Tate Creek School
The
First Tate Creek School (1921-1925)
Tate Creek School was one in a series of pioneer schools established in the Fort George Inspectorate and overseen by school inspector G. H. Gower. This inspectorate included all schools “in the Grand Trunk Railway Belt east of Endako; those in the Caribou and Lillooet Districts as far south as Blue River; as well as those in the Peace River District.” And it was in the most eastern region of the Peace River Block that Tate Creek School was established adjacent to the tiny hamlet of Tupper, BC. There are few details remaining regarding this one-room school other than the vital statistics supplied by the annual school reports.
What is
known about this school is that: it was
established in 1921 and operated until the end of the school year of 1925, the
total enrollment of the school had a peak enrollment of 13 in 1921 and showed a
steady decline until 1925 when only 9 students were enrolled, and the records
indicate a steady flow of teachers who possessed either temporary or 2nd
class teaching certificates. Inspector
Gower often lamented the “shortage of duly qualified teachers in these parts,
and as a result a large number of unskilled, temporary-certificated teachers
found their way into schools.” Tate
Creek School opened its doors in 1921 with Mrs. Francious Van Den Riet, who
possessed a temporary certificate and was followed by: Miss M. A. McKinnon, 1922 and 1923
(temporary certificate), Miss M. R. Bayne, 1924 (second-class certificate), and
Miss Margaret K. Brown, 1925, (second-class certificate).
The school
closed its doors at the end of the 1925 school year with no explanation.
The
New Tate Creek School (1939-1949)
Tate Creek
may have remained closed indefinitely had it not been for the arrival of a
group of European settlers from the Sudeten area, who had been caught in the
upheaval created by Hitler’s encroachment into German-speaking areas of Europe
prior to World War II. The Sudetens
were of German-Czech origin and had resided in an area which was part of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire but had been ceded to Czechoslovakia immediately after
World War I. The Sudetans wanted independence or inclusion in Austria but were
denied either alternative. The Czechs
had convinced the arbiters that the Sudetens as well as other ethnic minorities
would be granted independence but they reneged on their promise and the
Sudetens were never granted the autonomy they wanted. In a bid to gain the
independence they desired, many Sudetens joined the Social Democratic Party and
tried to improve their conditions through diplomatic means. In 1938, Hitler had gained unprecedented
power and influence in portions of Europe, which included the occupation of
Austria. Many who were in positions of
power were aligning themselves with Hitler but the Sudeten German Social
Democrats refused. Despite this in 1938, the Munich Agreement, signed by
Britain, France, Germany and Italy ceded Sudetenland to the Third Reich. The Sudetens, because of their opposition to
Nazism became enemies of the state and in an effort to avoid persecution or
arrest attempted to escape deeper into Czechoslovakia. But the Czech’s fearful of retribution on
the part of the Nazi’s started to limit the number of refugees, and in some
cases sent whole trainloads back to German-occupied Sudetenland, where they
were systematically rounded up and sent to concentration camps. The Sudetens only alternative was to find
asylum in free countries of Western and Northern Europe. Unfortunately, most free European countries
were still suffering the effects of the Depression and were unable to absorb
these new refugees.
In
1938, Great Britain, Belgium, France, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland
agreed to accept some of the refugees, but many agreed to accept refugees on a
temporary basis only. Canada agreed to accept “physically fit families who are
suitable for land settlement” and who could finance their own
resettlement. The refugees, however,
had no money to affect resettlement and were forced to rely on monies which had
given to the Czechoslovakian government as restitution for the loss of the
Sudeten area. The other hurdle to
overcome was the proviso that these families be “suitable for land settlement”. The Sudetens were a people who had relied on
vocational and professional training for their livelihood. They had little or no agricultural
experience, as the lands they had inhabited were mountainous, and the soil
unsuitable for sustaining crops. The
Canadian government turned the money over to the Colonization Departments of
the Canadian Railway Companies and left it to these organizations to supervise
the resettlement of the refugees.
The CPR
and the CNR were each given the task to resettle half of the settlers. The CNR relocated their charges to North
Central Saskatchewan whereas the CPR chose the Peace River District of
Northeast British Columbia to resettle their share of the refugees. The CPR
chose to relocate the settlers to what was formerly the ‘Gundy Ranch’, it was
an existing ranch, which consisted of 16,000 acres, but with additional
purchases, the total area increased to approximately 24,000 acres. By August 1939, 518 of the Sudeten settlers
arrived at their new home.
