It all started with a project to preserve a piece of history in the area, and now the Bearspaw Historical Society continues to keep that history alive by using the old community schoolhouse in new ways.
The Bearspaw Historical Society, which was initially formed in 1973 by residents who wanted to save the historic 1920 Bearspaw School, re-established in 1999 to bring that goal to full fruition.
Roger Pilkington was one of the 1999 re-establishers, now 83-years old, and is still part of the society today.
“We rescued the historic one-room schoolhouse,” said Pilkington, who was a member of the Lions Club when the schoolhouse was located on their land.
When Pilkington became president of the Lion’s Club in 2000, he rallied people around him to save it. They raised funds to move the building to a piece of municipal land in 2002, and had completely restored it by November 2004.
Due to it being moved from its original location just across Highway 1A, it lost its historic designation.
The school's 1942 teacherage was located on a local farm and also moved to the new site, with renovations completed by the fall of 2006.
“Prior to that, teachers, who were generally young girls, lived with a farmer, and that wasn't a very good situation,” Pilkington said. “An older teacher came along and said, ‘I'll come and teach there, but I have a daughter so I'd like my own little cottage.’ So they found her a shack that's 10 by 16 and she and her daughter moved into that.”
The old school horse barn could not be located, so a replica of it was completed in late 2011.
“We saw that as a very important building because all the kids used to ride to school on horses back in the old days,” Pilkington said. The barn is brand new, with a toilet, kitchenette, heating, and serves as a recreation space.
“The school is now like a little community centre, but we can move all the desks back in place and grade one students from the local Bearspaw School come every year and sit in the school and have a bit of a lesson in the school,” he said.
Pilkington explained the space gets rented out, and every Friday night during the winter a local school teacher runs a chess club for children in the horse barn.
In the area between Calgary and Cochrane, four school houses were built between 1908 and 1920. Those schools included the Glendale School (1910), the Glenbow School (1910), the Westminster School (1908), and the Bearspaw School (1920). Of those four schools, only the Bearspaw School remains, which officially closed in 1965.
At the time, each school represented its own division, Pilkington explained, and each division was made up of about four miles squared so kids could more easily attend.
“It's interesting that between 1920 and 1965, in the district between Calgary and Cochrane, 60 children were in schools,” Pilkington said. “Each of those schools held about 15 students, so there were only about 60 kids between grade one and nine going to school in that area.”
Nowadays, he added, there are close to 1,200 kids attending schools in the area.
While touring through the schoolhouse on Oct. 24, he explained the school was not insulated and initially didn’t have any source of heat. Due to the bitter Alberta winters, the school used to be closed in January and February and was opened in June and July instead.
Eventually, the farming community said this didn’t work for them, and the school was put on a full basement with a coal fired gravity furnace in 1936 until a propane fuelled forced-air furnace was installed in 1952.
Sadly, most members of the Historical Society are almost as old as the old schoolhouse, Pilkington said.
“We'd like some younger members,” he said, but added they are still going strong and host the occasional community event.
For more information about the Society, to find out what current events are taking place, or to lend a helping hand, reach out to the Society on Facebook or their website: bearspawhistoricalsociety.ca