How Bern Will Brown and Colville Lake built the NWT’s finest log church

“I was far busier as a carpenter than as a missionary. On the other hand, isn’t helping part of being a missionary?”

Bern Will Brown wrote those words as he reflected on his 43rd birthday in 1963.

A priest and an extraordinary craftsman, as well as a writer and photographer, he not only led the construction of Colville Lake’s stunning log church – and helped build many nearby log homes – but also documented the process in meticulous detail.

The church burned down this week, just under 60 years after Brown finished it. Police are investigating.

Brown built the church with help from Indigenous members of what was then (and remains) a tiny Northwest Territories community.

It was a remarkable accomplishment for a place with no road access to the rest of Canada. All of the equipment and resources needed for the building had to be harvested locally or flown in.

This retelling of how the church was built draws heavily from Brown’s Arctic Journal, in which he sets out a month-by-month account of the project.

It also features reports from two journalists who flew to Colville Lake in 1967 following the delivery of a 1,000-lb bell from Iowa, an improbable acquisition that became the little church’s crowning glory.

Brown passed away just over a decade ago. His funeral took place in Colville Lake, where he had lived for more than half a century.

An excuse to stay

The idea to build a church for Colville Lake came to Brown in the summer of 1963.

By that point, he had already led the construction of a mission – a base for his activities as a Catholic priest – using plans he drew up a decade earlier for a similar building in Camsell Portage, northern Saskatchewan.

To build the mission, Brown had not only ordered Colville Lake’s only chainsaw from Edmonton but had also persuaded five graduating seniors from a boys’ school in New York state (where he was born) to come to the NWT and help.

Getting the mission built was a story in its own right, involving Brown having to see off a rival Pentecostal minister who insisted on spending a winter preaching to the same handful of people.

“I asked him if having the two of us men of the cloth here wasn’t a case of overkill. He countered by informing me that he got his marching orders directly from on high. This I doubted, as all the Colville Lakers had been baptized Catholic long ago,” Brown later wrote.

By 1963, the mission was finished and Brown decided a church would be next.

“With a population of only 50 people here, I could not hope to stay indefinitely, but I liked the place so much I was anxious to find excuses for extending my stay,” he explained later. Bishop Paul Piché, who came to visit, fell in love with Brown’s vision and the church plan was given the green light.

Brown put together a 29-foot V-bottomed boat that would be used to haul logs from around the lake. A boat that size was not a common sight, and he reported that residents reacted “as if I had started building another ark.” The boat was named Quimpay, which Brown understood to be the Sahtú word for an Arctic loon.

Weeks were spent harvesting more than 300 logs and hauling them up a 20-foot bank with the help of 10 men and a “stout rope.”

The boat was used for log-hauling and fishing during the week. On Sunday, the day of rest, Brown packed local kids into it and they went off gathering eggs or berries.

By mid-1964, extra lumber to augment the harvest had been brought down the Mackenzie River then flown the remaining distance. Brown, who had begun pouring cement foundations for the church, also asked for six gothic windows to be sent from Tulita, where an older church was being torn down.

(For anyone who thinks NWT communities are worse than they used to be, that’s apparently been a thing for a while. Brown noted in early 1964 that Tulita “had gone downhill significantly since I had left it 14 years before.”)

Building the church was not straightforward. As the resident missionary and a single man at that point – he later left the priesthood and married – Brown said one day of cement-pouring was interrupted by the need to bake bread, a request to dress the umbilical cord of a two-day-old boy, and an intervention to stop a man assaulting his wife.

In July 1964, log construction began. Only once did Brown throw his back out as he and eight members of the community notched-in up to 40 logs a day – the equivalent of two complete tiers of logs around the building.

Scaffolding was set up to finish the roof rafters, a part of the project that drove the crew wild as they had no bug repellent and the blackflies were almost impossible to handle.

On his 44th birthday, August 31, 1964, Brown could be found building an octagonal steeple and sheeting it with aluminum shingles from the mission at Délı̨nę. (Note that the date Brown gives for his birthday suggests he was actually 93, not 94 as was widely reported, when he passed away in July 2014.)

A month later, the steeple had been secured to the roof.

“Now the new building looked like a proper church,” he wrote, and a rush began to get the windows and doors fitted so work inside the church could carry on through the winter.

The six gothic windows from Tulita were ultimately installed by May 1965. An altar was built that summer and concrete poured for a set of front steps.

