Cantley 1889 articles

Back to School Memories - 1949 to 1959

Hubert McClelland

My school life started in grade one, September 1949. We walked two kilometers along the main “Old Cantley Road” to Chemin Ste-Elisabeth adding 11 children from five different homes to our group along the way. Five went to the Protestant School and six to St. Elizabeth School nearby.

Our white clapboard school was just south of the corner of today’s Chemin Ste-Elizabeth and Montée de la Source. It was one room with a bank of windows facing west and a single entrance on the south. On its north was a woodshed with outdoor toilets attached and the horse stable with about six stalls and a hay loft above, still in good condition and visible today. 

During my first three grades, the school was heated by a big barrel type wood stove that could fit a 60-centimeter log, 25 centimeters in diameter. Grade six and seven boys started the fire each morning and, with the teacher, maintained it all day. On early winter mornings, the school was so cold that sometimes the ink wells in the corner of each desk were frozen. Older students who used fountain pens thawed their ink wells on the stove before filling their pens. In about 1952, the school board replaced the wood stove with an oil stove and outdoor oil tank. This made school arrival on cold mornings much better.

Classroom life in a one-room school with seven grades and one teacher was special. Students benefitted from listening to all that was taught but were also easily distracted from focusing on their work. Grades one to three were in class on mornings from 9:00 to 10:30 and afternoons from 1:00 to 2:30 allowing time for the teacher to teach academic subjects to the higher grades.

In the spring of 1959, the school inspector recommended our school be closed and the children bused to the Millar Street school in Hull. The school taught both the elementary grades one to seven and the high school grades eight to eleven. Since graduating from grade seven in 1956, I was already attending this Millar Street school, the Protestant High School of Hull, to achieve my “High School Leaving Certificate”. Joe Hupé drove me to school at 6:45am on his way from Wilson’s Corners to his carpentry job in Ottawa. He dropped me off at 7:30 am and picked me up at at 4:30 from the corner of Montcalm and Rue Principal where I walked to and from the school.

My father, Trevellyn McClelland, was secretary of the Protestant School Board of East Hull. In the summer of 1959, he was responsible for transferring Cantley students to the Hull Protestant School Board. I remember helping with the hay and milking cows while Dad phoned about school affairs using Cantley’s old “party line” telephone. His main job that summer was to purchase a yellow school bus to transport about 20 to 25 kids from Cantley to Millar Street in Hull. I was happy I would no longer have to wake up so early to hitch a drive with Joe.

The school inspector promised the School Board a grant of $6000 to buy the bus. School taxes would pay for this as well as costs for bus operation and driver’s salary. When the Protestant Directorate of the Quebec Ministry of Education confirmed the grant of $6000 was forthcoming, the School Board ordered a Bluebird bus with capacity for 30 students – three to a seat.

By the end of August, still no cheque had arrived. Dad phoned our member of Provincial Legislature, Gerald Desjardins, in Maniwaki to seek his help. Later that week, Dad phoned the Ministry. He learned that Premier Maurice Duplessis had died while travelling to Shefferville in northern Quebec so the Quebec Government closed down for a few days. Finally, after days of uncertainty, the $6000 cheque finally arrived as did our Cantley Protestant School Bus. This yellow school bus was the first to drive on Cantley roads. It certainly made my final school years much easier.

 
Photos of textbooks used during the 1950s.