Children living in the Beaver Point area in the south had to walk a very long way to get to the Burgoyne Bay School. So a new school was built.
This little schoolhouse is still there today - children go to pre-school there..
To get to the Beaver Point area, you rowed your boat, and landed at Beaver Point, where the Post Office was. This was a centre for the first families farming in the Beaver Point area. Some of these children had parents who had come from Europe and Britain. Others had mothers who were First Nations women and fathers from Europe. Some had parents who had come from Hawaii.
To get to school, children from the Hawaiian families paddled canoes from Russell Island and Portland Island in the south, or from Isabella Point across Fulford Harbour. The Beddis children (British background) rowed along the coast from further north. To get to the school these children still had to hike a long way through the wilderness. So did the children who did not have to come by boat.
Some Hawaiian men (or ‘Kanakas’) were among the first settlers, from 1859. They had Indian wives. After the San Juan Islands were declared part of the United States in 1872, many Hawaiian families there moved to the islands and shores south of Salt Spring Island, where they formed a Hawaiian community.
4. Three School Districts 1884-1896
Check your Map-Reading Skills
- find Russell Island and Portland Island
- find Beaver Point and Isabella Point
- find Beaver Point Schoolhouse
A Map-Reading Challenge:
-in your Atlas, can you find Hawaii? Britain? Europe? Greece?
Check your Understanding and Imagination
- using the map, draw a line where children may have paddled their canoes to get to school: choose somewhere to land and secure the canoe. Then draw a route for them to get to Beaver Point School.
- you might also like to paint or draw a series of pictures to show their journey home again at the end of the school day.
Challenge your Visual Memory
- study the line of the west-east division on the map in relation to the lakes nearby
- draw a vertical line for the west-east division, and then try drawing the nearby lakes, copying the map
- after closing your eyes, try visualising where the west-east division passes between the lakes