Archbishop’s blessing

As Brown was putting the finishing touches to the church in 1965, a visitor began a quest for the final item to complete the project: a bell.

Jeanne Branson and her husband ran a fishing lodge on Great Bear Lake. When she flew some guests to visit Colville Lake and noticed the absence of a bell for the new church, she promised Brown she would look for one.

Months passed and Brown all but forgot about Branson and that offer.

In the interim, a federal election took place in November 1965 and Brown found himself the deputy returning officer for his small, isolated community.

Despite that isolation – and the size of the riding at the time, which also included all of modern-day Nunavut – Progressive Conservative candidate Eugène Rhéaume flew in to campaign in Colville Lake. Once all the costs of running the election were calculated, Brown estimated allowing Colville Lake to vote had cost the federal government $700 per vote cast.

By the end of 1965, Brown had finished a vesting cabinet and new tabernacle for the church. He added benches, chairs and a large Christmas tree just in time to hold the first service inside Our Lady of the Snows on Christmas night that year.

“The angels must have looked down with approval as our rustic log church came alive for the first time to celebrate Christ’s birth with a Christ-Mass,” he wrote.

New Year’s Eve at the church featured cake, ice cream and cigars, the handing out of new calendars and some “impressive aerial rockets” from the porch.

In the summer of 1966, the church received an official opening from a distinguished guest.

Brown had just begun painting something to hang behind the altar when Archbishop Sergio Pignedoli, then the Apostolic Delegate to Canada, flew in. Brown had no idea he was coming.

“He had come to bless our church officially. For Colville Lake it was a historic day, which, as usual, happened without any planning or forewarning,” Brown wrote.

“As long as this church stands,” he added, “it will probably never see another archbishop.”

Records suggest he was correct – Cabin Radio could find no other reference to an archbishop visiting in the 59 years since.

‘It is a good bell’

Bell hunter Branson had been busy while all of this was going on.

Originally from Arizona, she had flown down to Iowa to advertise her fishing lodge on American TV stations. During one such appearance, she mentioned her search for a bell for Colville Lake – and someone called in with a tip.

“She got a reply from a Methodist deacon, who told her he knew of a big bell hanging in an unused Methodist church in rural Indianola. Jean, with her usual flair and determination, got that 1,000-pound bell flown up on the strip to Sawmill Bay below her lodge on Great Bear Lake. From there she had it transferred to her Norseman and flown to my dock,” Brown recorded.

“Now the fun began, because we had to get it unloaded with no mechanical equipment to help us. We proceeded by opening both side doors of the aircraft and pushing a stout, 20-foot pole through, attaching the bell to its centre. Now, with six men on the dock end of the pole and another six on the opposite end in a boat, we all lifted. But as we lifted it up the first foot, the plane came up with it!”

Eventually, the group got the bell into the belfry and Brown winched it into position.

Branson came back a few weeks later. This time, she brought with her the deacon who found the bell, a Des Moines pastor, and writers from the Cleveland Plain Dealer and Calgary Herald newspapers.

“A Bell for Colville,” read the front of the Plain Dealer’s AA section on September 3, 1967.

“It is a good bell. Now we celebrate,” Plain Dealer reporter Eleanor Farnham, then aged 71 (she lived to 99), reported Colville Lake resident John Gully as saying.

She was impressed by Colville Lake, concluding that life there “takes a special breed of men.”

In the Calgary Herald of August 24, 1967, John Schmidt wrote that the bell was already 100 years old before it made the trip across the border to Colville Lake.

“For Father Bernard Brown, the hanging of the bell in Our Lady of the Snows Roman Catholic church has a symbolic note,” Schmidt penned.

He wrote that for Brown, the bell called Indigenous people “back to the trap-lines of the North, a vocation for which he feels they are more suited than living a degrading life in the white man’s settlements along the Mackenzie River to the west.”

Schmidt said the bell carried a plaque from the Iowa Methodist church stating that the gift should “exemplify the two great faiths working for God and the betterment of mankind.”

He concluded his article: “As the Norseman winged away from Colville Lake, Mrs Branson looked back. ‘Today we lived in another century,’ she said. ‘It’s as if we had dropped into Fort Calgary 75 years ago.'”

Brown was writing, too.

“They all got a chance to ring the bell and listen to its commanding peeling as it reverberated through our quiet village, setting the sled-dogs howling,” he wrote years later, relying on notes he made at the time.

“Jeanne got some well-deserved publicity from this charitable project, and a lot of newspaper readers from across the continent heard of Colville Lake and its little log church.”