I must tell the story of the church at Stanley. My connection with it is one of odd coincidence.
The story begins in England, at the time I was leaving for Canada. Our home was in Tunbridge Wells, in Kent; the church of our affiliation, Holy Trinity. A day or so before I was to sail, the rector, the Reverend Stather Hunt, met me. He said, "I hear you are going to Saskatchewan. I don't know what you will do there, but it may be that at sometime in the future you will journey into the wilderness north of Prince Albert and go to a place called Stanley. If so, I would like you to take a good look at the church.
"With Indian labor and the help of a half-breed carpenter named Sanderson, my father built that church. In fact, he named the place after our ancestral home, Stanley Park. Every board, every nail that went into the building was made on the spot. The lumber was whipsawn from logs out of the forest and the nails were cut and headed by hand. The only materials that were shipped out from England were the big door hinges and the colored glass for the windows.
He went on to say that the first lot of glass was lost when the boat coming from York Factory swamped in a Churchill rapid. He said that until more glass was shipped the following year, they had to make do with parchment.
H.S.M. Kemp, Northern Trader (New York: Bouregy and Curl, 1956) pp. 131-132.
