Heritage Harvest Festival
Published Thursday October 15th, 2009
Before school busing and large regional schools, one and two room schools were a focal point of life in rural New Brunswick.
Keswick Ridge is one of the few lucky communities to still have its old school house. The Superior School was built in 1887 and was a functioning centre of public education until it was closed in the 1960's.
The old school will come to life again this Friday night during the Keswick Ridge Heritage Harvest Festival.
The two-day festival, Oct. 16-17, opens with a dessert theatre, staged in the school.
As visitors enjoy a dessert, coffee and tea, local teens from "The Ridge" area will be acting out skits and stories about those good old golden school days.
"There were a lot of funny experiences and stories of the old school," says local resident Mary Tingley, who wrote the four skits being performed.
Tingley can attest to the authenticity of the stories because, while she and her husband have only lived in the community three years, she gathered the material through interviews with several long-time residents.
They were students of the superior school during the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s. She even found a retired teacher, so the skits will include both students' and a teacher's perspective of what went on.
Typically some of the tales involve the outdoor toilets, the foundations of which can still be seen in the school yard.
Teachers back then did not have the luxury of their own separate washrooms. They had to share the outdoor facilities with their students.
One story will tell of students whipping snowballs at the privy when the teacher was inside.
Characters in the skits are real people and some still live in the community. So to protect the innocent - and the not so innocent - "I have changed a lot of the names," says Tingley, an assistant pastor at the Nashwaaksis United Church.
Tingley says some of the stunts pulled by students were so popular they were repeated year after year.
Most of the stories are humorous. "It's obvious they had a lot of fun here," says Tingley. But at least one is not funny.
Not wanting to give anything away before the show the author would only say, "It touches on reality, but it ends up with a happy ending."
The two-day heritage festival is organized by the Keswick Ridge Historical Society. This is the third year for the festival. Building on the success of the first two, society president Sheila Moore says they decided to do it again.
"This is the kind of thing a historical society should do, provide an opportunity for residents to get actively involved in their local history," says Moore.
The festival is also a fundraiser for another project. The society is restoring an old country store, dating back to before 1875. It will become a small museum of artifacts and records. Like the school, the McKeen corner store, as it was known, was another focal point for the small rural community.
Keswick Ridge today is a mix of modern, new houses and huge, century-old farm homes, that stretch for five miles along the peak of a ridge, between the picturesque Keswick and Mactaquac valleys.
The fertile farm lands were one of the areas where the Loyalists settled. But when a neighbour down the St. John River in Douglas researched the area he got a big surprise.
When Paul O'Connell bought a farm in Douglas he wanted to know who were the first owners.
He researched the old land grant maps, dating back to the coming of the Loyalists in 1783.
His land, he found, was given to William Garden, a quartermaster with the army in New York that was on the side of the British. Other names appearing on the long narrow lots bordering the river were Captain Sam Hallet and Captain Walter Campbell, and other Loyalists. A large block of 950 acres was granted to the Prince of Wales American Regiment.
"Then all of a sudden you see Muzeroll, F. Aubere, P. Pinette, and Gaudin, and Diegle. Those were all Acadians, and they had land grants," says O'Connell in a recent interview.
The Acadian names, interspersed with the Loyalists, extended from Douglas, around the mouth of the Keswick River to Keswick Ridge.
O'Connell, a past president of the York-Sunbury Historical Society, will give a talk on the area's Acadian settlers on Saturday at 2 p.m. in the old schoolhouse.
He will unravel the mystery of why a punitive British government, in the tragic tale of the Acadian expulsion, drove 10,000 Acadians from their lands and into exile, and then, barely 20 years later, was giving them land grants.
"Here they were giving them grants, in amongst the Loyalists," says O'Connell.
Why such a reversal of fortunes for the Acadians, who, before the expulsion, had been tilling the soils here for a century?
And why such a dramatic change of heart on the part of the British governors who ruled the colony?
O'Connell doesn't want to spoil his presentation so he is keeping mum for now about this mystery. And another.
"I traced a little bit of where these people ended up and what happened to their farms," says O'Connell.
To make reservations for the dessert theatre contact Angela Baker at 363-1095 or by email at angela.baker@WARPNET.ca.
Space is limited.
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