I was the youngest of the family of Joseph Augustus White and Bessie Ola Sterns. I was born August 28, 1913. I went to school in Souris until grade 10 which was all we had in our public school. My father was a clerk in the store of my grandfather, John Sterns. The Sterns came to Prince Edward Island from Nova Scotia. They were actually Americans from down around Belmont, Massachusetts. I believe they came to Five Houses where my grandfather lived his younger life. He came to Souris in 1867 at age 20 and started a business. It was on the west side of Chapel and then later he built a huge building which was on the south side of Main St. a little west of Chapel Street. The lower part of that building was a store, the second story was offices, and the third story was living quarters for his family. At one time he was dealing a little bit in land.

I have seen, in my mother's home, the churning of the cream etc. but not in my home. My grandfather had the farm where Mrs. Leith Townshend is now. That was his home. He built it in 1881 and he had all that big farm area that extended away back beyond where Roy Coffin lives. That was Mother's home and when I was a child I spent a lot of time out there because I was the youngest. Grandma was dead then. Grandma died in 1907 or 1908, so my grandfather just depended on housekeepers for years. Then his youngest daughter really gave up her life style to keep house for him.

I had quite a family of dolls. I used to do their wash and hang it on the fence. The dolls all had names, of course. As I grew a little older, I didn't have too many girl chums up around where I lived. So I used to play with my brother and his chums and I got to be sort of a tomboy. I played rugby and hockey and boxed and had competition with the girls. My mother wanted me to come down and play with Babe Matthew's cousins. I was probably between five and nine - my father died when I was nine - so things had to be more important in those years that I can remember of him. He was sick at home for a whole year and I got a little closer to him at that time. After that, my mother managed the family as two of my brothers worked at my grandfather's store. Ernest was born in 1896 so he was older and worked down there. Mom managed to keep things together and us under control.

I wasn't allowed to go down to the breakwater with some of my school acquaintances. Roy went and walked his girl friends down there, but that was really out of bounds for me. I walked with my mother because she had cousins around that she liked to visit.

We spent a lot of time with Adele and her family. Adele's older sister, Jean, designed the Island Tartan. She and Roy were about the same age and Jean's mother always had a Valentine party and we were all invited and had fun. We used to go up there and play tennis on the courts in the yard. We had a nice time in the summer because we got acquainted with people at the Cox Hotel.

I had four siblings, Ernest, Dorothy, Reginald and Roy. My oldest brother made my baby sleigh, and my great grandfather made the sleigh that I pushed my dolls in which is now down in the Log Cabin in Souris. Ernest built doll furniture for me and Mom made the mattress and pillows and sheets and blankets and coverlets for the bed. I did spend a lot of time out at my grandfather's and we were great companions from the time I was small until he died in 1939. I finally got to be chauffeur of his car the last couple of years. He had rheumatism and couldn't drive.

He had been a spritely man going out around the yard. He was partly farmer and mostly businessman and he was a very good-Iiving man. When we went there on Sunday he would always say, "What was the golden text?" We lived out there for two years. I was 14 and we had prayers every morning and prayers every night. We had the usual pets, the cats and the dogs and the farm animals. I used to ride one of his horses. I've driven a horse and wagon which was his, I guess.

I remember the touring car that he had because he had one of the first. My uncle Reg was a businessman in Charlottetown and he had hotels. First he had the Victoria Hotel and then it burned down. He had the Queen Hotel and then he built one of the first summer hotels on the Island, Beach Grove Inn. It was where the Beach Grove Home for the aged is now. Uncle Reg and his friends were the first people that had cars coming to the Island. Uncle Reg thought his father should have a car so the touring car was bought about 1917 or 1918.

One thing I remember, during the first war, the army barracks was the home where the soldiers trained and lived and was right at the foot of Chapel and Main Streets on the west corner which had been a hotel in earlier years. My oldest brother was one of the trainees and I can remember going down there to my brother when we'd perhaps be on our way to the store. One day, one of the men, of course, was teasing me and he told me if I did a certain thing I'd be put in the clink, which was the lockup. I always remember that. I also remember shining the buttons on my brother's uniform.

We had a small gymnasium up on the top floor. There was a facility up there for the cadets to practice their shooting, their marksmanship. The principal in later years was the cadet instructor. They carried that on for quite a number of years, in fact, in just it's last year, which was 1940 term, it was still being used for training cadets. They had excellent teachers at that school. My principal was Russell Leard, an uncle of Waldron Leard's. He taught me in grades nine and ten. We took what we called Entrance exams in grade ten, and for education beyond that we went to Charlottetown to Prince of Wales College and the Provincial Normal School.

