Accession 2003.033
Title & Physical Description
Linford Hackman fonds. – 1945-1970. – 1,910 slides.
Biographical History
Linford Hackman, northern missions worker, itinerant pastor and evangelist of the Alberta-Saskatchewan Mennonite Conference, was born into an Anabaptist family on 2 December 1906 in Souderton, Pennsylvania, and died at Edmonton, Alberta, on 11 April 1983. As a youth, following a serious illness, Linford began to teach Sunday School classes, distribute tracts, and erect road-side gospel signs in his home community. He read numerous magazines and books on the North and came to regard it as a great mission field. He married Ada Clemens (6 January 1908- ) on 15 June 1925. They were the parents of four sons and two daughters. In 1929 he and Ada decided on a trip to the Peace River country of northern Alberta, contacting Mennonite congregations along the way. That trip marked the beginning of a life-long enthusiasm for northern missions. In the next fifteen years they did mission work in northern Ontario and northern Minnesota where Linford learned to fly and eventually acquired a small aircraft. Hackman was ordained to the ministry in 1944 while working in northern Minnesota, but returned to Alberta in 1945 to look for prospective localities for mission work. The following year he and three members of the Mission Board of the Alberta-Saskatchewan Mennonite Conference traveled more extensively in the north and subsequently established a number of northern mission stations. Hackman made the West Zion Mennonite Church near Carstairs his home base, but retained great enthusiasm for northern mission work. He made numerous trips north, serving as pastor of the small Edson congregation in the late 1950s and as itinerant pastor charged with responsibility to visit as many of the scattered northern congregations, mission stations and voluntary service projects as possible each year. The Hackmans retired to live in Edmonton where they became members of the Holyrood Mennonite Church. On his many travels to the isolated communities where voluntary service personnel were located, he would fly his plane. Some of the communities had airstrips but many were accessible only by float plane. He loved flying. During his travels and visits he would take many pictures (slides). The pictures help to understand the conditions under which the voluntary service personnel were working, often indicating how resourceful they were in the absence of commercial centres nearby. Most of the slides have captions but some were without captions or the caption could not be read. Some of the photos are simply pictures of scenic parts of the beautiful north country.
Custodial History
The slides were given to Theodore D. Regehr at the time when he was writing the history of the Northwest Conference. He donated them to the Mennonite Historical Society of Alberta where they were sorted and scanned.
Scope & Content
The collection contains photos of the early travels to Peace River Country in 1929 and later visits to various churches, voluntary service locations and activities into the 1960’s. They include some pictures of retreats in Ontario, Oregon, and a good number of airplanes and some churches where he served
Notes
Related Materials
T.D. Regehr, Faith, Life and Witness in the Northwest, 1903- 2003: Centennial History of the Northwest Mennonite Conference. Kitchener, Ont. : Pandora Press, 2003.
Paul H. Martin, As the North Called to Linford Hackman. Des Moines, Iowa : Paul H. Martin, 1995.