SUNDAY SUPPLEMENT: This week, DAVID MORGAN meanders across Canada to chart the founding and decline of another Croydon community, this time in British Columbia
Rockies outlook: Croydon in British Columbia today is largely deserted and abandoned
Some memories are still visible.
The gravestones in the little cemetery provide reminders of folk who lived and died there.
A rusting shell of a car, once the owner’s pride and joy, lies abandoned beside a field.
The school, though, where the children struggled through winter snow and ice to do their maths and learn about the wider world has long gone. Deprived of a school, a settlement loses a heartbeat.
The church, St James in the Wilderness, was constructed in the 1930s. It never reached its 40th anniversary.
The story of Croydon in British Columbia, Canada, is about what it used to be like. Today there are just a few scattered houses and a mere handful of people.
Croydon is situated in Yellowhead Pass, beside the Fraser River, on the far western edge of Canada.
This pass through the Rockies was first surveyed in 1825 by James MacMillan, working for the Governor of the Hudson Bay Company, Sir George Simpson. Transporting beaver pelts, more quickly, more easily, more profitably, was the overwhelming objective of the company, one of the great bastions of imperial Britain.
Tete jaune: Canada’s history of British, French and the first nations is all wrapped up in the naming of Yellowhead Pass
Yellowhead Pass was first known as Leather Pass. Macmillan had with him on his survey a fair-haired Iroquois trader named Pierre Bostonais, whose blond locks gave him the nickname “tete jaune” – or “yellow head”. As well as giving his name to Tete Jaune, a town now abandoned, Bostonais’s nickname was adopted for the pass which later became a major route through the Rockies.
The Grand Trunk Pacific Railway was opened in 1914 and Canadian Northern followed a year later. The TransCanada Highway 16 was completed in 1970.
After World War I, a sawmill was established in Croydon. It was run by the Etter and McDougall Lumber Company and in 1920 it had 80 employees. Two years later the mill was closed down and moved a few miles upstream to another small town, Shere.
School transport: Croydon pupils Flora Long and Nora Barnett in 1924
The closure of the mill meant that the buildings were left vacant. One of them, the cookshack, was turned into the school.
In a book Yellowhead Pass and its People, produced by the Valemount Historic Society, precious memories were collected about life in Croydon, BC.
One of the contributors, Ellice Blackman, remembered her schooldays in the 1920s.
Opening in autumn 1923, the school had just a few pupils who sat on long, rough benches with tables to work on. One day, desks arrived at the railway station. The children were so overjoyed that they didn’t complain about carrying them the quarter of a mile to the school. At that time there were children from just five families: three from the Long family, three Davisons, three Poburneys, one Switzer and two Barnetts. Calling the register must have been a swift and straightforward daily ritual.
The school was run with the parents as trustees and with only a small grant from the government to cover the teacher’s wages, with a little extra for supplies. “Scribblers”, or notebooks, cost the children a dime or a nickel. A prize was awarded for the neatest notebook. Hazel Davison won.
Despite having only a few children on roll, the teacher still organised concerts, although they were “a mixed bag of tricks”. All of them were unique.
Church mission: St James in the Wilderness was built in the 1930s
During the winter, the children brought their own cocoa or soup for their lunch, to be heated up in the classroom. Everyone had a cup and spoon. No one ever missed school because it was too cold, despite an average daytime temperature being -5 degrees Celsius.
Because it was once part of the sawmill complex, there was a creek by the schoolyard. In the warmer weather, the children couldn’t wait to eat whatever they had brought for lunch and spend a few minutes on the rafts. These were used on a small pool created by a dam which the children built themselves.
The school was also used for a variety of community activities. Despite the floor being made of six inch spruce boards, occasional dances were held. One of them was to raise money to buy Christmas presents for the children. “Music was provided by the Victrola”, remembered the first teacher there, Richard Downey. A Victrola was one of the first portable record players in America and Canada.
In June 1924, the school was used as a polling station for the provincial elections. During the election campaign, the Conservative candidate turned up for a political rally. A grand total of four people attended, including the teacher (although that was probably because he had to lock up afterwards).
The meeting broke up “when one of the four people took out their watch and began to wind it.”
The school had a mascot, the Poburney family’s dog. Downey had concerns for the three Poburney girls at the weekends and in the holidays, as they would leave home in the morning with a packed lunch and be out all day. They would roam far and wide over the mountainside, which was home to an array of wildlife, including moose and caribou, but also grizzly and black bears.
The eldest Poburney girl was just nine, but their parents never worried. They had absolute confidence in the girls, and their dog.
Grave importance: one of the first burials in the Croydon churchyard was Aaron Watson’s
By 1952, the school was closed, and the children bussed each day to the nearby town of Dunster for their education.
