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Two wooden sculptures that long stood outside St. Martha’s Regional Hospital in Antigonish, N.S., have found a new home at the Antigonish Heritage Museum.
One statue depicts a graduate of St. Martha’s School of Nursing, which operated from 1911 to 1995, while the other represents a Sister of St. Martha.
The move comes as the hospital, founded by the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Martha in 1906, prepares to become fully independent on Sept. 30.
Beginning Oct. 1, it will be known as Antigonish Memorial Regional Hospital.
“Because of the important connection between our community and both the nursing school and the Sisters of Saint Martha that are represented in the statues, we wanted to make sure that they ended up with a good home,” Barry MacKenzie, curator of the Antigonish Heritage Museum, said Sunday.
Chainsaw artist Albert Deveau, who died in 2022, carved the sculptures in the late 1990s using trunks from elm trees cut down to prevent the spread of Dutch elm disease.
They are among the few remaining sculptures made by Deveau after many others, including pieces in Truro, Saint John and Edmundston, N.B., rotted from exposure to the elements.
“These just aren’t random wooden statues of people that just kind of add to the character of the building … they’re really representative of a body of work by the New Brunswick artist, I think, that is quickly disappearing,” said MacKenzie.
“It’s up to us now to make sure that these two statues, in addition to the two that we already have … get the kind of TLC that they need so that we can actually preserve them for the long term.”
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