A new Tate
Creek School was built to accommodate the settlers in the summer of 1939. The two-room schoolhouse was built to serve
not only the educational needs of the 60 school age children but to provide a
place where adults could take English language courses and citizenship classes
in the evening. The school was unique
in that it provided no grades, for none of the pupils spoke English, everyone
started with book one and continued at their own pace, the teachers had been
given the freedom to utilize whatever method appeared to work in teaching the
students English in the easiest and quickest way possible. Inspector J.F.K. English’s instructions were
to, “Teach them English. I don’t care
how you do it.” According to teacher,
Miss Amy Brown (1939-1940) who taught English and citizenship classes to the
new arrivals, “my students had no trouble communicating that their children’s
education and adjustment to their new country was a top priority to them, while
I was able to show them how keenly I wanted my first class to succeed.”
Mr.
Walter Schoen, who was an eight year old child when he entered Tate Creek
provides the most comprehensive description of the school, which can be found
in its entirety on the South Peace District website: “The building was typical of rural school houses of the time: 2 X
4 frame, two rooms back-to-back with a door between them; a small unheated
cloakroom at each end and a roofed over, small open porch at both entrances. For insulation, the space between inside and
outside walls was filled with sawdust mixed with slaked lime to discourage
occupancy by mice and insects. A
hissing two-mantle Coleman gas lamp dangling from the ceiling by a bent wire
provided lighting, when necessary in the classroom. For heating there was a wood-burning stove, large enough to
handle three-foot logs, approximately in the middle of each room. It was surrounded on three sides by a wobbly
sheet-metal arrangement and a piece of sheet metal on the floor in front of the
stove door as a safety measure against fire.
A long line of stovepipes, suspended from the ceiling with haywire, took
the smoke to a brick chimney built on a two-by-two foot closet intended for
broom storage. The “air-conditioning
system” consisted of an eighteen inch square outlet through the ceiling that
could be opened and closed with a hook on a long stick referred to as “the long
arm”, and two narrow windows, high up on the north wall, that could also be
opened with “the long arm”. The south
wall was mostly large windows that didn’t open, but let in a lot of badly
needed light. On sunny winter days,
they also augmented the heating system but on warm, sunny days in other seasons
helped to overheat the room. There was
no plumbing. Drinking water was melting
ice in a five-gallon stone crock with a little tap at the bottom on a shelf at
the side of the room.”
From 1939
to 1941, there were enough pupils to keep the two schoolrooms open, but for the
next 5 years only, one of the classrooms remained open. Miss Lydia Hinke, who was among one of the
first three teachers assigned to the colony, took this time to instruct the
students in rudimentary English and then faced the task of grouping the
students in appropriate grades to “conform to the course of studies that had to
be faced. Otherwise my successor would
have found it somewhat difficult to carry on.”
In
1944-1945, Miss Celia Stickney arrived to teach at Tate Creek, she was “not
experienced, fresh out of Normal School, she did not speak German, and was very
young and lonesome.” She was impressed
by the enthusiasm of the children, as well as the adults, to whom she taught
“English for New Canadians” in the evening.
“The people walked as far as five miles through the snow to attend long
before E.S.L. was thought of.”
In 1946,
two teachers were once again employed by the school board to teach at Tate
Creek. One teacher, Miss Marian Bunyan,
agreed to teach providing a piano was delivered to the school, and she was subsequently
was named principal of the two-room school, while not much older than the
oldest student in the school. The
center of rural schools was the wood stove that invariably stood in the center
of the room and Miss Bunyan provides a description of this apparatus that gives
a glimpse of just how important the stove was to rural school life. “We had a big stove in the middle of the
classroom with a nice flat top on which we heated soup and milk for cocoa each
day; we also laid brown paper on top where the children either toasted or
defrosted their sandwiches. The weather
was often 50 degrees below zero and these kids walked up to five miles without
missing many days – just pairs of frosted eyes showing in the wrappings of
toques and scarves.”