Building work on the Anglican church in Croydon commenced in 1930 and took five years to complete with the help of local labour, with a small graveyard around it. The log cabin church was consecrated on Wednesday June 12, 1935. Rev Edward Reader and George Wells, Bishop of Cariboo, presided at the ceremony.
There were two other important events that day, too. The clergy conducted a service at the grave of one of the local farmers, Aaron Watson. He had died three years earlier and was the first person to be buried in the new plots. His memorial still survives to this day.
There was also a confirmation. Sisters, Edna and Flora Campbell were photographed with the two clergy after they had completed the sacrament. The Campbell and Watson family names both appear on the 1937 voters list for Croydon.
Holy orders: from left: Mrs Watson, Rev Reader and Bishop Wells at the church consecration service in June 1935
From information supplied by the local museum, the church here in Croydon, south London, from where the little settlement in British Columbia got its name, helped to set up the new church with its wonderful name “St James in the Wilderness”.
Financial contributions helped to pay for the lumber and the furnishings. The link was made between the two churches when the Canadian vicar Rev Pallinger visited London. The timber church didn’t survive for long, however, as after World War II, the numbers of the local population. The church was dismantled in 1963, leaving just the cemetery.
Fourteen graves were identified during a survey in 1989. Among them, there was Walter Davison who had drowned in the Fraser River in 1938. There was a second grave next to Aaron Watson, presumed to be his wife, although no visible markers remain.
Transport hub: Croydon BC once had a railway station and a ferry across the Fraser River
Two young women Effie MacKenzie and Victoria Keefe were also buried there after a tragic accident in 1943 on the chain ferry which crossed the Fraser River. For some reason the car in which they were travelling failed to stop once it was on the small craft and went right into the water. Despite frantic efforts to rescue them, the two women drowned.
There was no store in Croydon, and in the 1930s supplies either came from nearby Dunster, brought up by the railway’s section men on their hand-car or, more usually, from The Alberta Trading Company, Edmonton. This freight came twice a week, so Croydon families needed to be organised.
One of the highlights of the week back then was the arrival of the mail. The mailbag was hung on a stand called a mail crane and as the train sped past the mail car grabbed the bag, while railway staff threw down Croydon’s incoming bags.
The locals had the same postmistress for 40 years, Jessie Barnett. She had to walk three miles from her post office to the railway station, often at night, to carry out her duties.
The decline of the little settlement wasn’t because anything terrible happened.
Circumstances just changed. The 1943 Post Office Directory listed a population of 68. A resident in the 2000s quoted the population as 11.
The station has closed. The ferry is no more, although the street down near the river is still named Croydon Ferry Road.
The trains still thunder through the pass. The highway channels the traffic through the pass in the Rockies. Apart from those few souls enjoying an isolated life away from the hurly-burly that most of us are used to, Croydon slumbers.
On a summer’s day, a group of hikers or cyclists in the valley might pause and almost hear the cries from the schoolyard, the growl of a grizzly and the barking of the Poburney‘s dog, or the clank of the chain ferry. Their daydream, though, is brief. They are brought back to reality by mosquitoes. There were swarming in the ’20s, they are still buzzing now.
Summer isn’t summer in Croydon BC without mosquitoes.
- David Morgan is a former Croydon headteacher, now the volunteer education officer at Croydon Minster, who offers tours or illustrated talks on the history around the Minster for local community groups
If you would like a group tour of Croydon Minster or want to book a school visit, then ring the Minster Office on 020 688 8104 or go to the website on www.croydonminster.org and use the contact page
Other articles by David Morgan on Croydons around the world:
- Tough pioneer spirit took Croydon name to the Great Lakes
- Empire pioneer who put Croydon on the map in Australia
- How Melbourne’s White Flats is linked forever to Croydon
- Sharpe’s rebellion in Jamaica highlighted the plight of slaves
- The ‘incompetent’ Lebombo scout who helped win Boer War
- Croydon gold rush that saw thousands move to the outback
- Hard lives for the Puritan pioneers of new state New Hampshire
- How Croydon lodged itself forever in a part of Philadelphia
- Hardships and dangers on the Utah trail heading to Croydon
- If you have a news story about life in or around Croydon, or want to publicise your residents’ association or business, or if you have a local event to promote, please email us with full details at inside.croydon@btinternet.com
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ROTTEN BOROUGH AWARDS: In January 2024, Croydon was named among the country’s rottenest boroughs for a SEVENTH successive year in the annual round-up of civic cock-ups in Private Eye magazine
as an occasional historian of “the valley,” congratulations on making the trip! Did you drive through to Tete Jaune on the south side of the Fraser?