An eel weir in the school gym

Across the land, students have been interviewing people, gathering information and building complex structures and displays in order to compete in nation-wide Historica fairs, held each year to celebrate Canadian heritage. The fairs are a twin to the science fairs held in schools but highlight a different area of human endeavor. The fair at North Queens is but one of a series involving more than a thousand communities this spring in Canada.

Come May 2, the best projects from North Queens and other South Shore schools will compete in the regional Historica fair, to be held in the gymnasium of the Lunenburg Junior-Senior High School. The winners there will go on to the national competition at Victoria, BC, in July.

The event at North Queens was highly organized, under the direction of teacher Julie Ramey. She told the judges they would operate in a different manner than in previous years. Where before pairs of judges would evaluate all aspects of a student's project, from display to knowledge to quality of research, this year those tasks would be divided among teams of judges.

One set of judges would look at the display, another the historical research, another the Canadian content, and so on, so that individual students would receive three or more episodes of judging. These were new rules adopted across the country by the Historica organization but while judges saw many more projects, the inspection of those projects seemed more superficial.

In any case, what was seen was impressive. I was part of a team judging the historical research done by students in grades eight and nine and the projects ran the gamut from the Canadian trans-continental railroad to the history of the Greenfield school. The railroad project was done by Hannah Blanchard and was called Tracking the Transcontinental, while there were actually two projects on the Greenfield school, one by Caleb Joudrey and one by Kyle Parker.

I saw a fascinating depiction of the process of harvesting wild blueberries, called Out of the Blue, by Nicholas van Dyk (the van Dyk family is heavily involved in the Nova Scotia blueberry industry). Randy Zwaga did a loving study of his grandfather, Rudolph Zwaga, whose career has taken him from working with KLM Royal Dutch airlines to cross-Canada trucking; Randy was able to show us digital maps of where Rudolph was each day, and pointed out Brandon, Manitoba as his location that very day.

The kids chose topics that held interest for them. Danielle Wamboldt studied war brides, her project complete with interviews, while Katelyn Mansfield did a companion piece called The Gateway that Changed Canada, a project on Pier 21. Daniel Uhlman, who has been trout fishing since he was five years old, essentially interviewed himself, showed examples of lures and fishing tackle, pictures of trout he has caught and offered reasons for the decline in the trout population. You could tell that he loved his topic.

Shannen Mailman did her project on her grandfather, Jimmie Rogers, who started a local company called Kedge Contracting; she tied that to the history of the area, in which the Rogers have figured prominently. Jake White had a rare set of Nova Scotia Voyageur hockey cards on display and researched everything he could find about the team.

One fascinating project was created by a Grade 8 student, Kristina Cunningham and had to do with her family's eel fishing business. It included a large model eel weir, complete with water, a display of the process of catching eels, and a brochure about the business. Kristina modeled the Wamboldt eel weir, which has been operated for close to 120 years, and her brochure said the largest eel encountered by Louis Wamboldt was 44 inches long, weighing six and a half pounds.

After spending the morning making the rounds of the projects, my only regret was that they all couldn't have gone on to Lunenburg.

- Tom Sheppard can be reached at twsheppard@gmail.com