After more than a decade of service, the Oyster Bay schoolhouse was barged over to Whaletown in 1950. There it opened its doors to the children of a new community.

Brigid Weiler started attending the Whaletown School in 1959. 

Her earliest memories are in that area.

“My dad Ottie Weiler was the postmaster in Whaletown for many, many years.  My mom, Mary Weiler, was from New Westminster. My dad was from Victoria. They were essentially urban visionaries, if you will.” 

“They met during the war. My mom was a nurse, and  nursed through the London Blitz. My dad was an officer. When the officers would come up to London, they’d hire a hall, and requisition  a busload of nurses to come down and dance with them. That’s how my mom and dad met. They were married there. Things happened after that, and then they finally got to come home and be together. They chartered a boat, and  came up the coast looking for a place where they could live a happy, romantic, bohemian life.”

“They didn’t know anything about living in the wilderness at all. They saw the house half built on Whaletown Bay and bought it. It’s still there. It’s a blue house, you see it when you go out on the ferry.  Five acres of waterfront for $1,500. They were so happy. They had just a wonderful romantic, bohemian life and four daughters.” 

Thanks to Mary Weiler, the schoolhouse was a community arts centre more than 50 years before its rebirth as the Old Schoolhouse Art Gallery.

BW: “My mother taught art classes here,  from the late 40s until she left.  There’s a photo there of her students squished into the little kid’s desk. This is Mr. McDevitt, who was our teacher and his wife Lottie, Bernard Woodward, Edie Huck, with all the easels. She did that for many, many years, so it was always an art teaching place.”

Mary Weiler painted one of the pieces currently hanging in the gallery, after she  moved to Cortes in 1947. 

BW: “This is an early piece of hers, after that she was a watercolorist.She was an art teacher and an artist. She also taught first aid classes here.”

“The community club used the building in those days as well. They had the Santa Claus parties here sometimes, and other things. When they opened the road to Mansons around 1960, there was a big party. There was actually quite a bit that went on in the field. It was the place where people would celebrate. We’d had community picnics.”

Brigid was living just a short walk away when she started school. 

BW: “I came here from grade one to grade six.”

“My teacher was Don McDevitt. He and his wife lived on the corner of Cemetery Road and he would catch the school bus over here every morning to go to school.”

CC: Can I get you to name some of the students?

BW: “David Robertson still lives here and he had several siblings who were also in attendance – Alan, Alice and Bernie – and then that family moved away. There was Jeannie, Cheryl, and Rick Matthews. The Matthews family still own property, and come here for holidays. There were the Riddell kids, Marilyn and Noreen and Louise. There were two Waring families and the Bergman kids, Gail, Lynn, and Phillip. I’m still in touch with one of that family, Lynn. They ran the Whaletown store for 30 odd years, so they were a very well known presence here in Cortes.  My best friends were in those families.”

“We had an oil stove for heat at the very back of the building. We also had Vic the dog, who lay by the oil stove and steamed away and made the whole place smell like wet dog in the wintertime. There were gas lights, propane, which were almost never used.  On the very darkest mornings when it was blowing a heavy southeaster, pretty much pitch dark, Mr. McDevitt would climb up a tall step ladder and light the lights. Other than that, we didn’t have that, just the windows. By nine o’clock you could see. it was probably pretty dark in here, but I came from a house with no electricity. We were used to it.”

“We had to go out and play at lunch hour, no matter what the weather. Mr. McDevitt liked to have his space at lunchtime. He liked to take a nap in his chair.” 

“We didn’t have any toys, we didn’t have any sports equipment. I think we had a baseball bat and there were some bases and  a terrible teeter totter thingy that went way too fast and a swing that pinched your fingers,  things like that would never be acceptable now.” 

“We had a big field here, bigger than the property, and there was a pond down by the road. In the fall, we’d spend every recess and every lunch hour daming up the creek that went out of the pond, so it would flood the schoolyard. Then if we had a cold winter, we would have a skating rink. We also had a sawdust pit down there for sports day practice because there used to be a big interisland sports day, encompassing many islands. Whaletown was part of that as an independent school. So us children would practice high jumps and stuff.” 

