Category Archives: History

Education, History

Schools of Squirrel Cove

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Originally published January 22, 2024. This is the first audio recording of the article below, and may have sufficient additional details to be called the most recent version. The text was originally published in the booklet Squirrel Cove (Cortes Island Museum & Archives Society)

At the beginning of the 1900s, Squirrel Cove on the east side of Cortes Island was a hub of activity for homesteaders, loggers, fishermen, miners and trappers. They came from all the surrounding islands for supplies, groceries, mail, repairs, radios and dances in the hall. There were two stores, a post office, church, hall, two machine shops, a boatworks, a marine ways, and a big dock where the Union Steamships stopped regularly. Jim Spilsbury also stopped frequently to install or repair his radios in boats and homes.

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Finances, History

The Quadra Project: Globalization – Part 1

Peter Zeihan, in his 2022 book, The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization, offers an insightful and credible explanation for the globalization process that affects us all, and is becoming increasingly relevant because of global economic, political and environmental factors. Although his book might exaggerate the importance of America, his ideas deserve our attention because they provide a framework for illuminating other related subjects.

At the end of World War II, in 1945, the world was in a political and economic mess. Although Germany and Japan had been defeated, most of the rest of the world had been heavily damaged by the conflict. In the East, an imperial Japan was in ruin, as was China after the Japanese invasion of its northern territories. In Europe, Germany, too, was in ruin. Great Britain, Italy, France, Russia and their many adjacent countries had been heavily damaged.

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Arts, Gardening, History, Housing

Cortes Island Museum 2025 AGM

The Cortes Island Museum had their AGM on March 30th.

“We had  52 people come out despite a really nice gardening day. You could see people having conversations and lots of hugs.  Nice to see everybody out after the winter. Coffee and treats were available, a nice wide selection of home baked goods. So it’s like the social atmosphere was really positive,” explained Melanie Boyle, Managing Director of the Cortes Island Museum.

“The museum AGM business meeting takes maybe half an hour and then Iris Steigemann gave a really wonderful visual presentation of her travels in Greenland. Donations are up and membership is up, so we’re very pleased about  those facts.” 

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History

Stonehenge: Exhibition from a sacred place for all Britons

Modern geneticists have shown us that the past is much closer than most of us realize. We carry the genetic coding from previous generations in our DNA and it can be traced back 200,000 to 300,000 years. Adam Rutherford went further, proclaiming everyone with European roots descends from Charlemagne (as well as his most humble followers). His point being that the number of your direct ancestors doubles every generation you count backward. By the time you count back 33 generations—about 800 to 1,000 years ago—you have more than 8 billion ancestors. By way of contrast, the population of England is believed to have only been about 2 million in 1,000 AD. At that point you had 4,000 ‘ancestors’ for every living person. This means your genealogy is populated by the same people counted over and over again through different lines of descent.  If you are of English ancestry, something of even greater antiquity like the Stonehenge artefacts currently being exhibited at the Royal BC Museum in Victoria is definitely about your heritage. 

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History

Brian Scott, Sherman Barker & Isabelle LaPlante: on the Cortes Experience

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Around 40 people turned out to the Cortes Island Museum on November 10 for the launch of a series of community speakers. The host, Brian Scott traced the idea for ‘Finding Home: The Cortes Island Experience’  to a conversation he had with Sherman Barker. 

“Sherman and I have known each other for a few years, it’s long other story, but he was up on Easter Bluff one day when Jane and I went up for a hike.  We’re chatting, and he started telling us his arrival story. It actually goes even further back to when he came as a kid.  He said, there’s lots of stories on the island here and if we don’t somehow capture them, we’re going to lose them.” 

“I thought it would be an interesting thing for the museum to do because the museum has artifacts that it’s saving and preserving and sharing with the public. Stories are artifacts as well. How do we capture those? Then it occurred to me, well, why don’t we do a speaker series? I approached Sherman and said, ‘Hey, what do you think? You want to be the first?’ And he’s like, ‘yep, It’s awesome.’”  

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