Description of Historic Place

Baldur United Church, built in 1904 for a Methodist congregation, is a large brick-clad structure in Baldur. The municipal designation applies to the church and its lot.

Heritage Value

Baldur United Church is a reserved yet elegant example of a substantial Protestant facility erected in the early 1900s in a growing agricultural service centre in southwestern Manitoba. The structure's graceful Gothic Revival exterior incorporates a corner tower and a creative mix of window shapes and sizes. Within is a spacious and finely appointed nave with an adjacent Sunday School wing characteristic of the Akron plan, an American Methodist form of church layout that was occasionally used in Manitoba. The building replaced Bethel Methodist, a small rural church established in 1884 and moved to Baldur in ca. 1890. It became part of the United Church upon the 1925 union of three Protestant denominations in Canada.

Source: Rural Municipality of Argyle By-law No. 7-96, June 11, 1996

Character-Defining Elements

Key elements that define the heritage character of the Baldur United Church site include:
- its corner location in a residential neighbourhood near the village's business district
- the building's east-west placement, close to public rights-of-way, on a grassed and treed lot

Key exterior elements that define the church's graceful Gothic Revival design include:
- the tall rectangular form set beneath a moderately pitched hip roof, with short gables on the front (east) and south elevations, a tall square tower in the southeast corner and a hip-roofed bay, etc.
- the walls of buff-coloured brick on a cut fieldstone foundation
- a rich assortment of windows, including broad Tudor-arched openings on the front and south facades, each with intersecting bar tracery and set in heavy wood surrounds; single basket-arched openings with three windows in bold surrounds and large transoms with tracery; single, stylized trefoil windows in the tower; and segmental-arched openings
- gable-roofed porches supported by square columns at the main and secondary south entrances, etc.
- limited yet refined detailing such as the scrolled modillions under all eaves, the windows' rusticated stone sills and radiating brick heads, the tower's corner pilasters and unmarked cornerstone, etc.

Key elements that define the church's Akron plan and fine interior appointments include:
- the practical layout, including the tower's entrance vestibule, the spacious nave with a north choir alcove and the west Sunday School/study wing
- the nave's square auditorium plan with curved pews placed diagonally between two aisles on a floor sloped down toward a service platform in the northwest corner
- the large stained-glass windows filled with stylized plant and geometrical designs
- the well-kept woodwork, including the nave's dark-stained vertical wainscotting and pews, its truncated ceiling with artfully placed cedar panelling, the generous dark-stained trim and solid doors throughout, and the impressive panelled and glazed pocket doors between the nave and west wing