“Of course we have open range here. The neighbor’s cows would come and graze in the yard, and poo in the sawdust pit. There were two or three horses that would be here as well. We could put a rope halter on them and ride them. All the animals were free range.”

“If it was pouring rain, us kids played in the play shed.  There wasn’t anything in there, not basketball hoops, we didn’t have any toys or any sports equipment. Some of the more brave kids would shimmy up the posts and walk around up on the rafters, which were really high. There was no supervision.” 

“Every now and then Mr. McDevitt would take us all down to Mr Bergman’s store. An ice cream cone was 8 cents and he had one flavour. In those days tourists would come over in their yachts and ask him what variety of ice cream he had. He’d get really annoyed because he only had one kind and everybody should know that, it’s like, ‘it’s these people!’” 

“In my last year, there were seven children in the school. Grade one had two kids Ian McLean and Phillip Bergman. Grade 2 was Jeannie Matthews; grade 3 was my sister Johnny; grade 4 was Sheril Mathews; grade 5 was Pat McCoy and grade 6 was me.” 

“I went to Mansons School when I was 11.” 

“Prior to that, I had almost never been to Mansons because we didn’t have a car. The roads were non-existent or very bad, and when we went out on the boat we were going up north towards Plunger Pass or other places to fish. We never went to communities. By the time I was ten years old, I’d probably been to Mansons  maybe six times on the school bus for Sports Day, that would have been it. So when I started school there when I was eleven, I’d never met any of the kids. None of them.  All the communities were separate in those days, and independent.” 

“Mr. McDevitt, our teacher, used to come on the bus. Ernie Guthrie was the bus driver.  He used to smoke on the bus until the school board made him stop. Even then, that wasn’t acceptable, so he would jump out of the bus and light his smoke when he got to Mansons.”

“I have other memories of this building, when we were teenagers, scaling the walls and opening a window and coming in just because teenagers are curious. We weren’t vandalizing it or anything. We just wanted to hang out in it.”

CC: What can you remember about the school closing? 

BW: “Nothing. I wasn’t around. My youngest sister would know more about that.”

“I went to Manson School  when I was 11. That’s what all the children did from grade 7 to 10, and then I went away for high school to Campbell River when I was 14. Then on to art school, so I wasn’t on Cortes a whole lot at that time.”

Mr McDevitt passed away in 1971. He was 67 years old. A swing at the schoolhouse was dedicated to his memory. 

Ottie Weiler passed away two years later. 

Mary and the girls left Cortes in 1974, but not before there was a big surprise party for them at the schoolhouse. 

The community continued to use the schoolhouse for public functions, but no longer as a school. 

BW: “The field was used a lot.”

There was one memory that provoked Brigid’s laughter, “We used to be ‘hippie’ and ‘straight’ baseball teams and they’d come here and play ball.”

 Meinsje Vlaming came into the story two decades later.  

“I got involved with this building more or less when my kids went to Linnaea school, and then we would hire it for dances.  The older class would have their little evenings with the dance and lemonade and treats. We used to rent it for parties. We had ballroom dance classes here as well. Some people attempted to hold yoga classes, but it didn’t work out. It was cold, so cold,” she said. 

Another chapter in the building’s history was about to begin and many of Cortes Island’s better known artists, including Meinsje and Brigid, have a part in it.

Go on to ‘Birthing of the Old Schoolhouse Art Gallery

Top image credit: 1964 school picture: Pat McCoy, Jeannie Mathews, Brigid Weiler, Sheril Mathews, Johnny Weiler and teacher Don McDevitt; Heather and Ian Maclean are in front – courtesy Cortes Island Museum

Sign-up for Cortes Currents email-out:

To receive an emailed catalogue of articles on Cortes Currents, send a (blank) email to subscribe to your desired frequency:

• Daily, (articles posted during the last 24 hours) – cortescurrents-daily+subscribe@cortes.groups.io
• Weekly Digest cortescurrents – cortescurrents-weekly+subscribe@cortes.groups.io