living feature
Paradise
A Slice of
on the Prairies
TYLER STEWART
The Coutts Centre
“Medicine Wheel”
garden.
Well worth the drive, the Coutts Centre for Western Canadian Heritage,
located just northeast of Nanton, is open to everyone, and offers visitors
a unique prairie experience that must be lived to be fully understood.
DRIVING
H I G H WAY
2 between Lethbridge and
Calgary, you’ll often see signs of the agricultural activity
that underpins our province. Combines in the fi elds, tractors
chugging along the side of the road, all nurturing the land
to produce crops that will feed families.
What’s harder to see are the farmsteads that provide
family connections to the land over multiple generations.
They dot the landscape, but much of society today has
no connection to that way of life. The Coutts Centre for
Western Canadian Heritage, just outside Nanton, seeks
to preserve that history, as well as to share it in new ways
with the greater Southern Alberta community–making new
connections to engage a broad spectrum of society.
Family Ties
“Jim was a real history buff, he knew local history better
than most people who lived here their entire lives,” says
Brad Berger, neighbour of the Coutts homestead and family
friend. He is referring to Jim Coutts, the Centre’s namesake
and driving force behind the vision to convert the Coutts
family homestead into the multi-faceted heritage and arts
centre it has now become.
Originally broken by Coutts’s grandfather at the turn
of the 20th century, the homestead was lost during the
Depression, like so many others when times were tough.
Growing up in the town of Nanton, Jim Coutts felt the
emotional pull towards the land through spending time
with his grandfather in his childhood.
“As a young boy, I would go into his fi eld with him in
the summers,” he told Southern Alberta Magazine in 2011.
“We would walk over to the old homestead from that fi eld,
which was just across the road. He always told me he never
should have given up that property and, although I didn’t
understand it, I could tell that it was a painful memory for
him.”
Coutts spent most of his professional career in politics
out east, as secretary to both Prime Ministers Pierre Trudeau
and Lester B. Pearson. Through his years on Parliament Hill,
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