Hills School - Hills, BC
Posted by: Groundspeak Premium Member T0SHEA
N 50° 06.506 W 117° 29.545
11U E 464789 N 5550802
This little one room schoolhouse is one of the few relics of the community of Hills and is now used as the community hall.
Waymark Code: WMVAYH
Location: British Columbia, Canada
Date Posted: 03/25/2017
Published By:Groundspeak Regular Member MountainWoods
Views: 1

The little community of Hills began in earnest in 1929 with the immigration of several Doukhobor families from Saskatchewan. A railway siding and depot were built in Hills (then still known as Hills Siding) in the early '30s and this schoolhouse not long after. As was the norm in Doukhobor communities the entire building was built with volunteer labour and donations of the money required for materials.

At its peak, Hills consisted of two grocery stores, one with a gas pump, a post office, a railway siding, this school and possibly one or two other businesses. With the end of the logging boom in the 1970s, the post office closed, followed not long after by the school's closure, forced by school amalgamation. The railway siding was discontinued in 1981 and the community of Hills soon became simply a rural area dotted with small farms.

Early Memories of Hills, British Columbia

In 1929-1934, eight Independent Doukhobor families from Saskatchewan established a farming hamlet at Hill Siding in the Slocan Valley of British Columbia. Other families of different backgrounds followed, and it soon became a busy lumber village.

Hills originally consisted of only a C.P.R. siding to which two brothers by the name of Hill lent their name. ... the brothers came to the area sometime in the late twenties to conduct a sawmill operation at the head of Slocan Lake and used that siding from which to transport the finished product of their mill.

There was yet no road into that area, and belongings necessary to start a farmstead, complete with stock, had to be transported first by rail, then by Sternwheeler (S.S. Rosebery) down Slocan Lake and again by rail to the Siding from which stemmed a future community.

The first school was opened in a log cabin on the property of Marc DuMont, with his daughter, Rosalee, as teacher. The class consisted of about 12 pupils, including the children of the C.P.R. Section foreman at that time. A one-room school house was built soon after and averaged 20 pupils throughout the year.
From Doukhobor Dot Org
Address:
Highway 6 & Baldwin Road
Hills, BC Canada
V0G 1S1


Web Site: [Web Link]

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