History on the mountain: Mount Hanley Schoolhouse Museum re-opens June 27

The Bay of Fundy shore is an area where a growing interest in the history of the local communities is gathering wide attention. A focal point of this interest is the Mount Hanley One-room Schoolhouse Museum, located on the road that first came up the North Mountain from the Valley in 1784. The area was quickly settled and the villages along the bay carried on fishing, boat building, and commercial voyages to Saint John and the New England states as the only way to travel great distances in those days. Soon agriculture was thriving as well as did the forest industry involved in building ships.

Very early on a school became important. Families had many children in those days, 15 or more was not uncommon. An important student in the Mount Hanley history was Ora Blossom Elliott who in 1909 hand-wrote and illustrated a history of that village. Not long before, a world famous student, Joshua Slocum, spent his early school days in class, but also sailing a wooden washtub on the mill pond across the road,

It is from Ora Blossom Elliott that we learn much of the history of Mount Hanley. In her exquisite handwriting she tells of the way the first homes were built, of early farming, such as “Potatoes are raised in abundance and shipped to other parts of the province or Saint John.” She speaks of wood cutting, sheep raising, various saw mills (1830), grist mills, stores, churches, and home based work such as spinning, weaving, and making clothes and footwear. There are maps and sketches of homes and workplaces.

SLOCUM

The story of Captain Joshua Slocum never fades. A long-time captain of large sailing vessels in the latter half of the 19th Century, he was born in 1844, grew up in Mount Hanley, attended early school there and later moved to Brier Island, down the Fundy shore. In the late 1800s he converted a small sloop and began an epic journey around the world. Then he wrote a book about it “Sailing Alone Around the World,” and he has been a hero to sailors and sea lovers ever since. If you read his book, or Ora’s you will be amazed at the excellence of the writing, and yet they attended a tiny, one-room school, with often short-term teachers, oil lamps (the students helped to clean), a wood-burning stove for heat, water carried in a pail from the neighbour’s well, and they had to walk, often a couple of miles through snow drifts to school and back home. Both of them, however, grew up in one of the most beautiful places in the world, on the North Mountain, overlooking the Bay of Fundy, an inspiration to anyone.

MUSEUM HOURS

The Mount Hanley Schoolhouse Museum is located at the Brown Road intersection with the Mount Hanley Road. It will open June 27, and will be in operation from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. weekends and holidays into September. It is a great place to see old desks, pictures on the wall, maps (An ancient Church Map) and books from bygone days that Ora and Joshua might have read. There you can imagine what it was like to go to school in such a setting. Copies of Ora Blossom Elliotts book are available at the museum.