“The Sechelt Community Archives has been established to maintain and preserve the Helen Dawe Collection of materials relating to Sechelt’s history and to collect and preserve other archival material pertaining to the growth and development of Sechelt Village and District and other areas of the Sunshine Coast.” For the past 25 years, the archivist and volunteers in the Sechelt Community Archives have been working to follow this mandate and to fulfill Helen Dawe’s wishes.
In addition to the 25 metres of records and 130 artifacts in the Helen Dawe Collection, we have added 100 metres of historical and significant documents, photographs, letters, newspapers, maps, paintings, prints and books from 153 individuals and 30 organisations. On our website archives.sechelt.ca you will find more than 5,000 photographs of the Sunshine Coast, letters between Helen Dawe and Betty Youngson, whose parents built and ran Rockwood Lodge, and audio recollections of a number of early and long-time Coast residents.
Three grants from the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre at UBC made this possible.
We have written brief histories of the Boulevard, Cowrie and Mermaid Streets, Inlet and Wharf Avenues, Wilson Creek (now ts’ukw’um), Davis Bay, Selma Park, Sechelt, Sandy Hook, Tuwanek, West Sechelt and the Redrooffs Resort area of Halfmoon Bay. A grant from the District of Sechelt enabled us to prepare an inventory of the District of Sechelt’s buildings of historic and architectural significance: 156 have been recorded.
None of the above would have been achieved without the assistance of the following dedicated archives volunteers: the late Bea Swanson, Val Swanson and Bruce Redman who all provided invaluable information and gave freely of their time to preserve Coast history, as did Stan Anderson and Gordon Cassidy (both now retired). Volunteer Janet Ansell continues to work in the archives and hosts our Facebook site, regularly posting an interesting photograph with text. The Sechelt Community Archives continues to work with the other historic institutions on the Coast; we co-operate with the Pender Harbour Living History Society, the Sunshine Coast Museum and Archives and the tems swiya Museum.
To date, 2,006 searches have been made by the archivist, volunteers and by authors, historians, genealogists, and interested individuals from the Coast, British Columbia, other parts of Canada, the USA, Great Britain, Germany, the Bahamas and New Zealand and answers have been found for 95 per cent of the questions. Time spent in research totals 4,000 plus hours. Each year, students from the local high schools prepare scholarship essays about local developer Len van Egmond from information in the archives.
Historic displays have been exhibited annually in the Sechelt Public Library during Heritage and Archives Weeks, the Sunshine Coast Museum and Archives Antiques Road Show, Gibson’s Sea Cavalcade and the Sechelt Arts Festival.
An archives brochure and a self-guided walking tour of downtown Sechelt brochure are available and eight historic plaques can be seen on or near historic Sechelt buildings or sites.
Recent interesting acquisitions are 200 black and white photographs of work up at Clowhom Falls from 1948 to 1952, the Sunshine Coast Dance Society records, reminiscences of a “Coffee Boy” on the Union Steamship Company’s vessel The Lady Rose and photographs of the Selma Park Power Station.
After 23 years the archives outgrew the space in the Sechelt Public Library and we had to leave the friendly ever helpful librarians and staff there and move to larger quarters in the Royal Bank building. Many thanks to the Clayton Family, Trail Bay Estates and the late Paul Meyer for providing space for the Sechelt Community Archives to continue to grow and to add historic information. I would like to acknowledge the support of Siobhan Smith, the District’s Arts Culture and Communications Coordinator. She has been a strong advocate for the Archives through the years, as have the different mayors, councillors, Deborah Flitton and other District staff members.