I went there for grade 11; then I taught a year and went back for another session to get a first class license, which gave me a little more salary and gave me more skill, perhaps, to get certain subjects across to pupils that I wouldn't have otherwise. I taught until 1940 and went to Ottawa to work in the Civil Service. I was up there until 1963.

I had 39 boys and one girl one time in the classroom. I taught three grades. Most of the girls went to the convent school. Most of the protestant girls went to the public school but some also went to the convent school because up there they had sewing and music. I had to strap some of the boys but they didn't hold it against me because they knew they had been bad.

When I taught first in Souris school, I taught grades three and four for two years; then I took on the vice-principa1's job: grade five, six and seven -which meant that I had some of my students from grades three and four which I enjoyed very much. The older ones I found a little hard to get used to, but I did. I think the school was built in 1900. My sister was born in 1899 so she went to school. At one time it had furnace heat. When I taught there we had stoves with coal and we had a janitor and it was up to the teacher to keep it stoked with coal. We very often had a tin of water with Iysol to keep the air pure.

I married George in 1963 when I came back to Souris. I had a lot of scope here, so I got right into church work because my husband was into two or three things, including treasurer. I think George started collecting old photographs and between he and Ray, they both kept collecting during the years.

After I was back a few months, I got in as Commissioner of Girl Guides and I worked with them for several years. I had never done Guide work. I got to know all the young girls and I really enjoyed that. It was very interesting. George died in l967 and I continued with church work. I carried on my husband's jobs as superintendent of the Sunday School and treasurer for many years. So I kept busy. Then, of course, in later years, Adele Townshend, as author, and I got working on the Souris History book and, between the two of us, we got the thing together. Adele and I were cousins. Her mother and my mother were first cousins.

My friend stayed at the Cox Hotel when she came back to Souris this year after 60 years, to renew our acquaintanceship. I hadn't been in touch with her since the middle thirties. She decided that she wanted to make a sentimental journey to Souris and didn't know if there would be anyone living here that she had known between 1926 and 1931. She contacted the postmaster to ask if Roy and Olga White, Nellie and others were around and he wrote back and said that I was still here. So she came back and we got reacquainted.

We went to Fortune to Abell's Cape where the Duchemin family still has decendants living there and who were very hospitable to us as when we were teenagers. They would have summer parties there and invite a lot of Souris young people for dances in their pavilion. We also went for late night swims down at the wharf. Billy Dingwell helped to build our present St. James Church. His grandson is Lloyd Duchemin, a retired professor from Mt. Allison University, and he and his wife were at home the day Helen and I visited. Helen remembered Lloyd's two younger sisters dancing and singing in a concert that was put on in the Irish Hall. Helen walked the Souris Beach, which was one of the favorite places when she was between 12 and 16. The beach was the place for swimming. The hotel had a large bathing house and about seven compartments in it. Frank MacKinnon, who later was one of the key people that had the Confederation Centre Building built in Charlottetown, was one of the guests.

The Cox Hotel was built by a grand uncle of mine for a store. He and his family moved in and for some reason or other the plaster wasn't quite dry and he contracted tuberculosis and died. His wife carried on for a while and then she moved out. There was a lot of tuberculosis in Souris. My husband went to Saranac Lake when he was 16 years old and Babe Matthew had an uncle who was up there at the same time. His wife moved there and she opened her house to George in later years. He later had one lung removed in Boston. When he came back they had opened a sanitorium in Charlottetown and he worked in there doing X-Rays and things. Babe and I knew two girls who were sisters, one was her age and one was mine and they both died of it. The younger one had a little cabin, sort of, out in the yard and she lived there.

To go back to some of the sports, we used to skate on the sea ice and there were two or three that had ice boats and we could sail up and down. They used to have horse races on the sea ice. Later we had an outdoor rink which must have been provided by the town.

We also skated on Norris Pond. We would go up there at night and have a fire in the woods and take our skates and boots with hot potatoes in them so they'd be warm to put on. It was up there that Babe broke her arm. One of the girls who had TB and I walked up to Norris Pond. We had both gone to Prince of Wales College together and were home at Christmas time. We went to the Pond and there was sand on the ice, so we couldn't skate. I learned to skate on the double skates, then went to the spring skates which fastened on the boots, then went to what we called the hockey skates, which were special boots with skates attached.

When I was teaching here, we had a girl's hockey team in the closed rink. We played hockey against the Souris Line Road and they were real hefty. I taught one year up in Kingsboro and that winter I had to snowshoe to school. There was no pavement in those days. The first pavement from Charlottetown was completed in 1939. Prior to that, I had been driving my grandfather to Charlottetown every second week during summers because he was supervising the management of the Beach Grove Inn Hotel at age 90. It was gravel roads and I often thought, "Poor Grandfather never lived to drive on the paved roads. "

Copyright
Waldron H. Leard