Tate Creek Public School – Teachers
by Year
1939 – 1940 Amy
Brown, Lydia Hinke, and E. Meade
1940 – 1941 Lydia
Hinke, E. Meade
1941 – 1942 Lydia
Hinke
1942 – 1943 Lydia
Hinke
1943 – 1944 Millicent
Houldcroft, Ruth Sibley
1944 – 1945 Celia
Stickney
1945 – 1946 Helen
Soderquist
1946 – 1947 Marian Bunyan, Anita Asselstine
1947 – 1948 Marian Bunyan, Anita Asselstine
1948 – 1949 Agnes Dahl, Anita Asselstine
A
New Name - Tomslake (1949-1964)
In
1949, the Sudeten Settlement was renamed Tomslake and to coincide with the
change the school was also renamed: Tomslake School. The school underwent a variety of improvements during this
period, which included: a basement with
a coal furnace and a cement cistern, a new entrance and indoor toilets (which were
only used in cold weather), as well as the introduction of a bus to service the
school were added in 1951. The
teachers, however, were still responsible for hauling coal, water and wood.
Teachers, Laurel David and Margaret Anderson tell of how one problem was
dealt with, “The difficulty of lighting the fire in the kitchen stove when one
is cold, tired, and hungry was overcome with the first paycheck. The wonders of electricity allowed us to use
a hotplate. Later a phone, a film
projector, sports equipment, including:
two bats, two balls, a backstop and a slide were provided by the
P.T.A. A barn, a teacherage and an
icehouse were adjacent to the school.
In almost every recollection of a teacher is a
mention of the annual Christmas concert.
It was the most important event in the school year for many children and
their parents and teachers went out of their way to provide the children with
an opportunity to shine. “Many hours of
planning, practicing, and costuming went into preparation for the concert. It was truly a co-operative effort in those
years. The teachers prepared the
children to produce ‘the best concert ever’ while the parents raised money
(another Tomslake dance!) to provide the children with candy bags and, in the
early years, a gift. As the big evening
drew closer, we took the whole school across the road to the Community Hall to
use the stage for practice. We were
always sure it would be a disaster, but the budding actors and actresses lived
up to our fondest hopes. When the program
was over, Santa arrived with the ‘goodies.’
It was over and we were off on another adventure on the bus to make it
home for Christmas and back to begin school in January.”
In
1964, the Tomslake School was closed.
The building was moved to the original Gundy Ranch site. The school was consolidated with Hays and
South Swan Lake Schools and a new four-room school was built and called Tate
Creek Elementary School, only to be replaced in 1976 by another new Tate Creek
Elementary which is still in operation.
The old Tate Creek school property is privately owned and nothing
remains of the original school except “the ice house and a toilet are still
visible from the gravel road as are the beautiful trees and shrubs planted by
the P.T.A. as part of the school beautification plan.”
Tomslake Public School – Teachers by Year
1949 – 1950 Joan
Hograth, Anita Asselstine
1950 – 1951 Shirley
Lockhart, Anne Reinelt
1951 – 1952 Elinor
Shortt, Anne Reinelt
1952 – 1953 Mr.
& Mrs. McCulloch
1953 – 1954 Mr.
& Mrs. McCulloch
1954 – 1955 Maureen
Stickney, Phyllis Bryant
1955 – 1956 Maureen
Stickney, Phyllis Bryant
1956 – 1957 Laurel
Hewitt, Margaret Andrus
1957 – 1958 Laurel
Hewitt, Margaret Andrus
1958 – 1959 Ada
Rowe, Margaret Andrus
1959 – 1960 Ada
Rowe, M. Teeple
1960 – 1961 Ada
Rowe, M. Teeple
1961 – 1962 Ada
Rowe, M. Teeple
1962 – 1963 Ada
Rowe, M. Teeple
1963 – 1964 Dan
Armstrong, Marcia Sober
Equipment
A list of
equipment to be found in the school in 1950 for Grades 1-4 included:
1
teacher’s desk
1 library
table
2 tables
(Grades 3 and 4)
5 desk
units (Grades 1 and 2)
16 primary
chairs 14”
6 primary
chairs 12”
1 sand
table
2 globes
1 set of
maps
1 double
easel
1
yardstick
Written and researched by Marg Drysdale, History 349, Malaspina University-College, June 2001
Amstatter, Andrew.
Tomslake: History of the Sudeten Germans in Canada Saanichton: Hancock House Publishing, 1978.
South Peace Historical Society. ‘History is Where You Stand.’ <http://www.calverley.dawson-creek.bc.ca/Part10Contents.html>
Tomslake Reunion Committee. Tomslake: Reunion
Homecoming, 1939-1989.
York, Lillian, ed. The Lure of the South Peace:
Tales of the Early Pioneers To 1945.
Dawson Creek: Historical Book Committee, 1981.
*Thanks to Mr. Walter Schoen and Mrs. Laurel David.
