Two additional recently-surfaced newspaper articles, pertaining to the opening of the Silver Valley School, offer additional information and, in part, corroborates that already outlined in Volume One, particularly on 293:

August 24, 1914, Vancouver Sun, Pg.3:  “Mr. Ewen Martin, secretary, and Trustee Hawthorne, of the Coquitlam school board, visited and staked out the site for the new school at Silver Valley.  The contract has been let to Mr. Nicholson, contractor, New Westminster.”

September 25, 1914, Vancouver Sun, Pg.3:  “Coquitlam, Sept. 24 – The Coquitlam school board will open the new school at Silver Valley, at Pitt Lake, on October 2.  Miss Cockering has been appointed teacher.  Chairman George Alderson and Secretary E. Martin visited the almost finished school on Wednesday and subsequently visited the Glen School, taught by Miss Bolton.

In Volume One, I had indicated, on Pg.289, my view that, given the available evidence about the number of days the Silver Valley operated during its first season, it was likely that it would have opened sometime in early September 1914.  The September 25, 1914 Vancouver Sun article now definitively pinpoints the opening date as October 02.  Perhaps it opened then and the additional days were made up during – or at the end of – the school year.  In any event, this new information is certainly welcomed.

Lyle

A recently uncovered Vancouver Sun newspaper article established some helpful corroboration of details documented in the Burke and Widgeon – A History (Volume One) narrative about the opening of the Silver Valley Post Office and the Silver Valley School (book pages 282 through 297).

This article confirms the book’s assertion that the Silver Valley Post Office opened on June 01, 1914.  It reported that on May 12, 1914, the local Member of Parliament had committed to the post office’s imminent opening as well as the unofficial announcement that its first postmaster would be Alvin B. Olmstead, who was reported to have had the contract for carrying the mail from the Pitt River Bridge up to the Silver Valley Post Office for further distribution.

Significantly, the article also stated that a schoolhouse was also to be built in Silver Valley that summer, on an acre of land donated by Olmsted, which definitively confirms the school’s location as outlined on Volume One’s page 289.  Nice to see this additional corroboration!

L