Scott Woroniuk recalls having an interest in Saskatchewan’s history and landmarks from a young age. He shared that his father often turned road trips into history lessons, and those lessons stuck. “My dad had a really encyclopedic knowledge of Saskatchewan. And as we travel across the province, he would always tell me, ‘Oh, this happened here, this happened there, this used to be over there.’ ... it was about the smaller, little-known stories and every time we would travel somewhere, he had something to say,” Woroniuk said. During those road trips, one sight in particular caught Woroniuk’s attention: bowstring bridges. Named for their bow-like (as in bow and arrow) appearance, this style of bridge was common in Saskatchewan’s early days. Woroniuk is now in the process of making a documentary to tell the story of these unique structures. “These bridges tell the story about when Saskatchewan was young, because the province was only 20 years old when they started building this road program,” Woroniuk said. “And because of the grid road system, they had to build so many bridges.” Bowstring bridges were quite common when Saskatchewan was first establishing itself as a province. Woroniuk shared that after a trip to the Provincial Archives, he counted 97 bowstrings bridges built at one point or another throughout Saskatchewan’s history. But now, Woroniuk said only 18 out of those 97 bridges still carry traffic. Furthermore, only 19 additional bridges are even still standing, with bypasses built to take traffic a different way. Though once common, Woroniuk said bowstring bridges were unable to keep up with safety requirements as well as the stress of modern, heavy-duty machinery. “They were too narrow to allow modern plows and that sort of thing to travel. And most of the ones in the southeast were taken out because they couldn’t support the width of the weight of all the oil equipment,” he said. Over the past three years, Woroniuk travelled more than 3,600 kilometres across the province to document every bowstring bridge that still stands. “A lot of the bridges – there are no old pictures of. There were no new pictures of [them] because when the bridges were taken out or replaced, there was no ceremony, there was no fanfare, there was no press release, Woroniuk said. “They were just an old bridge that had to get taken out or replaced. But now people are realizing that these bowstring arches all over the province are just something that’s a little special and a little Saskatchewan.” While Woroniuk looks forward to telling the architectural side of the story in his documentary, he said the most meaningful part of the process has been learning more about the impact bowstring bridges have had on people’s lives in the province. “It was the memories that were attached to them like, ‘Oh, I remember that when we crossed over this bridge by this town, it meant we were getting close to Grandma and Grandpa’,” he said. “[Or] ‘I remember we used to go berry picking by this bridge’ ... it’s not so much the bridges, it’s the memories that people have attached to them.” Woroniuk shared that his goal is to help preserve a piece of Saskatchewan’s history through his film. “My hope is not only will people enjoy watching and learning about them, but at some point, my work might be able to be used as a reference for somebody looking 30, 40, 50, 70 years [from now] that I did manage to visually document every surviving bowstring bridge across the province,” Woroniuk said. Through his production company, Crosscut Films, Woroniuk plans to release the documentary, titled The Last Bowstrings: The Story of Saskatchewan’s Historic Bowstring Bridges in three parts via his YouTube channel in the fall. The filmmaker shared that he has also been in contact with the Architectural + Design Film Festival in Winnipeg to hopefully showcase the project.
