Tiny town, indeed: 100-year-old N.B man recreates hometown buildings in miniature

When Gunnar Pedersen began to build houses, he started out small.

His first construction was about two square feet of house. Maybe three.

That was about 12 years ago — when he was 88.

He turned 100 earlier this month. His houses — which meticulously recreated structures from his small hometown of New Denmark, N.B. — have stayed quite small, and there's certainly a lot more of them.

WATCH | Explore the tiny recreation of his hometown, all built by 100-year-old Gunnar Pedersen 

"I don't have the exact count, but it's in the 30s, I guess," said Pedersen.

It started out as crafts, making twigs look like logs, and putting them onto tiny homemade skids pulled by toy horses. They showcased how lumberjacks used to harvest timber when New Denmark was first settled in the 1800s.

Then he built a rudimentary recreation of a local dam. Then a barn. A house. A church.

Pedersen now has dozens of recreations of buildings from the community of New Denmark. Some of them are little monuments to buildings that are long gone, lost to fires, decay or torn down over the years.

The New Denmark train station was levelled years ago. A series of potato barns in the community used to be nearby, but they're gone too. 'Valhalla' is still standing though. The sharp looking landmark of the community stood for years as a general store for local farmers. It was later converted into a family restaurant, but it's now empty, sitting for sale as contractors fix it up.

But despite their destruction or disrepair over the decades, every one of those buildings still stand in the Pedersen family farmhouse porch. They're a snapshot of the community — made from wood instead of film.

"For younger people, it will be something they hadn't seen before. When they come, maybe more of it will be gone," says Pedersen.

And they're not easy to build.

"Some of them take quite a while," explained Pedersen. "Some houses, with the shingles and clapboards, takes quite a little while, maybe months."

Built from memory

Much of what Pedersen builds is from his own memory. He's lived in New Denmark for 95 years. He and his family emigrated from Denmark in 1928 when he was five. When he needs some help with details, he uses a photograph to help jog his memory.

Photos are important to Pedersen, not just for constructing his tiny homes, but for bringing them alive.

If you poke at some of the windows and doors of his homes and peer inside, you'll often find old photographs of the people who used to live there.

If you look inside every window of his recreation of the New Denmark Seniors' Complex, where he now lives, you'll see the smiling faces of the residents who used to live there. That includes Pedersen's late wife.

Squint inside the tiny version of his favourite project, the home he grew up in, and you'll find black and white pictures of his parents on the wall.

"I guess I thought it was valuable to put something inside," said Pedersen.

Those memories of loved ones aren't the only thing bringing the insides of these little homes together. He's built tiny chairs, tables, and dressers. He's laid out entire rooms with small props like tiny Bibles or fruit baskets, things that have meant something to him in that space.

He's never taken any woodworking classes, but he's built actual barns over the course of his farming career. When he started building these small homes, he figured it was just a single project, but it's since snowballed into a tiny town.

While Pedersen does much of the construction of each project himself, he does rely on his son-in-law to cut the wood for each building, using the measurements he provides.

"He gives me his dimensions, what he'd like to have and so on, and I cut them out and bring them out to him," said Ray Christensen. "And he starts assembling them one by one."

Pedersen doesn't have much space for his completed houses in his apartment at the New Denmark Seniors' Complex, so once his builds are done, they go on display at his son-in-law's home.

And while he's happy to showcase the tiny town to anyone who wants to come see it, Christensen says the buildings really need a building of their own. The dream is to have a small community museum showcasing Pedersen's work and give the public a 3D history of the farming community.

"What we'd like to accomplish here is to get a focus of the history of what the community was like 80, 90, 100 years ago, so we can pass that on to our children and our descendants," said Christensen.

Pedersen said he would love if younger people were able to see his creations to get an idea of what New Denmark was like in the past, but admits when he started building, he didn't think he'd be preserving history with his hobby.

"It's a good pastime instead of sitting, retired, and looking out the window," said Pedersen.