A new exhibition in the Cortes Island Museum looks at the island’s housing from pre-colonial times up until the present. ‘From the Ground Up: Cortes Island Dwellings And Their Histories’ combines photographs and artifacts from the museum’s collections, stories and images from the community and a display from the Cortes Housing Society. Melanie Boyle, Managing Director of the Museum, took Cortes Currents on a tour of the exhibit.
“Welcome to the Cortes Museum and Archives. We are standing just inside the museum store, but as you know, the museum once was the Cortez Lodge store, down at Manson’s Lagoon. We have a new exhibition which just opened on May 5th and runs throughout the year. I curated the show with Monika Hoffmann,” she began.
“This exhibition looks at dwellings and communities from a historic perspective, not only just the dwellings, but the process behind a lot of them. On Cortes we face a lot of challenges, whether economic, terrain, or just accessing material. Our idea was to look at dwellings from that perspective: how people overcome the challenges; the solutions solutions they find, and the connections they make to the land, to one another and the way they build community.”
“Starting here, at the very beginning, you see an image of a float house from the Gilean Douglas collection. It’s taken from Seymour Inlet, and the kids are pulling themselves on a little raft that goes from the float house to a boat. We love the dynamism of the framing. She was a very good photographer as well as a writer. That’s the first panel you’ll see when you come in.”
“The second panel here is a photograph we took at Klaus Maibauer’s workshop. He has a fabulous house and a workshop. The image shows the word ‘chatoyance,’ which is French for the lustre of the kind of ‘cat’s eye’ that comes from wood. It seemed like a metaphor not only for the community, but also the way that the glow can come from inside of people or the community. That’s our contemporary lead-in image.”
“If you go left, which is what we like to do, here’s a little re-imagining of the Cortez Coffee Shop, which was also down at Manson’s Lagoon. It was run by Mrs. Ella Lowes. Her daughter and son-in-law ran the Cortez Lodge. It’s a repurposed building because after it had its life on the lagoon, it moved around the island. And it’s now Elijah Verschuur’s workshop at Blue Jay Farm. The exhibition committee went up to Blue Jay, had a nice visit with Elijah and took photos of where it is now and what it looks like. We thought it would be a neat way to again explore another repurposed building.”
“Ella Lowes made pies, that was her big thing. You’ll see above, the wooden propeller that we had in our last exhibition (Wayfinding: Stories of Maps and Place). It’s a wooden propeller from a Cessna plane, 1930s, and it has all the signatures of the pilots who would come in and have a slice of pie at the coffee shop.”
“We have, of course, the history binders. Have a seat, look at these fantastic photographs of early people on the island.”
Cortes Currents: Continuing around the museum in a clockwise direction, we came to the floathouse section.
Boyle: “From the collection of the archives which are all online, the variety of houses, conditions and communities that were the float camps up in the channels. We have a fantastic saw. It’s a very big one and we brought it out from the Von Donop Logging Shed. We have a permanent outdoor exhibit and that’s this fantastic sculptural element to frame these really beautiful photographs.”
Cortes Currents: What years would this be?
Boyle: “This would be the 1950s, 1940s, up to about the 1960s, when the bigger companies came and took over from the small families that were logging.”
“Bruce, Andy and Shirley Ellingson grew up in Phillips Arm, and then they moved down to Von Donop. Their home is featured here and I think it’s been moved 12 times. Now it’s the home of Aaron and Jeramie Ellingson on Hague Lake. So again, it has a continued life.”
“If you come around here, this is a photograph we took down at Smelt Bay. A lot of people know it as the place where we celebrate Cortes Day, but Julie Hanuse, Education Coordinator for the Klahoose First Nation, sent me some scans from a really well known book with research on this area. It was a former subterranean fortified settlement. The Tla’amin First Nation historically would have settled in this area.”
“I wanted people yo have an appreciation of housing that was here pre-contact.”
“We look here at some shed houses of the Homalco, the Tla’amin and the Klahoose First Nations, all up and down the coast. It was a very typical form of architecture, which allowed for seasonal movement. Again, it’s the repurposing of materials, the movement according to harvesting and gathering. The winter villages would’ve been taken apart. The planks that lined the homes were canoed down to a seasonal camp.”
“We have here an image of a Klahoose village, the village of Toq in Squirrel Cove, back in the early 1900s or late 1800s, just as it was getting set up. We’ve had it on display before. It actually is from the Campbell River Museum, but it shows the first row of houses that the Klahoose built when they moved their permanent winter village down from Toba. When I was chatting with Julie, she shared some of her family history and the connection there.”
We proceeded to a wall covered in shingles.
Boyle: “I took them off the side of my building and nailed them in this area.”
“We thought we’d take a portrait of one of the buildings on the island.
