Journey of century-old chair carved by WW I Quebec prisoner ends at war museum

o'er a century after it was carven in a number one domain state of war internment camp, a handmade wooden chair has found a new home at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa.

“It’s hard not to notice the beautiful craftsmanship of this piece,” said Meredith MacLean, a collections specialist at the museum.

Believed to be made from yellow birch or oak, the chair is engraved with grapevines, oak leaves and acorns. On the back, a large French inscription lists the date — 1915 — and a message that says it was carved by a detainee at the Spirit Lake internment camp, which operated in Quebec’s Abitibi region from 1915 to 1917.

During the First World War, the Canadian government detained Ukrainians and other Eastern European immigrants in these camps because officials considered them to be enemy aliens.

Before it was donated, the chair sat in a corner of Margalo Whyte’s home in Tsawwassen, B.C., for years. She inherited it from her grandfather, who had lived in Ottawa. She has no idea how he acquired it as their family had no connection to the camp.

After he was released in 1916, Sofian and his family spent a few years in the Windsor, Ont., area and then moved to a small farming community in Michigan. 

His life was not an easy one. He worked as a carpenter, in factories and later as a farm manager, but the work was poorly paid. In 1933, Sofian sent U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt a hand-carved table as a Christmas present in a bid to ask him for financial assistance.

Once Whyte learned about Sofian’s story, she took some time to decide where the chair would go next.

Archival items from this time period are rare, particularly from Spirit Lake.

“Before this, I think we had a collection of photos and one archival piece, a Christmas card in our collection,” said MacLean. “They are very uncommon, so we were quite interested in this piece because it’s a 3D artifact.”

The chair’s backstory also makes it special. It's unusual to know so much about a prisoner.

"It helps to connect to the history if we have people who lived through these events, who experienced internment and we can talk about them as human beings, right?" said Stacey Barker, a historian at the museum.

Barker and MacLean said they’d like to figure out how the chair ended up in Whyte’s family. Large pieces like this are usually commissioned by camp guards. 

“It is interesting, the relationship between the people who were interned and the people who were guarding them,” said MacLean. “We have a number of artworks in our collection that were created by people who were interned and given as gifts to the guards.”

There are no immediate plans to display the chair, but it could be loaned out to other museums or used the next time the museum does an exhibition on internment camps as a tangible relic from a past few Canadians are aware of.

Journalist

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