Alberta couple discovers and restores family snowplane found in Elkhorn Automobile Museum
Fudge snowplane has historic ties to Moosomin, Oxbow, and is restored with help from Moosomin’s Dean Godon
April 14, 2025, 11:51 am
Ryan Kiedrowski, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
What started as a chance visit to the Manitoba Antique Automobile Museum in Elkhorn launched an amazing journey, linking a string of communities through southeast Saskatchewan and southwest Manitoba. Darrell Hunter and Lisl Gunderman live in Seba Beach, Alberta, but were spending time at their cottage at White Bear in the summer of 2022.
“We had always heard about this Elkhorn museum, and its restored antique cars,” Gunderman, a recently retired teacher, recalled. “We decided that we would go to Elkhorn, to the museum, just for a day trip because I’d never been there and hadn’t seen it.”
Another reason for the couple to visit the museum was in the family history.
Gunderman is the oldest grandchild of Dr. Gerry Galloway, who practiced throughout the southeast, primarily in the Alameda and Oxbow areas. Dr. Galloway was also famous for using a snow plane in the late 1940s, and family history suggested that the machine had ended up in the Elkhorn museum at some point.
“When we got there, I asked the summer staff if they had a snow plane there, if there had ever been a snow plane there,” Gunderman said, learning that one had been brought to the museum the year previous, but was in pieces.
“When I saw it, it was just a pile of rusted parts in a heap,” Gunderman said.
But one special piece linked the pile of parts to that historic snow plane.
Dr. Galloway had painted an image of a stork on the snow plane, and upon closer inspection, Gunderman discovered what their family had believed to be long lost.
“When I looked around at the sides of it, I could see the bottom of the stork’s legs on the side,” she explained. “That was the stork emblem that I completely knew from all the time I was growing up. So that was a smoking gun for me!”
Gunderman and Hunter would later learn that the snow plane had been sent to a hot rod shop in Calgary with the intention of having it restored.
“It stayed in Calgary for 15 years or more, and then that hot rod shop in Calgary closed down,” Gunderman said.
The people in charge of dispersing items from the shop had returned the pieces to the Manitoba Antique Automobile Museum in 2021 where it lay in wait.
“The other funny thing is once we were at the museum and saw the snow plane, we stayed around the museum afterwards because we were kind of in shock, so we just sort of hung around there for like an extra half hour,” Gunderman said.
“But right on the wall in the Elkhorn Museum is a copy of the return quote letter to my grandpa from the Fudge Factory. On it was an answer letter for his request for a quote.”
According to the Dec. 1, 1947 quote, the Fudge Snow Sedan would cost Dr. Galloway $1,342—roughly $20,700 in today’s dollars.
By all accounts, it was a top-of-the-line model for 1947, complete with a Chrysler T112 industrial motor, radiator, battery, and adjustable three-blade propeller. The shipping weight of the Fudge Snow Sedan was 1,150 lbs, and the model came in the standard silver finish.
We found it, now what?
Excited about the discovery of her grandfather’s snow plane, Gunderman wondered what the next steps might be. After all, it had been donated to a museum—it surely can’t be as simple as just asking for it back.
“You can’t just show up on the scene and say, ‘hey, we’re the family and we’d love to have this back’ or something, right? So we didn’t know what to do,” she said.
Gunderman decided to compose a heartfelt letter to the museum detailing their desire to return the piece to its former glory.
“We just put the offer out there, like we’d be really happy to go into a collaborative partnership with them on the restoration of it,” she said.
The museum committee was delighted by the offer, and what evolved was a five-year commitment between the couple and the museum.
“We would restore it at our own expense, and then it would go back to the museum in a five year time frame,” Gunderman said. “But my husband is really energetic, he does not procrastinate, and it’s really close to being finished! Ultimately, it would be part of the Manitoba Antique Automobile Museum collection. We’re just very happy out of respect and love to have it be a piece that’s locked into history.”
During the restoration process, the museum board in Elkhorn wanted to see how things were going with the snow plane in Alberta, so Hunter turned to technology as a way of bridging the gap.
“Instead of sending them pictures and everybody not getting the same message, I started an Instagram account, and at their monthly meetings, they pull out the Instagram account and they share the pictures,” he explained.
Connecting communities
Dr. Galloway was born in Alameda, which is also where he started practicing as a young doctor in 1947. Gerry and Hilda Galloway moved to Oxbow in 1951, where he would continue to work as a doctor until his death 40 years later. Gerry was actually the second Galloway to serve as a doctor in the region as his father, Harry, was a practicing physician from 1906 to 1938. Also, Harry’s father—William Galloway—settled the family on a homestead near Oxbow in 1882.
“In 1947 when he was starting out, all of his work would have primarily been going out to do house calls—delivering babies and helping people that were in trouble,” Gunderman said. “So transportation was really necessary, and in 1947, there had been really bad winter snowstorms. It made transportation on the roads really difficult, because the roads were just being established, and in the wintertime, it was really hard to get out to people’s places. So he bought a snow plane from the Fudge Factory in Moosomin.”
March, 1947 was memorable for many communities in the south as a sudden storm buried trains in snow, halting rail service for over a week. Even the CPR snowplow was not immune, trapped under a snowbank just west of Oxbow for three days before the mainline plow could rescue it.
“It was over top of the power poles, and that’s why Doc Galloway decided he was going to buy a snow plane,” said Hunter. The Snow Sedans made by Robert Fudge had the same ski width as the horse drawn log cutters commonly used, allowing the machines to use the same tracks Tweet
