Part 5

The Atkinson Foundation, built the first section of the Hub; the kitchen part [in 1949]. They built that for the Composite Camp. Composite Camp was to look after these single boys that couldn't get to camp any other way.

Years later in late November [1953], they put on the dining hall. The lake was pretty well frozen by the time Jim and I left that year. It was snowing. That was the closest to winter that we had spent in the camp because the men were working and we had to stay. They worked as long as weather permitted to try and get that building closed in.

When Composite Camp started, the boys had tents all down below by the lake. They came up to the kitchen to eat and ate in the kitchen part. I don't think there was that big stove. There was a much smaller stove in those days. There wasn't any refrigeration. We didn't have power for it then.

Mill Valley Buildings
Back in '48 or '49 when the camp started, when Mill Valley Lumber Company left, one of the first things that was done was to bring the buildings down (from the Mill site). A lot of their buildings were portable, and a lot they took with them. But what they couldn't take, they left for us. There was a couple of fairly nice homes that they hauled out on skids.

One was where Bill Wilson is living now, just where the road joins the highway. That belonged to the Sheardons of Windsor. They'd come up on holidays. I don't know how they got in there but they fell in love with the area and went to work for Mill Valley. He was with Chrysler in Windsor, gave up his job and came up and worked there. Eventually, his brother followed and came up too and lived there. So they were there and they had a house which they took out.

Bunky
There was a cabin that we got from the Mill Site. It had been their meat house, cause they didn't have refrigeration either. They had this heavy walled meat house with two doors that came into a kind of veranda. The meat was just hung there and left. It was screened all the way around. The sun and the heat sort of made it all black on the outside, and it cured there and it seemed to keep. When they left the Mill Site, they left that. We brought it down. That was where Ken Woods lived. He had that cabin.

Mill Valley Cabin
The first staff cabin - that was the office from the Mill. It was in the swamp, originally. Then they brought in a little cabin. We used to call it the henhouse. It was like a lean to and we fastened it on the back of the Staff Cabin when the staff grew to six.

This cabin was the office at the Mill Where Neils Webster lived. He had one room as an office and the other room was a bedroom. It was divided in half. It was brought down from the Mill and put where the picnic area is. That was all swamp in those days, or at least very wet before it was filled in. We later moved it. It's the old Mill Valley cabin up on the hill. Then they built Lakeview and Driftwood.

Then of course all the five cabins were built down at the other end. That was around Composite time. They were built for staff.

Rangers Cabin, Kennabi Lodge
I was asking my son, Alan what his early memories were. He said he remembers sleeping in a tent, right out behind the kitchen of Kennabi Lodge. Just out the back door, they had a tent there with a floor. That's where he and Don lived until they built the cabin where we eventually lived. That was when we were putting the living room on the main building. He says it was a building that was up at the Mill that they pulled apart and brought down and built their place out of.

I think it was a stable that was up towards Holland and Mislaid that was in a marshy area. There was just a very short time it could be brought out, when the roads were in condition to haul it out. He thinks it was something from the Mill, so I don't know who's right.

Pow Wow and the Hospital
The Group Committee decided we needed a hospital. Plans were drawn up. Gordon Wallace was an architect, and probably his company drew them up. He was a land expert. He could look at a piece of land and say how firm it was and what it would hold. He traveled all over the country, China and Japan, putting in foundations for earthquake and quicksand, and that type of terrain where they had trouble with getting buildings of any size. Whether he would be an engineering company or an architect, I'm not sure, but he was a great person.

He was on the Group Committee, and he designed the building. It was supposed to have eight rooms, and then a sitting room where the fireplace was put, and that was it. As it started to come along, something came up, ventilation or something that they wanted at each end. Jim thought it should have some kind of cross-ventilation. So he decided on a Sunday to go down to Fenlon Falls where Gordon Wallace's cottage was, and discuss it with him before the workmen went ahead with it.

I went along with him and we were talking. I said, "what are you going to do about washroom facilities?"
"Well I suppose the same as any other camp", he said. But can sick people wander outside? We didn't have a nurse at that time. Eventually I supposed that they counted on having one that would look after them. Well, they weren't just too sure about that.

So I said what about meals. I said there's no way we could bring meals from our place up there. They would be stone cold by the time it got up. You'd be running up and down the hill.

Furthermore, you can't leave a sick person up there by themselves without somebody staying with them. So they began to sort of look over, the situation again.

Helen Cruden (later Anderson) At this point, we had the bare walls and that was all. So they realized they'd made kind of a mistake. A few other things were not working out the way they had expected. So they scrapped the whole plan and made that into what it is, Pow Wow, meeting place for get-togethers and camp fires on rainy days, and built the little hospital down by us, which was handy to the kitchen.

By the time that was up and finished, they hired Helen (Cruden) Anderson as the first nurse. They put a bathroom in there, and just the first section, just the four beds first. Then they put the operating room in, and the other four beds at the other end of it.

The only buildings we had when we bought the property was just that one kitchen and dining room, and what they left at the Mill. The Trapper's Cabin was there when we came. Everything else was built by the Rovers. These Rovers on the hill that camped there, were great. They worked continually up there.

There was another group of leaders that used to spend a lot of time there. Steve Coates, and it seems to me, Helen Anderson's brother was in that crowd. They used to come up and sort of set up the floats and things for the annual Rotary parade there. He was a designer for Simpsons, a window designer, so he knew how 'to put things together. That was all built up in Pow Wow, all that kind of stuff was put together in there.

You know those topographical maps, we used to have so many of them. I don't know where they disappeared to. A lot of the stuff I left in that living room, the old traps and the old skates that you screwed on under your shoes that we found. We used to go up and poke around the old farms up there and get a lot of that stuff, the broad axes and the yokes and all that stuff we left up there.

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