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This week, we had a "Memories of Sidmouth" evening at the museum. We invited people who grew up in the Hall's Landing and Sidmouth areas, south of Revelstoke, to share their stories. One local resident had several stories written by former residents of the area. One of them was a story written in the 1970s by Walter M. Girling. He told of his family's move to Hall's Landing in 1912, when his father secured the job of teacher at the one-room school. The family had previously been living at Nakusp. Walter Girling tells of their coming to Hall's Landing:
"I remember my father saying that the advertisement for a teacher at Hall’s Landing asked for a man with several children of school age who were needed to bring the enrollment up sufficiently high to prevent the government from closing the school. There were 4 of us of school age at the time. My 2 older brothers Moray and Charlie and my older sister, Louise and myself, age 8. My father went ahead of us to be on hand for the opening of the school term. We did not follow him until about the end of October where Noah and Dove Hall and Noah’s wife came down to Nakusp to get us in a small steam wood-burning paddle boat called the “Beaver” which was operated under government sponsorship for the Hall’s Landing people from Arrowhead on the other side of the Columbia River. I was very surprised and impressed to see Mrs. Hall acting as “captain” and steering the boat part of the way. The night we arrived, it snowed. The first snowfall of the season, but we did not see the ground again until the end of March or early April.
"Mrs. Noah Hall put us up the first night and I remember looking out the first morning and seeing a number of cows pulling hay out of a haystack as their pastures were covered with snow. Later we moved into a 2-story log house about 1/2 mile north of the Ferry Landing.
Shortly after that we moved to a house on the opposite side of Cranberry Creek from the school. This house had been owed by an English family who had wearied of pioneering in Canada and returned to England. This was a very badly built house. The walls were full of cracks. The winter was very cold-- often down to 20° below zero-- and we had to rely on stoves for heat. These burned out during the night and we awake every morning to find the water frozen to ice on the wash basin and water pails. Milk was also frozen and the bread glistened with frost. There was no wood supply and my father and 2 brothers spent all their spare time after school and on the weekends, cutting firewood in the foothills and dragging it home on a sleigh. Fortunately green birch wood burns fairly well.
"My brother had located an abandoned preemption consisting of about 100 acres on the bank of the Columbia River almost opposite Arrowhead, with a small building on it ("The shack," we called it). My father filed a claim on this property and as soon as the snow was melted sufficiently, he laid out a site for a small house and excavated by hand with a shovel, a hole for the “cellar.” As soon as things were ready, the neighbors organized a “bee” and erected the frame of the house. A man named “Nichol” an eager proud axe man, squared up some cedar logs for the joist. This I believe is probably a lost art in this mechanical age. We lived in this house till December 1914, where we left to join my father at another school where he was teaching at Balfour, B.C.
"Some incidents which occurred during our residence at Hall’s Landing may be of interest. My parents were always devoted church members and one Sunday evening during January or February when we were living in the Wymess house, they and my older brother, Moray, set out to attend evening service at the church in Arrowhead. They were re-crossing the river in a rowboat when the broke an oar lock and they found themselves stranded helplessly on the middle of the river. The boat was caught in an ice floe and they were carried down to the head of the lake where they managed to land on Cottonwood Island. There they “hallooed” until they attracted the attention of someone on the shore at Arrowhead. And a very harsh voice shouted “Go into the bush and make a fire and get yourselves warm.” Help came and they spent the night in Arrowhead, returning home next morning. We younger children went to bed and slept unconcerned, but my brother Charlie and sister Louise spent a very worried night.
"The first school I attended at Hall’s Landing was in a little log cabin, so tiny that my desk was so close to the teacher’s desk that I could reach out and touch it. Slate pencils squeaking on slates were the bane of the teacher in those days. Our family owned the Hall’s Landing property up to about 6 years ago (mid 1960s) when it was sold to the Provincial Government because it was going to be flooded.
"During the 2nd World War, birch trees growing on the property were bought by the Dept of National Defense to use in airplane manufacturing but most of the revenue from this was taken by the government to pay arrears of taxes, Some of the people I went to school with were; Byron Bessie and Grace Frusster, Alee and Jean Shannon, Oscar and Evertt Petersen, Nelson Nichol and Lawrence Vigue."
We would be very happy to hear of any other stories from families who settled in this region.
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3 comments:
I was raised in Sidmouth, about 1/2 mile north of the 24 mile ferry, I belong to the Vigue clan.
My grandmother Cecilia was a child when she and her family lived on a farm near Sidmouth. John and Elizabeth Schuhmacher were her grandparents and they are buried at the Arrowhead cemetery. Her father was Syd Dykstra and her mother was Johanna Schuhmacher. Their land was expropriated and they were relocated when the dam went in.
My grandfather John Nelson Nichol (Jr.) was raised near Sidmouth. Originally from Innisfail, Alberta in the late 1800’s, John Nichol Sr. and his wife Eva had farmed for several years but they bankrupted due to multiple successive years of drought, hail and disease to their crops. In 1901, their first child, John Nelson Nichol was born and they moved to Craigellachie, a small village west of Revelstoke and where the “last spike” of the CPR was driven. In 1903, they moved to Halls Landing on the western Columbia River shores, 7 miles north of the north end of the Arrow Lakes. Meanwhile a new district East of the river was being developed and John Nichol Sr. was able to pre-empt land across the river about a quarter mile south of Crawford Creek. When the CPR railway was built from Revelstoke to Arrowhead, and since the residents along the railway needed the rail service, the C.P.R. approved a stopping point on their line named “Sidmouth”, two miles south of the Nichol pre-emption. The train station was 2 miles south of the land John Nichol pre-empted. The north-west corner of one acre of land had been allocated by the Department of Education for a school grades 1 to 8 which the Nichol children attended; a 10 minute walk. My Grandfather, John Nelson Nichol was the eldest of 5 siblings and when his mother Eva Nichol passed away during childbirth in 1916, and her husband John proceeded her only a few months later from pneumonia and heart disease, the children were scattered like the wind and placed with other families as orphans. Later that year, John Nelson Nichol lied about his age and enlisted in the first World War, serving with the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry in France, with service at Dieppe. When he returned to Sidmouth in 1918, his younger brother Roy had been holding the property and John worked as a logger on the west coast to pay off the taxes which were in arrears. By 1922, John Nelson Nichol was able to take over the family farm with its small orchard, garden, and a pasture for hay. Meanwhile, just up the rail tracks, The Bowen family (Edward and Kate), who had originally emigrated from England to Kansas and then to Red Deer Alberta, had pre-empted land only a quarter mile north of the family homestead, and they had a beautiful daughter named Elsie, who was born in 19o4. By 1928, the two sweethearts had married and were raising a family of their own. Their four children, named Edward, Eva, Allan and Everette were raised on the original Nichol family pre-emption until the land was flooded along with the Arrow Lakes in 1961. My father was Allan Joseph Nichol (1932 – 2017) and his ashes are scattered on the summit of Mount Sproat, as per his wishes.
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