Most communities build a town hall when they need a centre. Horsefly built a log cabin and let the community figure it out.
The original Corner House was not much more than a one-room cabin, built by Billy Reid Sr. in 1910 for J. P. Patenaude and his wife, who operated the store directly across the road. By around 1917 or 1918, the Campbell brothers (Bob, Al, and Jack) bought the store and the cabin from Patenaude. In 1920, Captain W.D. MacDougal arrived from Victoria to manage the store for his nephew Al, bringing with him his wife Agnes, his daughter Greta, and her Aunt Grace Cessford. The cabin became the Corner House in full.
Ben Gruhs did most of the building as the house grew: a long hallway, then three bedrooms downstairs and four upstairs. By 1921 the original cabin had become a large living room, lined with tanned bear skins along the walls and a piano at one end. In the summer evenings, the whole community would gather around the big fir tree in front of the store across the road and play games until dark. Old and young, it made no difference.
The Teacherage and the Stage
Teachers boarded at the Corner House in succession for years: Lily Widdowson Walters, Esther Larson Gruhs, Kay Carter, Aubin Fairley, Mary Jeffery, Nancy Ramsey, Norvena Irwin, Ruby Barrett Aikenhead. Lily Widdowson arrived in 1923 as a former Victoria classmate of Greta’s, and stayed long enough to marry Glenn Walters in 1927.
Mrs. Cessford directed the community plays, recruiting anyone willing to take a part, and Ben Gruhs always arrived at rehearsals word-perfect from beginning to end: “He made everyone mad because he knew his lines.” The winters were spent practising, the costumes made from flour sacks, and on the 24th of May the plays ran for two nights, followed by dances each night. They even took the productions out to Williams Lake, loading everyone into an unheated truck with straw on the floor and benches around the sides.
$1.50, All In
By the time Ruby Aikenhead arrived to teach in 1937, board cost $25 a month and included what she called “the best food in the country.” She walked to school each morning in a leather helmet lined with warm wool that came down over her brow and ears and tucked under her chin.
When Melba and Harry Brown arrived in 1951, the store had just burned down and they were rebuilding. Melba took on teaching at the same time as running the Corner House as a guest house with seven bedrooms. On her half-hour lunch break, she would run across from the school to find people sitting in the front room waiting to be served. She left them their lunch with instructions and came back to the dishes. Harry charged $1.50 for bed and breakfast.
The Junior Red Cross gave the Corner House one of its finest hours: all the school children came over, baked cookies and candy together, set up tea tables, and served the whole village afternoon tea.
The night the new Community Hall opened, the party spilled back to the Corner House until dawn. Someone made hotcakes, someone rolled back the carpet and played the piano, and by seven in the morning the last guests had gone. Melba went to bed, and woke to find three more men cooking their own breakfast in the kitchen. Her father, encountering them when he got up, was delighted.
Fifty Years, Then Gone
When Harry Brown first came to Beaver Valley in the late 1930s, he described Horsefly simply: there was the old store, and there was the Corner House. That was the whole of it.
The Corner House came down in 1964. For over fifty years it had been the social, cultural, educational, and business centre of the village, while officially being nothing but a private home. Two large pine trees had shaded it for half a century. The house lives on in the stories of those who stayed there, which in Horsefly was nearly everyone.
Sources
- Horsefly Historical Society Oral History Project, Jack-Lynn Memorial Museum. Interviews conducted by Christine Houghton:
- Melba Brown (Accession No. 9-1, July 29, 1977)
- Harry Brown (Accession No. 8-1, July 28, 1977)
- Greta Parminter (Accession No. 23-1, August 1979)
- Ruby Barrett (Accession No. 5-5, January 11, 1978)
- Horsefly Historical Society Oral History Project, Jack-Lynn Memorial Museum. Interview conducted by Judy Walters:
- Lily (Widdowson) Walters (Accession No. 2-2, July 26, 1977)
- Horsefly Historical Society Textual Archives: “The Corner House — A Landmark in Horsefly” by Harriette Erickson. Archived at harperscamp.ca/textual/cornerhouse.html, Jack-Lynn Memorial Museum.