November 2002 Crystal Village

A battered sign assured me! was at the Crystal Village. A thick chain dragged on the ground between two posts and the sun glimmered on the sides of structures that seemed to sprout among the weeds. There was no one about. Traffic roared by on Highway 3. The door of the church smacked methodically against its jamb like a lazy horse swatting flies, and the wind made lonely music around the corners of a coal shed. This was years ago, but I was already too late.

The Cover: CRYSTAL VISIONS
In 1970, about the time Pincher Creek resident Boss Zoeteman retired, the phone company was changing technologies and no longer required the clusters of glass insulators that topped telephone poles. What to do with the thousands of now-obsolete glass beakers? Boss's first idea was to make his granddaughter a doll house. But, never one to think small, Boss then made what would today be called a paradigm shift: "To heck with the doll house," he thought. "I'm going to create a city!"

Crystal Village is a collection of 13 structures, including a school, church and trapper's cabin, that Zoeteman meant to be a not-quite-life-size reproduction of Pearce, Alberta, the town of his childhood. To achieve his goal, he collected more that 200,000 of the glass cups, which he then encased in cement blocks. The church, his first and best building, is made up a hundreds of blocks and almost 6,000 insulators.

Alas, the Boss never did finish his project, for he died at the age of 89. But the Village lives on, as part of Heritage Acres Museum, just a toss of an insulator from the controversial Old Man River Dam. "He was an incredible man," laughs his granddaughter, Mamie. "But he was insane."

Article by Curtis Gillespie, WESTWORLD, Spring 1999 Photograph: bix studios ltd.

Yet the trails between the buildings were not over grown, and hunks of coal still hid the floorboards in the shed. Pieces of coloured chalk waited in the pencil grooves of wooden desks in the schoolhouse. At the entrance to the church I found a donation box with coins in it, and a guest book in which the last entry was recorded by a family from Camrose, Alberta, nearly a year earlier.

Except for roofs and windows, the buildings were made completely from clear or green glass insulators, but the insulators had been used differently in each structure. The schoolhouse and office building were constructed of square wood frames, each frame holding twenty-five insulators. The framing was cemented over, the office building painted white and the schoolhouse deep red.

In the walls of the church, the builder had used as little mortar as possible between insulators, so the inside was washed in green light. When I sat in one of the handmade pews, the effect was like looking out from inside a vast illuminated honeycomb.

The belfry of the glass-insulator church mimicked the ubiquitous grain elevators of the prairie, some of which stood silently beyond the northern end of the Crystal Village. No one was around them either. A cross over the door identified the church as a place of worship, just as the golden shafts of wheat served as a logo of farm commerce.

What had happened here after the last visitors signed the book a year earlier? Why was the place deserted, artifacts still lying about?

Bastien Zoetmann, nicknamed "Boss", had died on December 14, 1989, his wife Burga told me. He had been a machinist by trade, but Burga referred to him as "more the adventurer type, always doing something different, jumping from one thing to the next."

Once he got the notion sometime in the mid-1970s to build with insulators, there were evidently no second thoughts. The thing had to be done. Zoetmann went around Alberta collecting glass insulators from discarded telephone poles and used 5,642 of them on his first project, a church for his Pincher Creek backyard. With 150,000 insulators remaining, he made a school, playhouse and office, the coal shed and warehouse, and then realized he had the makings for an entire village.

But there was still more to be done. He had exhausted his Alberta insulator sources, so he acquired more of them from Holland, Denmark, Germany, Australia, Pakistan and Japan. These were recycled into more buildings. By 1986 he had run out of yard. Everything was transported to the new site, the property on the outskirts of town near the junction of Highways 3 and 6.

Burga says her husband was an incredible worker and seemingly endless reserves of energy. "He was at it till nearly the end, building, landscaping, taking kids around." Zoetmann had opened the village to visitors in 1987, and had arranged for school to be conducted and church services to be held. Next came the buffalo and the llama. No admission fee was charged, but he wouldn't turn down a donation.

The last thing Zoetmann made was a taxi stand, so the invisible residents could wait for invisible taxis. A few months before his death, he was still planning new projects --- a castle and a large house for himself and Burga.

"It seemed to me that he died suddenly," Burga told me. "But after he was gone, I discovered he'd had cancer for a long time but had told no one, not even me." After Zoetmann's death, the Crystal Village sat unattended and the weeds did their work "I don't have the heart to even go out there."

Zoetmann was always disappointed by the reaction of locals to his work "They didn't criticize him," Burga said, "They just sort of ignored him." Not long after I talked to her, the Alberta Historical Society arranged to have the buildings transferred to a park area near the site of the Old Man River Dam. Burga was assured they would be surrounded by antique farm machinery on a well-maintained plot of land. She considered this to be a gesture of official recognition. "Isn't that the way it usually is? They recognize you after you're dead."

Not long ago, I went out there to the Old Man River Dam and had a look at the buildings. The well-maintained plot of land is a featureless patch of the plains. No people, no friendly animals wander between the buildings. Neither are there grain elevators for reference points or traffic rushing by on Highway 3. The buildings just site there forlorn while the wind blows relentlessly.

Submitted by James and 'Raine Mulvey, Cobourg, Ontario. From the book, "Strange Site uncommon homes and gardens of the Pacific northwest", by Jim Christy, Harbor Publishing, ISBN 1-55107-131-3