

New slab benches provide the perfect places to stop and contemplate the beauty around you.

We’re particularly excited about the upgrades behind the scenes, like all the improvements to our kitchen including new cabinets, concrete countertops, electrical upgrades as well as a new commercial range and oven that will give us even more capacity for our Pantry Share program, for catering special events here and elsewhere and for our popular lunch service.

Serious upgrades to our kitchen equipment!

We’re also excited about our ongoing garden upgrades, which are intended to bring back some of the incredible heritage seed research and preservation done by the amazing Sharon Rempel back in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. It’s truly amazing how many rare heritage varieties of food and ornamental plants she was able to collect, display and share. Although bringing back her work is a long-term project, this is the season that visitors will see the largest changes to our gardens as we massively reconfigure them in exciting ways!

With all this big work happening on site right now, we hope you can make plans to come visit us this summer, we’ve got some really big things to show you!

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Project: The Birdbox

It may not look like much, but that little black box is running a fully-powered computer dedicated to listening to and analyzing birdsong on our site. Using microphones, data on the six thousand most common bird species around the world, and some amazing software, it can listen and analyze what it hears in real time.

This project started a little over a year ago when we first discovered an amazing iPhone app called BirdNET, a project out of the Cornell University Lab of Ornithology and the Chemnitz Institute of Technology. Using your phone’s microphone, you can record and submit bird calls to their system for near-instant analysis. On a walk or in your backyard, often you hear birds before you can see them and we loved being able to pull out our phones and record anytime we heard an interesting bird song.

Hour-by-hour breakdown of the species the box has identified this morning.

We couldn’t help but wonder how we could offer that feature as a service to those visiting our beautiful heritage site; because of our unique combination of tended gardens and old creekside cottonwoods, plus being on a major migratory pathway, we get an awful lot of interesting bird visitors. After a little research, we discovered that there were several efforts underway to take the key features of BirdNET and have them run on a kind of small hobby computer called a Raspberry Pi. This special software has been written by a small group of enthusiastic volunteers and is still in active development, constantly adding new features and improving reliability.

The process of setting up our bird box was a little technical, but we’re excited that we’ve now been collecting data for a week and hope to soon upgrade the microphone as well as put the whole thing in a solar-powered, weatherproof case. Eventually, we hope to give our visitors access to the recordings and statistics through our website as well as have some sort of automatically-updating signage so that site visitors know which bird species to watch out for as they tour the site.

A spectogram showing the sort of data the box uses to identify birds by their sounds. This image features a particularly chatty robin.

This is the second of a series of citizen-science projects we’re undertaking on site (the first was installing our own weather monitoring) and we hope to add more as we’re able–we’d love to be able to monitor the conditions of the creek running through the site (oxygen levels, water level, temperature, cloudiness, etc) for example. There is also people working on developing systems that can do the same real-time identification as our bird box, but for ultrasonic bat calls and insect buzzing. If you have ideas on other project that might suit our unique space, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Some of the many birds we’ve seen on-site in the past. We wonder what else we might hear…
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