We’re looking at the Roundhouse up on Robertson Road, built by Barry Sullivan in the late 60s and then owned by Paula Snow. A lot of people interviewed Howie Roman about his time there and his connection to the house. It was purchased by Henry and Margaret Verschuur, so the Roundhouse was moved up to Blue Jay Farm.”
“Jill Milton, one of our archivists, recently connected with the Sullivan family, and they sent an article about their dad building the roundhouse and some of the inspiration behind it. It just came in the mail and we have an interview too with Henry Verschuur about his connection to the Roundhouse.”
“Coming around here, we have the listening parlour. We did a lot of interviews leading up to this exhibition. People were really generous with their time and their knowledge and one of the features going forward is that we’d like to have some more audio available for people to listen to.
It’s a recreation of a fancy parlour, fancier than anybody on the island possibly enjoyed, but we thought it might be a fantasy of being able to sit down, rest, read a book and have a cup of tea. People are welcome to come. We have some reading materials here, archival as well as books on building or whatever.”
“We have some beautiful hand tools on display and these come from the artifacts collection. We chose them according to just their beautiful forms, and they’re on a big long cedar plank.”
“We call this section ‘the Island Builds’ and interviewed a number of the island builders, starting in the 1960s. We interviewed Klaus Maibauer, John Sprungman, Hubert Havelaar, David Shipway and Bruce Ellingson about their time building on the island, so going from the 1960s up into the 2000s. We also interviewed Ron Wolda about his experience running a mill.”
“We were looking at that period of time of building when things were funky, land values were a little lower and people could take a bit more risk with their buildings. You’d repurpose things on hand and make do. Paul Kirmmse, one of the founders of Redlands, was also interviewed.”
“It’s a fun corner. We have a fabulous picture of the famous dome. With a lot of these buildings, people would say. ‘I’ve been there’ or ‘I grew up there’ or ‘I remember that.’ We would have loved to include more images or more builders but our space is so small. We just were able to focus on these builders who had the time and opportunity to share their stories with us.”
“We also had an interview with Amy Robertson about her experience founding Treedom, because one aspect we wanted to explore is land use. Different ways people not only use materials, but also the solutions they find to live here. Someone who lives in Siskin Lane wrote about their experience. We hope to build that section out a little bit more and have more interviews available.”
“This is a late addition that came in after the opening. It is a model that David Shipway built when he was designing the home for Brian Hayden up in the Gorge. It’s a project that Trygve Ellingsen built with his crew. This model has seen better days, but it’s just cleaned up and we’ll get it back up to speed. What’s really interesting is the scale of it. You can peek inside. Brian had it in storage, which was really great because we thought it had been lost forever. It’s modelled off of Brian’s work as an archaeologist, and he was very inspired by the pit houses from the Interior. David designed it based on that kind of structure.”
“Then we have a film by the Cortes Cinema, which is really George Sirk. It’s called Orange Sunshine and it’s from the early 80s. It was recently digitized a couple of years ago by Doug McCaffrey of ScanLab. It shows the building of George and Izzy’s cabin up on the Gorge. As George says, it’s a cast of hippies, scenes, and people. It’s just a fun snapshot or a summary of a period of time. Pretty wacky, it’s on a loop and it’s great that we’ve been able to have it on display.”
“Coming around, we’re almost at the end of the exhibition. We invited the Cortes Housing Society to contribute their information about the housing situation on Cortes, not only the challenges, but also the solutions that they’re working towards. We felt this was really important because we’re looking at housing and dwelling from a historic perspective. We wanted to bring it up to what’s happening now.The Cortes Housing Society created these panels and designed this space.”
“There’s also a survey that we invite people to fill out on paper or a QR code (quick response code). Regional Director Mark Vonesch was great at developing that. A lot of the people on Cortes would probably be aware of this because it’s been in the public eye this past year, but I think it’s really important for visitors who come to the island to be aware of this.”
“This section we call our community wall. It’s entitled Snapshots of Home, and we invited community members to share their photos of their homes. This is like an ongoing project. Please send anything you’ve got in a funky home, a home on the move, something that you created, anything that shows a spark of creativity, but also finding a solution to living here on the island. We’ve got King Carl’s Castle and a little note about the history there. People have been really great with sending in their images. This is ongoing throughout the whole year, so if you have more information or questions and stuff, just email the museum.”
“We’ve come around to the very end of the exhibition. We really have a lot of people to thank for this project. It took longer than we anticipated because there’s so many people, so much material and our space is so small. We learned a lot in the process, like a deeper appreciation for everyone here and really look forward to what’s going to happen next.”
Links of Interest
- The Cortes Island Museum webpage
- From the Ground Up: Cortes Island Dwellings – Cortes Island Museum
- Articles about Cortes Island history on Cortes Currents
All photos courtesy Melanie Boyle, unless specifically designated otherwise.
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